NEWSMAX

The experience is not incredible right now. It's likely just going to get better at this ridiculous pace. Yeah. Are the folks that you talk about, the brands that you talk to, the leaders of those brands excited about ads coming to chat surfaces? It feels like new unexplored territory. Whenever there's a new ad product, that's opportunity for fast moving brands. But what are they worried about? What are they excited about? What's the mood? Most of the excitement is actually around this idea of like is there a potential for this to level the playing field? Meaning, you know, if I've done a bunch of research historically on, on the, on a gentic application. Yeah. James Purse or about, you know, Tom Sachs or about the stuff that I love, the brands that I love and then I'm going on a hiking trip, it probably should not show me a generic pair of boots. It should probably show me on running because it knows to some extent that I actually favor direct to consumer brands or more modern retail brands as well. So the excitement actually is around like is this going to introduce more brand brands that otherwise are unknown to more people? Or you know, True Classic tee for example, which you know, if you're looking for a black T shirt, I suspect on a search engine you're not going to see True Classic T come up that much. But it's an incredible product and, and ultimately it can be found on these agentic tools in a way that it probably couldn't historically. That seems to be a lot of the excitement. The other excitement is E Commerce as a percentage of total retail is still sub 20%. You've heard that literally you hear that the show all the time that people are like, well you know, we're inside the Shopify booth now and people that are more traditional say well where, when's this going to eclipse 25%? There is a chance, there is a school of thought that says that one of the things that agentic might do is increase that penetration rate at a faster clip kind of alla, you know, Covid did because people that may not be big E commerce consumers may be searching for recipes on ChatGPT and through that process may end up actually starting to buy stuff there as well. So that the other thing is like I think some of the time you go to a retail store you're going because you want to have a conversation about the product in a way that you just don't get with a website. A website is like a beautiful catalog and if you go around in the right order and you look at the FAQ and Maybe you talk with support and all that, and hopefully they respond quickly and actually give you the insight, like then you can get to the purchase decision. But. So a lot of people will just be like, I'll just drive by the store and get it. But I feel like LLMs can provide that. They can give people understanding on a subject or a category or a specific product that gives them the confidence to make a purchase. Right. Well, actually, I'll go one step further. I think it's actually a better version of that because it's an unbiased discussion, an unbiased conversation. I mean, the bias is based on your context history and based on merit, as opposed to being based on what spiff is that particular salesperson getting today in a commission structure. So it does. I mean, it's so cheesy, of course, but when I describe it to my mother where this is going, I explain that this may very well be the greatest personal shopper in the history of retail who knows everything about you, knows your sizes, know in certain. You know in. In European fashion, you. It's this size. But Americans like that knows where you're located, knows where you travel to, and can provide this unbiased, objective recommendation. And then once you build in these applications, you build in checkout, which we're doing with. With our agenti storefronts, right into the chat, it becomes this really delightful experience. Yeah, well, congratulations.

I just, I didn't. Genre's doing such a good job keeping it together. You got me. You got me. That's okay. That's no problem. Sorry. So the first thing we announced was actually Sundar announced it yesterday on stage. But with Google, we are making it possible for every agent to connect to every single merchant. We created this protocol called universal commerce protocol, which effectively is this universal language. It's open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents. And the best way to explain it is up until now it was really just about like a single transaction. So I can buy something on ChatGPT or Gemini or Microsoft. It was like a pilot. It could only do like a single item at that time. It couldn't really. But there's no concept of loyalty or subscription or bundling or, you know, if it's furniture, for example, please don't ship it to me on Thursday. I'm not home Thursday, send it Friday. So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we co developed with Google means that now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products on the, on these agentic tools. And it should be as good as it is on the online store. So that was a really, really big one. The second thing we announced also with Google, is that now we're actually expanding. You can sell everywhere. Commerce is happening from an agentic perspective. So we're going beyond the agentic storefronts of just ChatGPT, which is what we said in Q3. Now it's also we're going to be working with Gemini, with AI, with AI Mode in Google Search and also with Copilot and maybe the last one, which I wouldn't bring up in any other show than tvpn, that we're actually bringing agentic commerce to every brand, whether or not they're on Shopify. So if you're not on Shopify, but you want to have your product syndicated and indexed, you can do so with our Agentic plan. And that seems to be the talk of the show, which is amazing. Very interesting. Right, right. Because that's, that's nice ecosystem. I like that. I like it. Yeah, I like it. I mean, if you're, if you're going to. I think if agentic is going to do what a lot of us think it's going to do from a commerce perspective, you have to give consumers all the brands. We obviously want them all on sh, but there's some brands that want to participate now, but it may take some time for them to migrate over. So this idea of opening up to anyone we think is a big opportunity. Very cool. Walk me through the.

What's the goal? You guys already have a couple million dollars in revenue. Sounds like that's growing quickly. Yeah. How did that come together? Yeah, when we first started the company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets. You know, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle. That allowed us to rapidly scale. So mostly owned by like corporations and billionaires. But over time we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments and militaries. So the defense contracting model in Africa is like fundamentally very different from how it's done in the West. In the west is quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to a program of record. In Africa is quite very network based and also very solution first. So essentially no one is is really expecting you to write dozens of proposals and come to office and present them like PowerPoints. They're expecting you already have a solution to your problem. So in a very funny way, the Android approach of taking R and D head on and having the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field works perfectly for the model of defense contracting on the continent. And that has allowed us to scale very rapidly. And that is something that most Western companies don't understand. You know, Western Chinese, they come here with papers, they end up, you know, wasting a lot of time and not really being very productive. Yeah. Do you guys have a dual use opportunity?

Yeah, when we first started the company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets. You know, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle that allowed us to rapidly scale. So mostly owned by like corporations and billionaires. But over time we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments and militaries. So the defense contracting model in Africa is like fundamentally very different from how it's done in the West. In the west is quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to like a program of record in Africa. It's quite very network based and also very solution first. So essentially no one is really expecting you to write dozens of proposals and come to office and present them like PowerPoints. They're expecting you already have a solution to your problem. So in a very funny way, the Android approach of like taking R and D head on and having the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field works perfectly for the model of defense contracting on the continent. And that has allowed us to scale very rapidly. And that is something that most Western companies don't understand. You know, Western Chinese, they come here with papers, they end up, you know, wasting a lot of time and not really being very productive. Yeah. Do you guys have a dual use opportunity? I can imagine people that have.

From a security standpoint, what kind of opportunities are you guys pursuing there? Yeah, we don't do kinetic at all. So we are entirely focused on building surveillance because, you know, essentially the Nigerian army today has enough firepower to, you know, basically destroy any terrorist group in West Africa. The problem with insecurity in Africa today is not the lack of firepower, it's, it's the lack of intelligence, the lack of visibility, you know, understanding where these attacks are, are coming from, how it's being perpetrated, you know, looking at previous attacks to, to, to sort of like part out a pattern recognition that can help you predict future attacks. This is the major issue. So what Terra is trying to do is build that intelligence and surveillance layer across the continent, not necessarily, you know, building kinetics. You know, we don't ever intend to get into kinetics. I think this sort of struggle and war that African governments are fighting against terror does not require us getting into kinetics. You know, what the religious needle.

But then for podcasts, I have a 55 inch TV here. Okay. Staying on Apple, Gemini. The Gemini Siri news dropped this morning. It had been kind of previously reported, so in some ways it's old news. What are you expecting out of like this new version of Siri? Well, the bar is 55ft underground, so I expect it to be a lot better. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's now that the federal courts have approved Google and Apple combining to rule the world, Google has, Google has the infrastructure to support the scale of Apple. They know how to work together. They've worked together for years. They're very natural partners in that respect that Google can think big picture about this. Like, I'm sure Apple. The report that Mark Gurman had last fall is Apple's gonna pay like a billion dollars, which again, we're in tech. That's no money at all, which. But it's tied into the search deal. Like they can massage it. The problem with working with an OpenAI or an Anthropic is they need to make money. And so like Apple doesn't. I think there's a more sort of I scratch your back, your scratch my back sort of thing here. Google's talking about, you know, working with Apple's chips, adapting it, whatever it might be. Apple's does bespoke stuff like that. So I think it makes a ton of sense for both sides. Do you think, do you think it ever flips and do you think, do you think Google will be paying Apple? Because there's this news also that you're going to be able to do shopping through Gemini. And so you can imagine a world where you go to Siri, you ask for a product and there's ads in that Gemini result. And Google's the one that's monetizing that, so they're passing some of that revenue back to Apple. It's a good question. I mean, I think when Apple talked about like the next generation Siri and Apple Intelligence, I was pretty optimistic about this idea of Apple basically replaying the search. That's my whole thing. I'm like, in some way, if I'm Apple and I'm paying for an LLM and to use it to power a product that can basically do search really well, that could eventually have an ads business attached to it that eventually could have like commerce built into it. Like it's this weird, it's this weird situation where like Gemini is effectively helping. Like, that's, that's what I don't fully understand. Yet because I'm going to be like. The market structure was so perfect for Apple in that they need like it's just a default search engine. It's. There's no sort of deep integration into the product. It's just like when you type in your search bar, what engine is used. And so it's super easy. Like there, there's like a concept when it comes to like figuring out who's going to win in a value chain. Super easy. Substitability is good for whoever can plug whatever in so they could choose whatever they want. So it made sense that the value flowed that direction. The difference with this AI stuff is it needs to be integrated deeply. And Apple is more on the defensive here. Like they need to have quality AI features built into the operating system. And so I think the need is more on Apple's part and the benefit Google is getting. My suspicion is less that there is less about the ad thing and more they're getting some incremental revenue and they're probably getting a lot more. I mean Apple's gonna be precious about the data. We'll see how that sort of works. But. But they also don't need. It's all incremental. Even, even like the internal reasoning rollouts, all of that, that happens in Gemini. Apple's not gonna be able to call that back. So you're gonna have all this reinforcement learning training on. Okay, maybe you're obfuscating the privacy data, what the person asked for. But all those interim steps of I went to a website, I interacted with it, I figured out how to click this button like that's gonna accrue to Gemini. You would imagine. Well, and what it speaks to, I think is what would be the red flags that would come up to this deal from an Apple perspective. It's like, well, they're not yet. Maybe they need to tough it out and build their own crappy LM so that in the future they control their own lm such that if you get to a world with say ar, right where I'm, I'm actually lots of dispute about this, but I'm pretty optimistic on Just In Time uis where the idea that something pops up that is nothing but the decision you make in that moment for whatever it might be and then it goes away. Like to me this is the best part of the Orion experience was the Facebook sort of AR glasses was when I received a call because the OS I use there was kind of like quest just sort of dumped in there and it would, it didn't really make you have like blocky stuff and there's like an Instagram and stuff. Like I could just look at my phone. This is going to be better here. But you could be. We got a conversation right now. I could have a notification popping right now saying so and so is calling and I could use my own little wrist thingy and dismiss it and it's just there when I need it. It only has one option, accept or decline and then it's gone. And. And I could see that being a future of UI and important for Apple to control. But by not shipping their own, by depending on Google, they might say pretty words about, oh, we're going to simultaneously develop our own. No, that. Whatever. If you're. That's not going to happen. You're going to be so invested in this other one. And that speaks to the value is accruing to Google because they're the ones actually developing and pushing the technology and Apple is sort of trailing along. Given that I have a hard time seeing in Apple's gonna get more and more deeper into this using Gemini. Are they gonna be able to credibly go to Google, say pay up or else we're gonna switch to someone else? I think that's probably unlikely, so I don't think it's gonna play out like Search, but we'll see. I was obviously wrong about this one, so I could certainly be wrong again. Sure. What was your reaction?

Want to do ugly things anymore. And we all look around for different ways of avoiding that outcome. Yeah, I mean, the risk is that you just have NIMBYs that say, I think everything looks ugly and I don't want anything to build. I guess if you have the option to raise your hand and say, that's ugly, we shouldn't build it. I don't know. Earlier on the show, John was sharing how in 1947, there was a very, very small number of televisions in the U.S. 16,000. 16,000. Eight years later, it was 32 million. So we were talking. Talking about how that was effectively a fast takeoff. Hardware fast takeoff. Do you think we can see something similar in robotics? There's a bunch of different exciting projects, a lot of which we've covered on the show. I saw a video of a robotic hand yesterday spinning a screw perfectly, and it looks like it's sped up like 10x, but it's actually in real time. So it's like spinning a screw, you know, 20 times faster than a human can. Interesting, but, yeah. So I think people see the current state of humanoids today. They can do cool demos and other robotic form factors, but it doesn't quite feel like we could have a population of 100 million of these in three years. But who knows? I don't think we yet see the killer app in the home. So if I ask myself, what do I want if I could have a fully functioning robot that would be like a maid or a butler, that would be useful to me, but most things short of that don't quite seem worth it. Do I have a Roomba? No. I don't know. What if there's a mechanical vacuum cleaner that goes around on its own when I'm at work? Fine. It just doesn't seem that necessary. I do my own laundry. It's a welcome break sometimes. So I think we're still waiting to see the killer app. Yeah. Any other technologies that you're excited about this year?

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. New York is a problem. What's your personal investing strategy? Buy and hold. Focus on other things. Invest in. Yeah, but buy what? Because if you buy individual names, it can end up being wildly distracting, and then you can't focus on the other things that are maybe more productive. Diversified portfolio. I've thought now of buying some more gold. Just as a hedge. It's not that I think it will do well, but I see higher risk. And Bitcoin's not really a hedge. So maybe gold and silver. Again, I'm not saying it will make you rich. I'm just saying if everything else falls apart, you'll have something. Yeah. Have you pushed any.

Well, we have a new sponsor of the show, Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it, to get their apps, to keep their apps working. I use Sentry, so welcome to them.

Often I'll kick off a deep research report before bed because I know it's cooking for me when I wake up. I love that. That's actually a great workload. Iran is in flux. Very hard to tell what the outcome will be there. But if you have a free Iran, how should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets? I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. There are so many ethnic groups in the territory and they have expanded or contracted so many times. What they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%. But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people over time make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. Oh, we're giving you this, we're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive. What about the. Looking back, the post mortem on the tariff and the trade war from last year?

Iran is in flux. Very, very hard to tell, you know, what the outcome will be there. But if you have a free Iran, how. How should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets? I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. There are so many ethnic groups in the territory, and they have expanded or contracted so many times. What they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%. But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people, over time, you know, make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. Oh, we're giving you this. We're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive.

Wise. And so I think that's a very good point. And the reality is that's a much larger business like just be show what you're looking for is inventory. The number one way to predict sort of the upside for meta over the last several years, the stock market has consistently had it totally backwards. Every time they're sort of their price per ad would plummet because the stock market would freak out. This happened with stories in like 2018, 2019. It happened with reels a couple years ago. And the issue is that the reason why price brad plummets is because there's a massive increase in inventory. And when there's a massive increase in inventory, it's just more places to show ads. That is a huge opportunity and you saw huge run ups both times as they figured out how to monetize stories as they figured out how to monetize reels. And this should be an opportunity of how to like it's gonna take a while to figure out how to monetize. You know, maybe it's maybe just an aspect of when they're reasoning, when they're thinking or image generation that might be an ad opportunity. And it's a big opportunity. A big problem is these folks. I think the OpenAI has hired so many meta people it confuses me why they haven't been on board with this. Yeah, like it's a win, win, win. You get, you need money to fund your operation. The best way to make money is to, is to show ads. Why? Because you get to deliver a better product to more people. This idea that we're going to commit to a world where if poor people get a worse product, that's not how tech works. The reason why tech is amazing is it generates a ton of consumer surplus. You do this upfront investment and because it's monetized by ads, everyone gets the best product. It's great and OpenAI like having this religious devotion for so long about not doing this. If they had launched, they could have watched the world's crappiest ads in 2023, by today, in 2026, they'd be good, they'd be making money and people would rebel against it. Now they're gonna have to launch ads. They're gonna suck. And people are like, this sucks. I'll just go to Gemini or whatever it might be. Just it drives me bonkers because it. Seems like there's a little bit of like not to go back to chicken and egg problem but like the first mover disadvantage, like the first LLM that has ads there'll be a whole press cycle about oh Gemini's. The ad would have been a lot. Easier if you were the only LLM. It risks the entire company. They need to get their opportunities in the consumer space first and foremost because the consumer space needs to monetize via ads. And the fact they didn't get there or start to get there, still haven't started to get there. It's a company imperiling poor decision last year.

Sure. What about on the topic of cooling? We were just talking to Jeremy from semianalysis about how Meta changed their data center design from this H structure that was air cooled. Very efficient. It took them two years. They couldn't do water cooling. Now they're doing water cooling in their new data centers, the tents. What have you learned about various ways to cool water? What's special about your product specifically with regard to cooling and energy management? This is not a complicated problem. I love it, I'm sure. Yeah. You want to employ me? You want me to handle it? It's not complicated. Right. I got it. I can do it. In Buffalo at a Bills game, there are always three idiots who have their shirt off. Right. It's 10 below and they've got their shirt off. And. Right. They've been drinking hard, but they're not dead. Yeah. Why aren't they dead? Because if you're in the water and the water's 45 degrees and you're there for eight minutes, you're dead. Why is that? It's because water's really good at sucking heat off heat sources. We say in the technology the thermal density of water is really high. It rips heat off you, whereas the air doesn't do that. So they can stand there with their shirt off and not be dead. It's the exact same thing when you're cooling the chip. That water has an ability to pull heat off a heat source that is vastly better than air. So you have two choices. You can blow cold air over your chip and you don't get the same cooling effect as if you ran cold water against the back of your chip or against the back of a cold plate. It is more efficient by an order of magnitude. To use liquid water in particular is great and low cost to pull heat off the back of chips. We were among the first to do it. Google started doing it with their TPUs in 2017. It had been done previously in the supercompute world exclusively. And now, you know, the new we do it. I've been doing it for years. Gamers, I remember, you build a gaming, gaming rig, you get liquid cooling if you want that extra juice. Yeah, that's exactly right. Gamers have been doing it forever because they want to run those GPUs hot. Yeah, totally. And Facebook was. They learned a lesson, they jumped on it. Well, they were optimizing for one thing, which was this energy coefficient. And now they're optimizing for speed and new scale. And so they have a different set of optimization parameters and they.

Earlier on the show, John was sharing how in 1947, there was a very, very small number of televisions in the US. 16,000. Eight years later, it was 32 million. So we were talking about how that was effectively a fast takeoff in hardware. Fast takeoff. Do you think we can see something similar in robotics? There's a bunch of different exciting projects, a lot of which we've covered on the show. I saw a video of a robotic hand yesterday spinning a screw perfectly, and it looks like it's sped up like 10x, but it's actually in real time. So it's like spinning a screw, you know, 20 times faster than a human can. But yeah. So I think people see the current state of humanoids today. They can do cool demos and other robotic form factors, but it doesn't quite fit. Feel like we could have a population of 100 million of these in three years, but who knows? I don't think we yet see the killer app in the home. So if I ask myself, what do I want? If I could have a fully functioning robot that would be like a maid or a butler, that would be useful to me. But most things short of that don't quite seem worth it. Do I have a Roomba? No. I don't know. What if there's a mechanical vacuum cleaner that goes around on its own when I'm at work? Fine. It just doesn't seem that necessary. I do my own laundry. It's a welcome break sometimes. So I think we're still waiting to see the killer app.

What's your personal investing strategy? Buy and hold focus on other things. Invest in but buy what? Because if you buy individual names, it can end up being wildly distracting and then you can't focus on the other things that are maybe more productive. Diversified portfolio. I've thought now of buying some more gold. Just as a hedge. It's not that I think it will do well, but I see higher risk and Bitcoin's not really a hedge, so maybe gold and silver. Again, I'm not saying it will make you rich, I'm just saying if everything else falls apart.

That's actually a great work. Iran is in flux. Very, very hard to tell what the outcome will be there. But if you have a free Iran, how should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets? I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. There are so many ethnic groups in the territory, and they have expanded or contracted so many times. What they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%. But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people, over time, you know, make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. Oh, we're giving you this. We're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive.

Yeah. Any other technologies that you're excited about this year? Well, everything in biomedical. I mean, even without AI progress against cancer, I think youngish people today will die of old age and maybe live to 97 or whenever the time is. And that's already in the cards. You don't even have to be a big AI optimist. I don't think it will be soon. To me, it seems like a 40 year process where you have some gains coming now, but it's mostly complete within 40 years that you just won't die of. Most of the things that kill people, cancer, heart attacks, there'll be accidents and there'll be deaths by old age. Yeah, that's an extreme way pill. I love it. And that's likely. And again, it doesn't have to rely on AGI, though of course, AGI can help and accelerate that.

Most of which is produced by people who are not neither white nor black, pilled on AI. Sure. And it will take things a long time to change. Yeah. How do you think about the legacy of Thomas Piketty and the new debate over piketty in the 22nd century? I believe. Was it 21st century, 22nd century that Dorcas wrote about? 20 seconds talking about economic inequality, increasing gains to capital and increasing returns to corporation to capital work in the 22nd. 22nd century. Piketty did 21st. He's too focused on the labor share. I think real wages will go up a lot. If real wages go up, workers are happy. They might be upset that Elon or someone else is a trillionaire, but I don't think that will drive our politics. I think if real wages go up, we'll be fine. People will feel good. So my view is very different. We. But I mean real wages will go up, they'll feel good. But then they'll also be upset that there's now multiple trillionaires walking around. And so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like they need to do. People are that envious? They're envious about the people they went to high school with or maybe their brother in law. Most people are not that envious about Elon or Bill Gates or whomever else. Yeah, yeah, I was. Envy is local for the most part. Yeah. I was running you to envy each other. Right. Yeah. Maybe you envy, you know, the sheik, the richest sheikh in Saudi Arabia. I bet you don't even think about him that much. He does have a great. Or if you do, you think about his role in the AI world, which is fine. But you're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he does. It's all about the hummus. Yeah. I was doing a thought experiment. Don't you think envy is a factor in the current wealth.

Yeah. How do you think about the legacy of Thomas Piketty and the. The new debate over piketty in the 22nd century, I believe. Was it 21st century, 22nd century that Dorcas wrote about 20. 21st, 2020. It's in the future, talking about economic inequality, increasing gains to capital and increasing returns to capital to our 22nd. 22nd century. Piketty did 21st. He's too focused on the labor share. I think real wages will go up a lot. If real wages go up, workers are happy. They might be upset that Elon or someone else is a trillionaire, but I don't think that will drive our politics. I think if real wages go up, we'll be fine. People will feel good. So my view is very different. But I mean, real wages will go up, they'll feel good. But then they'll also be upset that there's now multiple trillionaires walking around. And so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like they need to do. People are that envious? They're envious about the people they went to high school with or maybe their brother in law. Most people are not that envious about Elonor, Bill Gates or whomever else. Yeah, yeah, I was envious. Local for the most part. Yeah. I was running you to envy each other, right? Yeah. Maybe you envy, you know, the sheik. Sure. The richest sheik in Saudi Arabia. I bet you don't even think about him that much. He does have a great. Or if you do, you think about his role in the AI world, which is fine. You're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he does. It's all about the hummus.

There was a massive debate that raged in a Google Doc which was published on Substack. The battle between Jack Clark, who's at Anthropic, of course, the co founder of Anthropic, and Dwarkesh Patel. They were going up against Michael Burry, Cassandra Unchained. They had a good discussion and it's been published free to all on Substack where you can go and read it. Highlights. Very cool, Tyler. Yeah, I have some highlights. I mean, I went through it. So. So one thing, it's not really a debate at all in this discussion. There's a bunch of questions and they. Go and they basically, they're just like, AI is amazing. I agree. Yeah, no, it's funny. Almost all the quotes I pulled were from Burry because the doorkesh and Jack Clark. I disagreed with everything they said. So it's like, oh, it's not that interesting. Like I already know this. Boom. Get your own opinions, bro. I agree with everything you said. I have no opinion. You're absolutely right. Yeah. So one thing, it's always interesting. Jack Clark, he writes, I've been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently. And the examples he gives are dollars of mass to orbit and dollars per watt from solar. So it's like, okay, Anthropic is looking at space data center. Sure. Right, sure. Some other stuff. I thought Burry said his one like policy proposal. So just the fact that Jack Clark is doing that research indicates to you that they might be thinking about orbital data centers in the future. Yeah, I mean gossip, orbit, mass, orbit and Yeah. I don't know what else. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, maybe he's just interested in space. He might just be interested. Yeah. He might just be like, I want to go to the moon. I'm bringing Claude with me. Yeah, I don't know, Claude go to the moon. The other interesting bury take was that he thinks that blue collar work might be more susceptible to AI disruption than many people think. He made this point that he's been doing his own plumbing and electrical work. Apparently. I thought, I don't know if that's how true that is, but he said that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you read it? I have the quote. Yeah. He says, given how much I can now do in electrical work and other areas around the house, just with Claude my side, I'm not so sure about jobs going away. Yeah. If I'm middle class and facing $800, an $800 plumber or electrical electrician call. Yeah. I might just use Claude, take a picture. I love that I can take a picture and figure everything out I need to do to fix it. So, I mean, this. That was a big moment for me. I forget who was sharing this, but somebody was like, yeah, they just took a picture of, like, the most insane wiring diagram. Yeah. No, it was just a bunch of wires going everywhere and it just one. Take a picture of your car. It needs engine out service. You're like, where do I screw? I'm doing it myself. Well, we have the.

Cumbersome to get set up. How did you, how did you process Powell's video yesterday? Oh, yeah. Well, it was terrible what Trump did. Fortunately, most of the markets did not react very much, but gold and silver went crazy. To me, that's a sign that the dollar is much less of a safe haven. And Trump is going a bit, you know, what I call the captain queer, and he's just not reliable. And that's very bad. But I don't think it's really going to change inflation or interest rates very much. Is that just because Powell holds steady? No, because we already wrecked the independence of the Fed, which I'm not happy about, but that's the ugly little truth behind this story. Yeah, that's why it's not been worse. What Trump did is because it was already wrecked. Why is Fed independence important? Sometimes the central bank needs to do things that are not politically popular and they need that shield to do it. But the basic problem is our debt and deficits are so high that over time we will monetize them to some extent and have higher inflation because we prefer that over higher taxes, no matter what we might say. And so the Fed independence is taken away through that mechanism, apart from whatever Trump said yesterday. Oh, so just like I'm not telling. You not to worry, but I'm telling you you should have been worried to begin with. Black Bill. So, yeah, you're saying that just by running high deficits that reduces Fed independ. And that's an old story, but it's now closer to a tipping point and Trump is making that much worse. So I would say his actions on the fiscal front do more to hurt the Fed's independence than his words. But they're both bad. Can you watch.

Fed Chair. Probably one of the worst jobs on earth if you care what other people think about you. Right. Because it's just like, you know, all the time people just have this massive fixation on you and they're going to form an opinion immediately. But in this case, I've never seen people so united around. Which is heartwarming. That's the only. And it is weird because the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're long the market, you'd probably benefit. But I think people do. Are generally still fans of Fed independence and they want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation. Yeah. I'm surprised there's no reaction from the prediction markets at all. Calci still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January. Yeah. Interest. Dang. But you would think there'd be something. Move the needle a little bit because it's. But at the same time he is. Posting video saying I'm not. I'm not leaving. You're going to have to pry me out with the jaws of life. Merrick says absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation. And interestingly, I don't know the details of this building, but it's not like the White House where he lives there. Right. It's like it's just a. It's a workplace. I assume. It's not like it's his personal house. It's not like. Not you. Based on this. He was using. Yeah. You would think you. Because. Because the other. The other who is a woman who. They also opened an investigation. I'm blanking on chair. But in that case they said like she. She got a mortgage for a primary residence but she actually ended up not living there full time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which maybe again. Right. But at least the claim. Lisa Cook. Hopefully she's not cooked. We'll see. Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's independence in setting the interest rate. American equities traded a premium because of our respect for law, accountability and central bank independence. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people. On a Sunday evening before market Open. What is the market doing? We should go over to public.com investing. For those who take it seriously. We have stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more with great customer Service. S and P 500 is green. Green. Yeah. So anyways, yeah, I think everybody expected last night for things to happen. Of course, nothing. Nothing ever happens. But we'll see. In some ways, this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say, like, the White House had nothing to do with it. Yes, yes. Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. He's saying, I might post something on Truth Social about where I think the interest rate should be. He's free to do with that what he will. So. So I'm sure the story will evolve and there will be a lot of reporting on it. Eddie Elfen Bean says, what are you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's hq. Trey in the chat says, the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self funded. Oh, yeah. By the actual fed. Because it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money. Don't they make money printing coins? Coinage? I think that they. Or is that the mint? Is the mint part of the Fed? I don't know, but I know that there's a number of, like, there's a number of government programs that are all self funded. Not all of them are, you know, taxpayer money pits. The CIA's in Qtel, for example, is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies and they put that money back to work. Very interesting. Bubble boy says, I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. So he is Jerome's strongest soldier. Mm. Bubble boy's getting standing up. 2000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Jerome Powell quickly. Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check out graphite. Geiger Capital. Powell watching stocks turn green after thinking the market would defend him. Isn't that Biden? Yeah. The tough thing is, like, if you assume that rates are going to come down, like, you don't exactly want to sell assets, you want to own assets. There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen. Positive and normative. Analysis. And so you could be like, I don't like the fact that the Fed's going to be less independent, but if it means that interest rates are going to come down, then that's bullish. That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long. Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marco Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things. And so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in, you know, different Venezuelan memes. I don't exactly know where this all came from, but I'm familiar with the concept of Marco, Marco Rubio doing everything. I guess I don't really. Yeah, it's, it's somewhat depressing because it just means like if you're in the, if you're in the inner circle, you're going to, you're going to be, you're going to get a lot of responsibility and if you're out, you will eventually get the laser beam of the admin. Move on. But, well, gold is through the roof today hosts a chart. Gold jumped from 45:10 to 45:85. Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold, of course. So people are bailing on the US dollar, potentially. Silver's also up, says the Kobiesi letter. Silver surges above $85 an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up 19% in 2026. There's been a number of hard tech founders have commented on the fact that silver is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of the semiconductor supply chain. A lot of different AI supply chains. And so there's an interesting narrative of like the knock on effects of high silver prices. The nothing ever happens. This is nothing ever happens on steroids. I've never seen so much nothing ever happens, says Mike Bird. Because The S&P 500 is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets. Potentially very odd. Odd scenario anyway. Crowdstrike.

Thought experiment. Don't you think envy is a factor in the current wealth tax sort of discourse? California is a crazy state, but I think it's just more a money grab than envy. And I think there's a very good chance they ruin the greatest engine of wealth creation maybe in human history. So I hope it fails and soon even the risk of it, as you know, is inducing many people to leave or get ready to leave. What's the retrospective view on the Laffer curve in light of what's happening in California today? Well, at some tax rate, the Laffer curve is true. We're not usually in that range. But California is playing with fire and experimenting with that range. So I dearly hope they don't do it for their own sake. It'd be great for Austin, great for Miami, maybe good for New York. Yeah.

Give me blood transfer. Don't make mistakes. I used cloud code this weekend in a funny way. I was having slow WI fi, which of course is a weird thing to go to cloud code for because it uses the Internet, so you're gonna have slow interaction. I had it diagnose my. I gave it a prompt. I said, what did I say? It's somewhere here. Maybe I lost it. But I basically told it. I told it like, hey, I'm having problems with my Internet. Can you just go fix it? It ran all way the. All these different diagnostics pinged, Google pinged all the different DNS servers, ran through everything, ran speed tests, and it came back and told me to turn it off and turn it back on, and it actually worked. And I could have saved myself, like, 45 minutes of sitting there being like, yes, I'm okay with you using Curl. Yes, I'm okay with you using wget. The entire time, superintelligence was just turning it on, turning it off, and then back on again. It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It should have just preempted me and just been like, look, dude, have you at least turned it off and turned it back on? Anyway, Tyler, what do you think? If Claude was being slow by the. Because of the WI fi, then that's an example of, like, you know, self improvement. Self improvement. Oh, it improved itself. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a weird issue. I had really high ping. Really? Like, the bandwidth was fine, but the ping was really bad. And so it was very annoying. But it did resolve it. And, you know, at the end of the day, Claude Code did a very thorough job of telling me some time honored advice. So thank you to Claude Code and.

So my view is very different. But I mean real wages will go up, they'll feel good but then they'll also be upset that there's now multiple trillionaires walking around and so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like they need to do. People are that envious? They're envious about the people they went to high school with or maybe their brother in law. Most people are not that envious about Elon or Bill Gates or whomever else. Yeah, yeah I was. Envy is local for the most part. Yeah I was running. You to envy each other. Right. Yeah. Maybe you envy, you know, the sheik. Sure. The richest sheikh in Saudi Arabia. I bet you don't even think about him that much. He does have a great. Or if you do, you think about his role in the AI world which is fine. Totally. You're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he does. It's all about the hummus.

Productivity gains. Yeah, but why not 1% growth? Why not 2% growth? These tools, they feel amazing. It feels like or triple digit as Elon alluded to. But you use these tools and it feels like you're more productive. And there's some studies that say, oh, maybe you can generate documents that don't get read, basically. Is that what's going on? What is holding back AI from actually moving the needle on economic growth significantly? Well, first, about half of our economy right now is just totally, perpetually sluggish. Look at government, look at most of the nonprofit sector, look at higher education, parts of our health care sector. Add that up, you're at 50% of GDP. To some extent they use AI already, but in pretty trivial ways, like, oh, it saves people some time, they don't work as hard, they take more leisure, they hang out more at the water cooler. That's fine, it's fun, but it's not going to get rid of our debt problem. And then you have some startups, you have programming, you have the dynamic parts of our biomedical sector that are already using AI a lot. But the more they use AI, the more efficient they become and the more the inefficient parts of your economy are left over. And it's just really hard to grow much faster. Unless you're like China playing catch up. Yeah, so. The number is hard to estimate, but GDP is a huge mound of stuff, most of which is produced by people who are not neither white nor black pilled on AI. And it will take things a long time to change.

Can you walk me through your mental model for thinking through what the right level of debt for a nation is? Some of the numbers get so big it's trillions of dollars. It feels very abstractly bad. But then if you look at it more like a mortgage relative to debt to income, it feels maybe more reasonable. How should nations think about the level of indebtedness that's approach appropriate? The United States is a special nation and we can get away with more debt, which is great for our living standards, but it's bad for our political responsibility because our leaders all know we can get away with more debt. I think what we'll need to do at some point is have half a dozen dozen years of something like 7% inflation, get the debt down. It won't at all solve the problem. The problem will never go away, but it will give us some breathing room. Well then lower inflation, maybe have a recession and start all over again. And it's highly unpleasant and a lot of people will be thrown out of work and living standards will be lower. But we've already spent that money. We can't default. And that's facing us over the course of the next 10 to 15 years. But I don't think the world will end.

Cumbersome to get set up. How did you, how did you process Powell's video yesterday? Oh, yeah. Well, it was terrible what Trump did. Fortunately, most of the markets did not react very much, but gold and silver went crazy. To me, that's a sign that the dollar is much less of a safe haven. And Trump is going a bit, you know, what I call the captain queer, and he's just not reliable. And that's very bad. But I don't think it's really going to change inflation or interest rates very much. Is that just because Powell holds steady? No, because we already wrecked the independence of the Fed, which I'm not happy about, but that's the ugly little truth behind this story. Yeah, that's why it's not been worse. What Trump did is because it was already wrecked. Why is Fed independence important? Sometimes the central bank needs to do things that are not politically popular and they need that shield to do it. But the basic problem is our debt and deficits are so high that over time we will monetize them to some extent and have higher inflation because we prefer that over higher taxes, no matter what we might say. And so the Fed independence is taken away through that mechanism, apart from whatever Trump said yesterday. Oh, so just like I'm not telling. You not to worry, but I'm telling you you should have been worried to begin with. Black Bill. So, yeah, you're saying that just by running high deficits that reduces Fed independ. And that's an old story, but it's now closer to a tipping point and Trump is making that much worse. So I would say his actions on the fiscal front do more to hurt the Fed's independence than his words, but they're both bad.

I assume, like the rocks. It is not. It is very basic with a rubber band, because rubber bands. Oh, okay. Rubber band. Yeah. So I disagree with your take, please. So my overall view. NBA was on the Vision Pro on Friday. Yeah. They had an NBA clip when they watched the Vision Pro. So I was there when they watched it. So I got to try it that day. Yeah, they took that clip out for the demo that shipped, and that was in Apple stores. So you only saw that clip if you were there the first day. And so I don't know if it was a rights issue, which maybe lends itself to your argument or whatever it might be, but that was for sure. It was like three seconds. It was the clip that sold me on the Vision Pro more than anything. Cause you felt like you were there. It was amazing. So they have this finally have a live sports thing, which is a big deal. They demonstrated that they can show stuff live. And it worked. It worked well. I don't think there was any technical issues. The cameras are quite small now compared to what they used to be. You could see them on, like, the sideline table and underneath the baskets. So this technology works. You can watch things live in the Vision Pro, and it should be amazing. And it sucked. And it sucked because you're getting jerked around all the time. You're not. You're there. You feel like you're there. It is immersive. The unimmersive part is the Apple part, which is some producer in a truck is moving you around. There's a pre game show. I don't need a pre game show. I'm sitting courtside. I can watch the players warm up. And the reason why I disagree with your take, that Apple knows this and wants to do it, is that every Vision Pro video has the same problem. Okay? The Metallica video, super cool. You walk in. The opening scene of that is amazing. Well, there's a little bit where they're in, like, the green room or whatever, but. But you're walking in. You're walking in on James Hetfield and you're in the crowd and it's like walking through and people are reaching and it's like. It's so amazing. And then suddenly he's going up the stairs and boom. You're jerked to somewhere else and you're seeing him come on this on the stage. You go back, they cut this MLS video, which they have the rights for. They're overpaying. You want to talk about the F1 deal? Look how much Apple's paying MLS. Like one of the Most absurd overpays in the history of sports. I think they can do whatever they want. They cut a. I love laugh tracks, but very distracted here. They cut like a Season in review video. Yeah. That had like 56 cuts in it. It's like, okay, what do you think it is? Do you think it's too much? Do you think it's production teams that are just trying to create work for themselves? Because they go in there, they're like, hey, boss. Actually the people just want to. They just want to put their goggles on and hang out. It's like, well then what are you doing here? I feel like there's just a lack of confidence here. Like what I. It feels very like. It feels when you say it. It's like half ass that we're gonna go out, we're just gonna set a camera there and you can sit there and watch the game. It's like, no. There's this pressure in part because it's not popular. It has to be a big production. We have to have a pre game show. We have to have dedicated announcers. We have to do all these things. The end result is you get six games which are physically uncomfortable to watch because you're getting jerked around. And like they could have just the Vision Pro there for every game. And I would pay a lot of money to watch that. They could have it at every concert. And this. What's amazing is it, number one, it would make it better. I'm fully convinced of this. And number two, it would solve their content problem because you could suddenly have tickets to every single concert in the world, to every single game in the world. It is a classic tech issue with where you put in the upfront costs, you buy the cameras, you install them, and you have marginal upside forever everywhere. And it's latching onto a major trend which is live, which is this idea that when everything's commoditized online, everything's digital. Live experiences are worth more and more and more. Like you go back to like the eras tour in Taylor Swift. Like who has a big topic of discussion at that point. Because like this is something people are. And sports specifically are like pretty immune to AI because nobody wants to watch like the AI box play. No one wants AI basketball. Right. Yeah. It's the. It's the human aspect of. And I don't think it's. The thing that was most crazy to me is that it was like GEO locked to Southern California. So I get that. I'm not gonna like beg on them for that because. But part of it. The reason why it was geolocked is because Spectrum spent all the money to do all this production. And so of course they get the benefit. It's in their catchment area. But you don't need to do all that. They're overthinking this. Like, literally set a camera on the sideline and do nothing else. I will be happy as a clam.

AI, get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Maduro, we're back in politics land. But don't worry, not for long, because we're going into watch land. Because he was caught rocking a Chopard Ganesh, a fantastic Indian watch that is incredibly, incredibly detailed. Look at all these different Swiss made. This is a crazy. I feel like this is sort of a lost art. You know, maybe Mark Zuckerberg should get into this. Wear a watch that has, you know, sweet baby rays on the dial. The sweet baby rays Chopard dial might go incredibly hard. I would love that. Also, it was the Golden Globes. I know Jordi didn't watch. Cause you probably haven't seen any of these movies, but they did in fact happen yesterday. Rob Report has some. Some images of the best watches at the Golden Globes. If the Golden Globes were any indication, subtle is officially on hiatus, says the Rob Report. This year's red carpet made a strong case for statement watches with bold dials. Did we kind of call this originally with the show? Did we? Okay, yeah. I mean, no. I mean, the joke early on was like, quiet luxury is over. Yes. Loud opulence. Not loud opulence. A lot of these are screaming loud opulence. In fact, I need to return to my. Let's start with the beginning of this, of the slideshow. We need to return to our original statements about the value of loud opulence. Because I see these and I'm like, I couldn't pull these off. My life depended on it. But the rock was spotted watching a Chopard, much like Maduro. But this one is the Alpine eagle frozen summit. Look at all those diamonds. I like it, but I'd like to see. I mean, could we get at least a couple more. Couple more diamonds. Diamonds on here? I think it's a little. It's a little understated. He could have gone with, you know, the rainbow. The rainbow one. The gem set. That's the Rolex with all the dime, the different colored diamonds. Who else is wearing fine luxury watches at the Golden Globes? Adam Scott was wearing a Vacheron Constantin traditional Perpetual Calendar Ultra. This is nice. That's a very nice watch. I like that one a lot. I also like this Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra that Glenn Powell was seeing rock. Watch wearing Marc Andreessen, notoriously Omega Guy. Omega Guy, that's right. New fund. Maybe this was a nod from Glenn saying, like, I salute you, hat tip. Yes. He celebrated. He probably read the Paki piece and he says, you know what? It's time to put on the Omega seamaster Aqua Terra. In terms of Omega seamasters, this one stands out to me. Gold is a choice, but I think it's working very well here. And you know who else is wearing an Omega seamaster? George Clooney. Also an Aqua Terra. I would love. I would love to know the details of Omega and Rolex and the other brands, like, fighting over people like Clooney. Right. Because, you know, I don't think Clooney's putting on a watch without getting paid. Okay, well, we have Ben Thompson in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV fan Ultradome. Fantastic. Ben, how are you doing? Here he is. Thanks so much for hopping.

But it's not an insane idea. For that reason. I like that. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show on short notice. Super fun. We're huge fans here. And congratulations. I am on a app. Look, no one cares about the Vision Pro but me. Therefore, I take it upon myself everywhere. And say the strongest soldier with camera, please. Yeah. If you want the deepest analysis, the most, the hottest takes on the Vision Pro, of course. Sign up for Shruthekeri. Get on the pro plan. You don't need to look. Just. This one's free. But you know, there's gonna be podcasts. We should. We should hire. We should. We should get a plane, fly over and drop the. This one. The. This new one has leaflets. I'm down. Let's do it. Let's do it. We need to. We need to. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week and I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Yeah. Great to see you, Ben. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The label box. Every time. They didn't give us. They didn't give us that tagline. But. But we're using it simply too good. Walmart partners with Alphabet's Google to allow shoppers to purchase products through Gemini. So Walmart is jumping in with Google. We're having Harley from Shopify on the stream later to talk about agentic commerce. What's happening there? There's a lot of other news and person probably. Whoa. I have the audio on my phone. Google is posting a video of Wing. The future of retail is landing. They're taking shots at our boy Keller launching a drone. This one hit me pretty know. I know. We love zipline. We love Calendar here. We love Google. Obviously they're sponsor. Can Google just leave one future of X thing for someone else? For someone else? Yeah, right. I didn't even know about that. I didn't even know about Wing until today. Was this an acquisition? Wing.com One of the best domains. You're going to be texting Keller like Sam Altman and Elon were texting each other about the future of AI. You're going to be like, the future of drone delivery is in our hands, brother. We got to. We got to be Wing. No, Google has been working on this for a long time. Obviously this is going not to be. There's only going to be one company with the technology. There's going to be variety. Tyler, what do you have for Us. Just on the point of Elon and Sam, Elon just said on the Apple and Google collaboration, he said seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google given that they also have Android and Chrome. So he's still on the. He's taking shots he doesn't like. He's not a fan. Well, we are fans of Plaid here and so let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank account to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI, we talked about Apple confirming Gemini. Very excited for that. I want them to roll this out immediately. I know that it's probably going to be some normal release cycle with very polished ads and on stage keynote and a developer preview and there'll be a whole cycle to updating. But we are in the age of AI. Apple just ship it today. Just replace Siri with Gemini today. I'm sure a lot of people would be fans of that but you know, they operate the way they do. Eric Toll. I pulled a little history on wing.com so started. Wait, they own wing.com wing.com that's what I'm saying. It's not only not only is this an amazing partnership, but fantastic domain. So it started within X, Google X, the moonshot factory. It really is a factory. The original mission was focused on emergency medical response. Okay, so they wanted to defibrillators to heart attack victims. Basically they pivoted away from emergency services to last mile commercial delivery. They started doing their first real world trials back in Queensland as early as 2014. It graduated from X in 2018. They later became the first delivery drone delivery company to receive a part 135 air carrier certificate from the FAA. And they've just been scaling the network since then. So yeah, I guess they're going to be able to serve 40 million people by 2027. Yeah, I mean as an American, as a human, as a technologist, I want more and I want competition. But as a big fan of Keller at Zipline, I want him to dominate. No, I think, I think Google maybe did this. They knew Keller had the potential to be one of the great, the greatest in history, but they realized if he didn't have a viable competitor, he would never live up to his. So they're inspiring him to grind harder. Exactly. That's what's going on. Okay, now we understand it well. Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create Code back, prototypes and apps fast. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health. Now anthropic has Claude code for heart attacks or something like that. Healthcare and life sciences. Claude code. I'm dying. Give me, give, give me blood transfer. Don't make mistakes. I used cloud code this weekend in a funny way. I was having slow WI fi, which of course is a weird thing to go to cloud code for because it uses the Internet, so you're gonna have slow interaction. I had it diagnose my. I gave it a prompt. I said, what did I say? It's somewhere here. Maybe I lost it. But I basically told it. I told it like, hey, I'm having problems with my Internet. Can you just go fix it? It ran all these different diagnostics, pinged Google pinged all the different DNS servers, ran through everything, ran speed tests, and it came back and told me to turn it off and turn it back on. And it actually worked. And I could have saved myself like 45 minutes of sitting there being like, yes, I'm okay with you using curl. Yes, I'm okay with you using wget. The entire time, superintelligence was just turning it on, turning it off, and then back on again. It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It should have just preempted me and just been like, look, dude, have you at least turned it off and turned it back on? Anyway, Tyler, what do you think? If Claude was being slow by the. Because of the WI fi, then that's an example of like, you know, self improvement. Self improvement. Oh, it improved itself. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird issue. Really high ping, really, like the bandwidth was fine, but the ping was really bad. And so it was very annoying. But it did resolve it. And, you know, at the end of the day, Claude code did. Did a very thorough job of telling me some time honored advice. So thank you to Claude Code and interesting that everyone's pushing into healthcare. I'm still waiting for the push into legal. I'm wondering if that'll happen or if that's more complicated than healthcare. I'm also wondering, maybe healthcare is more lucrative, more viable, more. I would love to be in the meetings where they have prioritization of what. Whose lunch they're trying to eat off. Whose plate should we eat off of? Let's. The lunch meeting. The lunch meeting. Well, New York Stock Exchange. You want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love the nice C. Can't wait to be out there again. We're Planning our next trip, so stay tuned. Cannot wait. Meta CEO Zuckerberg is launching Meta Compute Planning tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts longer term. This effort will be led by Santosh, Janard Hahn and Daniel Gross. Dg back in the mix. Santosh will continue to lead our technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity and building and operating our global data center, fleet and network. Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long term capacity strategy, supplier relationships, industry analysis. Let's give it up for industry analysis, planning and business modeling. Let's give it up for planning and business modeling as well. Dg, this is not his first rodeo. Do you remember the Andromeda cluster? Nfdg. That was really, really cool. Early and right on that they were, they were doing. Was it AI Grant was the name of the program. So they backed a bunch of companies, some crazy companies in AI Grant too. Sort of an incubator accelerator model. A bunch of early stage companies, smaller checks. Give me the details. Let me just read this. So in the first batch they had perplexity, cursor, replicate, chroma. Chroma do I think they had. Didn't they have Julius? Julius was in maybe a second half. It might have been on the second one, but there's so many bangers. If you just go to the site, it looks all of them. It's amazing. And so what they did was they went and bought a whole bunch of GPUs. They built a cluster. They had a feeling that GPUs would. Be important and it was. So basically anyone in their portfolio was sort of default GPU rich, at least for a little bit. Although of course the resources were shared. And I have heard about another accelerator doing this recently. I need to confirm with the head of that accelerator if it's okay to share because it's very exciting as well. But I was asking them like, what does it mean to build a cluster at this level? Did you buy land? Did you build a data center? Or did you just go to Microsoft and say, hey, cordon off this little rack of GPUs. We want those to be dedicated least instances. And I believe it was more of the latter, but still not their first rodeo here. So I think this project's in good hands with dg. So. So let's hear it for the Meta computer. Yeah, Meta also brought on Dina McCormick. Oh yeah. Joined Meta as President and Vice Chairman to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in and finance Meta's infrastructure. This is Making a wave on truth Social. I saw government. Yeah. Governments getting involved in financing Meta's infrastructure. So he's saying, he's like, sam, they said it. I'm going to say it now. It's not a backstop, it's the front door. Dina was a former deputy national security. Well, we have a new sponsor of the show Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to get their apps, to keep their apps working. I use Sentry Sentry. So welcome to have you. Nvidia is investing a billion dollars in an AI drug lab with Eli Lilly over five years. This will be very interesting. We're excited for Eli Lilly progress. Drug lab sounds. It's AI Ozempic. It's the two biggest super trends of the last of last five years, weight loss and AI. Could it get any better? Well, now it will. We'll have to dig into more of this partnership. Tom Brady is now the face of the former CEO of X's new company, eMed. That's right. Did you see this? I did. So Tom Brady, if you're not familiar, he was the former face of ftm. That's a rough one. And also was he actually the face. Because there were a lot of celebrities that partnered with ftx. Larry Davis, he was part of. He was part of some of their bigger campaigns. He did a bigger campaign. He did a TV campaign. But again, you know, it's hard if you're a celebrity to. But this is an interesting one because. So he's joining as the chief wellness officer of emed. Yeah. And it's interesting because this kind of just makes him the face of GLP1s. Right. Which is kind of a beneficiary like is beneficial to the entire industry. Right. If you sell GLP1s. Yeah. You'll look at. Tom Brady is down. Yeah. I wonder if he's. That'd be interesting. Anyways, his peptide regimen is. Maybe he's just super AGI pilled. Maybe he. Maybe Sam said, hey, I'm an investor in Anthropic. And he said, well, I think Anthropic is going to win. I'm partnering up with you. I don't care about the structure of your hedge fund. I don't care if there's a backdoor out of your trading platform. I'm in on you because of your investing track record. What about that? You know, Anthropic gets out at a trillion. There's going to be a Debate at least about Sam Bankman Fried legacy. He of course invested what, 10 million for 10. He owned 8% of the company. So that would be maybe like an $80 billion position today, something like that. 50 billion. 10 billion with dilution. I don't know. It was a good investment. Just like getting your business on gusto is a good investment. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses like us. Like us. Paramount Skydance has now initiated what insiders are calling Plan D. They're running out of letters as they look to upend Netflix's winning bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Hey, maybe the D just stands for Discovery. So, you know, maybe this is actually one of the earlier plans, but maybe. They'Re saving the best for last. Plan W. Never take the L. Skip Plan L. Go straight to plan W. Get the W. We're rooting for you, Ellison. It involves bringing home, banging home to investors the immense amount of regulatory uncertainty involved in the Netflix deal and how they could, how that could spell trouble not just for the transaction, but for Netflix itself. And so if Netflix finds itself in a quagmire trying to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, that could be bad news. And David Ellison wants to make that clear to all of the shareholders that going with a Paramount Skydance might be a little bit less bumpy of a road. We will see from the photo shoots. Seems like they're pretty happy together, but we will see what happens. It will be a proxy fight and I'm sure we will be following it closely. Some more news from Axios. Besant told Trump that investigation of Fed chair creates a, quote, mess. And so basically last night Besant was saying the secretary isn't happy or no, someone else said the secretary isn't happy and he left the president. No, that's kind of a white pill, right? Somebody in, you know, the admin that seems to, you know, have just kind of a steady view on things is pushing back a little bit. Nothing ever happens. Yeah, you need a secretary of nothing. Just. Did anything happen? No, nothing happens. But Vanta happens and compliance happens. So get on Vanta Automate Compliance and Security, the leading AI trust management platform is of course Vanta. There was a massive debate that raged in a Google Doc which was published on Substack. The battle between Jack Clark, who's at Anthropic, of course, the co founder of Anthropic, and Dwarkesh Patel. They were going up against Michael Burry, Cassandra Unchained. They had a good discussion and it's been Published free to all on substack where you can go and read it. Highlights. Very cool, Tyler. Yeah, I have some highlights. I mean, I went through it. So one thing, it's not really a debate at all discussion. It's like there's a bunch of questions and they go and they basically, they're. Just like, AI is amazing. I agree. Yeah, no, it's funny, like, almost all the quotes I pulled were from Burry because the Dorkash and Jack Clark, I disagreed with everything they said. Yeah. So it's like, oh, it's like not that interesting. Like, I already know this. Boo. Get your own opinions, bro. I agree with everything you said. I have. No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. So one thing, it's always interesting. Jack Clark, he writes. I've been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently. And the examples he gives are dollars of mass to orbit and dollars per watt from solar. Okay. So it's like, okay, anthropic is looking at space center. Sure. Right, sure. Some other stuff. I thought Burry said his one like, policy proposal. So just the fact that Jack Clark is doing that research indicates to you that they might be thinking about orbital data centers in the future. Yeah. I mean, okay. Mass orbit and. Yeah. I don't know what else. Yeah, no, I mean, maybe he's just interested in space. He might just be interested. Yeah. You might just be like, I want to go to the moon. I'm bringing Claude with me. Yeah. I don't know. Claude go to the moon. The other interesting Burry take was that he thinks that white blue collar work might be more susceptible to AI disruption than many people think. He made this point that he's been doing his own plumbing and electrical work apparently. I don't know if that's how true that is, but he said that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you read it? I have the quote. Yeah. He says, given how much I can now do in electrical work and other areas around the house, just with Claude, my side, I'm not so sure about jobs going away. Yeah. If I'm middle class and facing $800. An $800 plumber or electrical electrician call. Yeah. I might just use Claude. Take a picture. I love that I can take a picture and figure everything out I need to do to fix it. So I mean, this. That was a big moment for me. I forget who was sharing this, but somebody was like, yeah, they just took a picture of like the most insane wiring diagram. Yeah. No, it was just a bunch of wires going everywhere and it just one. Take a picture of your car. It needs engine out service. You're like, where do I screw? I'm doing it myself. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about AI diffusion and its impact on the job market, with economist Tyler Cowan joining in. Just a minute. First, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best in class embedding models and re rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? And without further ado, we will bring Tyler Cowan in from the Restream waiting room. Tyler, how are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome back. I'm fine. Good to see you. Congratulations on the Vanity Fair piece. I loved it. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you were able to check that out. It was a lot of fun. Very funny, getting dressed up all fancy. When are you going to be in Vanity Fair? They really doing their work? I think I would love to see a Vanity Fair photo shoot with you as the subject. I think it would be fantastic. We should make it happen. A style icon, right? Yes, definitely. Well, I mean, they really should do more. Reflecting on Conversations with Tyler. The team's grown a lot. Did you just hit a recent milestone? I saw that there was an event. Can you just get me up to speed on the organization and how long you've been working on the show? Conversations with Tyler is now 10 years. It's a few hundred episodes. And last year we did almost an episode a week.

That's the only. And it is weird because the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're long the market, you'd probably benefit. But I think people are generally still fans of Fed independence and they want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation. Yeah. I'm surprised there's no reaction in the. From the prediction markets at all. Kalshee still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January. Yeah. Interesting. You would think there'd be. Move the needle a little bit because it's. But at the same time, he's not backing down. He is posting. I'm not leaving. You're gonna have to pry me out with the jaws of life. Merrick says absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation. And interestingly I don't know that the details of this building. But it's not like the White House where he lives there. Right. It's like it's just a. It's a workplace. I assume. It's not like it's his personal house. It's not like based on this. Yeah. You would think you would use. Because the other. The other who was a woman who they also opened an investigation. I'm blanking on her name. But in that case they said like she. She got a mortgage for a primary residence, but she actually ended up not living there full time. Which maybe again. Right. But at least the. That was the Cook. Yeah. Lisa Cook. Lisa Cook. Hopefully she's not cooked. We'll see. Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's independence in setting the interest rate. American equities traded premium because of our respect for law, accountability and central bank independence. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people. On a Sunday evening before market open, what is the market doing? We should go over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more, all with great customer Service. S and P 500 is green. Green. Yeah. So anyways. Yeah, I think everybody expected last night for things to happen. Of course, nothing. Nothing ever happens. But we'll see in some ways, this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say, like, the White House had nothing to do with it. Yes, yes. Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. He's saying, I might post something on Truth Social about where I think the interest rate should be. He's free to do with that what he will. So I'm sure the story will evolve and there will be a lot of reporting on it. Eddie Elfen Bean says, what are you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's hq. Trey in the chat says the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self funded. Oh, yeah. By the actual Fed. Because it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money. Don't they make money printing coins, coinage? I think that they. Or is that the mint? Is the mint part of the Fed? I don't know, but I know that there's a number of, like, there's a number of government programs that are all self funded. Not all of them are, you know, taxpayer money pits. The CIA's in Qtel, for example, is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies and they put the that money back to work. Very interesting. Bubble boy says, I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. So he is Jerome's strongest soldier. Bubble boy's getting standing up. 2000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Jerome Powell quickly. Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check out graphite. Geiger Capital. Powell watching stocks turn green after thinking the market would defend him. Isn't that Biden? Yeah. The tough thing is if you assume that rates are going to come down, you don't exactly want to sell assets. You want to own assets. There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen. Positive and normative analysis. And so you could be like, I don't like the fact that the Fed's going to be less independent, but if it means that interest rates are going to come down, then that's bullish. That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long. Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marco Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things, and so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in different Venezuelan memes. I don't exactly know where this all came from, but I'm familiar with the concept of Marco Rubio doing everything. I guess I don't really. Yeah, it's somewhat depressing because it just means like if you're in the inner circle going to be you're going to get a lot of responsibility and if you're out, you will eventually get the laser beam of the admin. Well, Gold is through the roof today posts a chart. Gold jumped from 45. 10 to 45.85. Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold, of course. So people are bailing on the US dollar, potentially. Silver's also up, says the Kobsi letter. Silver surges above $85 an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up 19% in 2026. There's been a number of hard tech founders have commented on the fact that silver is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of the semiconductor supply chain. A lot of different AI supply chains. And so there's an interesting narrative of like the knock on effects of high silver crisis. The nothing ever happens. This is nothing ever happens on steroids. I've never seen so much nothing ever happens, says Mike Bird, because The S&P 500 is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets. Potentially very odd. Odd scenario.

We are experiencing. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Uav online. Glaze. Double glaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five coat. Cook is up. Quiz. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just rol right. Market clearing order in B. Surrounded by journalists. All your position. Break 1, Strike 2, Activate. Go. Golden retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. And mine. Founder, You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, January 12, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Bunch of fun news out of Ramp. They built an AI agent just for internal production for the back end. Yeah, we will go into that. But first we got to pay our respects to the big man, Jerome Powell. Pull up the anthem. The anthem. This is this week's anthem. This is. We've been blasting it all morning here in the studio. Yes, it is. It will make you emotional. It's a very emotional song. It's a trigger warning. I guess it's AI generated, but it. Hits in a manufactured storm. Power turned hostile. The rules deformed. Threats in the open. Whispers in home. Yeah, we should have gotten lighters for this for sure. Law turn to leverage. Of course. This is on the back that the New York Times reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell. He took to the they wanted loyalty. Dropped a video explaining his side of the story. But instead of playing that, we're playing this. I didn't want to cry at the office today, but it's happening. No. What a story. Powell says the Justice Department served the Fed with subpoenas. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the US Central bank has been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment related to his June congressional testimony on ongoing renovations of the Fed's headquarters. In a statement released Sunday evening, Jerome Powell rejected the notion that the action was driven by his testimony or the renovation. Joe Weisenthal has a post here. He says Powell confirms the Fed has been served subpoenas from the doj. Fortunately, we have Tyler Cowan coming on the show today. I'm sure we'll be able to talk to him about that and a whole bunch of other things in the world. We'll be asking him, should we roll the Fed into Truth Social? That's a good or World Liberty? Financially, we have options. Might be the Most entertaining. Anyway, let's pull up the LINEAR lineup and show everyone who's coming on the show today because we do have Tyler Cowen. We also have Andrew Feldman from Cerebrus coming on the show and a bunch of other folks. Harley's joining to talk about Agenta Commerce. Nathan from Terra, he's building drones in Africa. Excited for that one. And of course Harley and Ella Marina. And LINEAR of course is the system for modern software development. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. We also might have a surprise guest joining at 12:15 just so you can. We'll see. Yeah. Anyways, watching Sunday night, I'm all excited, right. One more sleep until Monday and I pull up this video I've got to watch. Jerome A two minute talk. Yeah, yeah. I mean really dark moment. It was funny. Buco Buco Capital shared Like if it's illegal to run over budget on a remodel, my wife's getting the electric chair. You didn't give me the punchline when you said that the first time but I knew where it was going. But anyways. Very political, very fraught. But it's created a number of entertaining. People have been standing up standing up. For standing up for the Federal Reserve chairman and fortunately, I mean the administration sees these. We know that they're very online and they see the support. So we'll see where the story goes. Poster says like if you would let Jerome Powell crash on your couch for a few months. AI is really at its best when you need a bunch of memes and images generated around a current thing before we do the next one. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go. To restream.com Rachel just said you just created a million central bankers and Jordy. Said this to me. I just burst out laughing so hard. It is, I mean Fed chair probably one of the worst jobs on earth if you care what other people think about you. Right. Because it's just like every, you know, all the time people just have this massive fixation on you and they're going to form an opinion immediately. But in this case I've never seen people so united around which is heartwarming. That's the only and it is weird. Because the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're long the market you'd probably benefit but I think people do are generally still fans of Fed independence and they Want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation. Yeah. I'm surprised there's no reaction from the prediction markets at all, Cal. She still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January. Yeah. Interesting. You would think there'd be the needle a little bit because it's. But at the same time, he is. Posting up saying, I'm not. I'm not leaving. You have to pry me out with the jaws of life. Mary says, absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation. And interestingly, I don't know that the details of this building, but it's not like the White House where he lives there. Right. It's like it's just a. It's a workplace, I assume. It's not like it's his personal house. It's not like. Not you. Based on this. I think he was using. Yeah, you would think that's what it feels like. Because. Because the other. The other who is a woman who. They also opened an investigation. I'm blanking on the chair. But in that case, they said like she. She got a mortgage for a primary residence, but she actually ended up not living there full time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which again. Right. But at least the. Lisa Cook. Hopefully she's not cooked. We'll see. Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's independence in setting the interest rate. American equities traded a premium because of our respect for law, accountability and central bank independence. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people. On a Sunday evening before market open, what is the market doing? We should go over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer Service. S&P 500 is green. Green. Yeah. So anyways, yeah, I think everybody expected last night for things to happen. Of course, nothing. Nothing ever happens. But we'll see. In some ways, this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say, like, the White House had nothing to do with it. Yes, yes. Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. He's saying I might post something on Truth Social about where I think the interest rate should be. He's free to do with that what he will. So I'm sure the story will evolve and there will be a lot of reporting on it. Eddie Elfen Bean says, what are you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's hq. Trey in the chat says the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self funded. Oh, yeah. By the actual Fed, because it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money. Don't they make money printing coins, coinage? I think that they. Or is that the mint? Is the mint part of the Fed? I don't know, but I know that there's a number of, like, there's a number of government programs that are all self funded. Not all of them are taxpayer money pits. The CIA's in Qtel, for example, is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies and they put that money back to work. Very interesting. Bubble boy says, I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. So he is Jerome's strongest soldier. Bubble Boy's getting standing up 2000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Jerome Powell quickly. Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check out graphite. Geiger Capital. Powell watching stocks turn green after thinking the market would defend him. Isn't that Biden? Yeah. The tough thing is, if you assume that rates are going to come down, you don't exactly want to sell assets, but you want to own assets. There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen. Positive and normative analysis. And so if you could be like, I don't like the fact that the Fed's going to be less independent, but if it means that interest rates are going to come down, then that's bullish. That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long. Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marco Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things. And so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in, you know, different Venezuelan memes. I don't exactly know where this all came from, but I'm familiar with the concept of Marco Rubio doing everything. I guess I don't really. Yeah, it's somewhat depressing because it just means like if you're in the inner circle, you're going to get a lot of responsibility and if you're out, you will eventually get the laser beam of the admin. Well, gold is through the roof today hosts a chart. Gold jumped from 45. 10 to 45.85. Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold of course. So people are bailing on the US dollar potentially. Silver's also up, says the Kobsi letter. Silver surges above $85 an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up 19% in 2026. There's been a number of hard tech founders have commented on the fact that silver is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of the semiconductor supply chain. A lot of different AI supply chains and so there's an interesting narrative of like the knock on effects of high silver prices. Yeah the nothing ever happens. This is nothing ever happens on steroids. I've never seen so much nothing ever happens, says Mike Bird. Because The S&P 500 is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets. Potentially very odd. Odd scenario. Anyway, crowdstrike, Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the Apple Vision Pro is in the news because and I think we can pull up this video maybe of Trung Fan posted this Mark Gurman was a big fan of this Apple Vision Pro announced you can now watch a free full NBA game in the Vision Pro. Not just a little highlight reel, not just a trailer. And Mark Gurman asked the question is the total addressable market for watching tonight's Lakers game in the Apple Vision Pro. Just me or is anyone else tuning in? A couple people said I haven't booted mine up for a year. They still have it. They did turn it on. He wound up loving it. Have they ever done this before? They've never done a full game. So they've done MLS highlights. You could watch like an eight minute summary of an of an MLS game that had a ton of different cuts. Not a lot of people were not fans of that. There were also release cadence needs to be studied. It's crazy. And I mean that's what Ben Thompson wrote about today in Strathecary. He sees all this as like crazy own goals. A lot of really obvious things. Also the reason that you see this video so grainy like this. So Mark Gurman loved it in the headset. He said it's absolutely wild. It's like watching courtside. Trunk Fan has the video here. You can't record what's happening in the headset. You can't just steal an NBA game because so you need to put your phone up against it. And you don't really experience it here because for DRM reasons, you can't just pirate it. You can't just record what you're seeing. So the actual experience is better than this. I actually went to the Apple Store yesterday to try and pick up a Vision Pro to experience this, and they were sold out. And I don't know if that means that they were just like not expecting to sell anymore. So they stopped stocking them, but they didn't have one. But I played with the Vision Pro. I mean, I would wait to. The real review would be getting the Apple Vision Pro, going to the actual game, getting the ticket right next to the system that they're using, and then just having the headset on and taking it on. At the game. Yeah, at the game. You want to see how real it is. Tyler, what would you do? This is cool because it's like emulating, like what is happening in real life. But in VR you can do, like, things that like, you couldn't do in real life. So, like, I want to see what is the point of view. Like, if I'm the ball, you'd probably. Be so motion sick. I want to be the ball. That sounds terrible. You know, ball wants to be the ball. I know ball. Matthew Ball or who's the other ball? Dean Ball. Dean Ball. We haven't gotten Matthew Ball on the show yet. We need him. He's a great analyst. Anyway, so Ben Thompson wrote about this because he's obviously a huge NBA fan. Also, he's a Milwaukee Bucks fan. And the game was the Lakers versus the Bucks. So this is like a royal flush of like the sweet spot for Ben Thompson analysis. He had to jump through VPN hoops to watch the broadcast because it was only available in Lakers home market, which is California, also Hawaii and I think one other state. So it's somewhat tricky. Yeah, you can't. No, no. If you're in New York and you had a Vision Pro, you could not watch the Lakers play the Bucks unless you had a vpn. Yeah, there's a lot of details here. And that's a huge detail. I know, I know, I know. Like, I have this. I have this $3,000 device that is just gathering dust. Yeah. And then you make this big deal about this amazing experience that I can have. And then if I'm not actually within the area that the game is actually taking place, I can't. Yes, I can't experience it. What's the point of, er. So there are a lot of reasonable critiques like that. Ben puts a lot of those in his piece. I think that there are logical reasons. I don't think Apple is dumb. I don't think they just made a mistake. I think these are all contract negotiations. And when we look at the history of sports and transitions through various eras of broadcast and new technologies, I think their decision making makes a little bit more sense. Even though I agree from a user experience perspective what you're saying, what Ben Thompson is saying makes a ton of sense. So Apple clearly reads Strathecary. They've sent him multiple headsets. He bought his own. But they keep sending them to him being like, hey, you should try it. We're coming out with something new. So they've sent him the new one, the M5 Vision Pro. And he was ready to watch this. He was ready to love this. But he was very disappointed because it cut from one scene to another. And so that takes you out of the experience. He says, do away with all of the pre show, special announcer, post show content. Just let me put on the headset and if I put it on 30 minutes before the game starts, I'll just watch the players warm up. And then you don't need any overlays, because if I want to know the score, I'll just look up at the scoreboard like this. You're in the theater. Like, people pay a lot of money to sit courtside and they're not like. Oh, I also, oh, I'm having a bad experience. Please give me an iPad with the score on it. No, no one cares. They just look at the score. They hear the audience. If something great happens, they hear the roar of the crowd. They see everything. They can even look up at the screen and usually see a replay if they need to. And so all of that should be possible with just one simple Apple immersive camera rig streamed the whole game and that's it. Instead, they did four different camera angles. They're cutting between them, and every time they cut, you get kind of like, whoa, where am I? I just teleport it. It's weird. So my question was like, so Ben frames this, as he calls it Apple. You still don't understand the Vision Pro. He's, like, taking shots at them. And I titled my piece Apple they actually do understand the Vision Pro. And I think they've heard his response. They've clearly read his piece. He wrote about this maybe two years ago when he got a demo before it even came out. And he said, the secret to success with this product will just be put a camera on the field. Let me sit there front courtside. That's it. No editing, nothing else. And then every time they delivered him something that was edited, he wrote a piece about how bad the editing was and how you don't need that. And just let me sit there. And so my question was, there's no one that really disagrees with Ben. Ben comes out and says these things. Every time there's an Apple Vision Pro piece of content that comes out, he comes out and says, too many edits, too many cuts. Just let us sit there. And there's not like, there's a lot of people that are like, ben's wrong. Actually, I love the edits more edits, like, they need to be even correct. Well, be clear. No one's talking about. No, I'm sorry. X over Ben, basically. So they should clearly listen to him. And no one's arguing that Ben's wrong. But my question is, like, why on earth isn't Apple doing this? Why? Or at least why haven't they made it an option? Like, they have the single camera there. They could just be like, do you want to watch the edited version or do you want to watch just the normal, just sit there in the seat version? Then Ben would be happy and he'd be writing a glowing review right now. Instead, Apple's not giving what sirtechery wants, and they're feeling the pain because they got an article that was not very complimentary to them in the experience. So I think that this actually has less to do with the technology, less to do with the creative direction and the directorial vision within Apple, and more with just straight up contract negotiations. So. And if you go back in history, Ben goes back to some other history. I went back to 1947. So TV adoption. I didn't realize this TV adoption went through a fast takeoff. In 1947, there were 16,000 TV sets installed in America. Eight years later, it was 32 and a half million. It's like completely asymptotic. Completely fast takeoff. So the technology trend was clear, but there was still financial risk to getting the timing wrong for your league. The NFL is obviously a huge beneficiary of TV today. They make a fortune from the super bowl ads that are extremely expensive. But in 1949, the Los Angeles Rams, because the Rams are in LA now, but they went to St. Louis and then they came back, but they were in Los Angeles in 1949. They sort of got wrecked because they jumped too early. So the NFL had gone to all the franchises that all the teams were giving you the permission to sell your broadcast rights this year, this season. If you want to put your. Your, Your particular team's home games on tv, you can do that. You can go out and negotiate, you can sell those. It's an option. Yeah. And the Rams said, yeah, we'll do it. We'll take the jump. They were the only one that did it. And it sort of makes sense since they're in la, there's a lot of production people here. It would be a natural. They were a little too TV pilled. They were extremely TV pilled and they got burned. So. So attendance dropped significantly. On an inflation adjusted basis, they lost $2.5 million of today's dollars. And so the Rams had to go to all the sponsors that sponsor the TV broadcast and say, like, hey, can you just make us whole because we're going to go out of business? And they did. And the sponsors basically paid the Rams for the difference in what they had taken in ticket sales, but it was not a good. It was not a good outcome. And. And although the NFL eventually got through all of this and figured it all out, that was not the case for minor league baseball. Minor league baseball. Attendance at minor league baseball events. Minor league events peaked in 1949, right during the TV install base, fast takeoff. And so 49 people, 49 million people went to minor league events that year in 1949. By 1957, the total had dropped to 15 million. So it actually did wreck the minor leagues in terms of their business model, and they never really recovered. And so the job of a league commissioner is to get the transition right. Like, if you transition too early, you'll have a really, really bad year, while everyone just says, hey, I can just do the new thing, the new technology, I don't need to buy the tickets if you do it too late. Other leagues might have figured out their contracts, their ad sales, their. Their broadcast rights, all this other stuff. So Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who we learned about through his connection to Josh Kushner, of course, he said, I think it's my job to incentivize our partners to be able to look out into the future. He's not saying, hey, my job's to get everyone out of the stadiums and into VR headsets. Asap. Like, the end result is like, there is a separation between immersive rights and presence rights. So there's broadcast rights. And effectively they're using the same framework. So when they sell a broadcast right, they're not selling the right to. They're selling the right to broadcast with an announcer, with multiple cameras, with different cuts and edits. They're not selling. You're teleported into the stadium. And that's something that they might sell, but they haven't sold yet. And I think they're deliberate about this. And so I think when they went to Apple, they said, yes, we can do something, because they did a deal with Meta and you can watch a number of NBA games in the Meta Quest. And it's the same thing. They cut around and the reviews are bad. Everyone says it sucks. And so it's obvious that the tech companies should Google, how did people like this? And it's obvious, no, no, people don't like it. But I think the NBA is holding fast that they're like, no, actually our courtside seats are really, really, really expensive. And we want to keep it that way. Way. We don't want, we won't. We don't want it to be substitutive on day one. And Ben Thompson, when he first wrote about the Apple Vision Pro, he said I would pay thousands of dollars a year for an NBA league pass that allowed me to in VR, sit courtside. And that's less money than courtside seats to every single NBA game, which is effectively what you're selling. So, and then how many Ben Thompson's are there? People with Apple Vision? And so you. So there's, there's financial risk there. I think it can work out. I think that there's a deal and there's a price and there's a number. The install base gets to this level and you price it at this level. And I think they're too. I think in some ways they could very easily be two wildly different consumers. Yeah, like, Ben is probably like, Ben Thompson knows ball. He wants to, he wants to be able to watch courtside for the love of the game. Whereas somebody that's going courtside at the Lakers or the Knicks, they're going there to be seen watching courtside. Right. And they're willing to, like. It's not. You're not just paying to watch basketball, right? Because you could pay like, you know, a fraction to sit a couple rows back. You're paying to be sitting courtside, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the other, the other interesting angle is this like region lock thing. It almost feels weirder to allow someone in Los Angeles to watch the LA Lakers play because they really could just buy a ticket and go down to the stadium. But maybe you should actually be trying. To get the whole point. If you're, if you're like a die hard Lakers fan but you don't live in Southern California and then somebody says, hey, with the Apple Vision Pro, you can watch it like your courtside. That's great. Yeah. What you actually want is like Ben Thompson's in Milwaukee, he loves the Bucks, but they're playing in la. He's not going to buy a flight to go courtside in la. And so you let him experience that game and then when they're back in Milwaukee, he can go get the courtside seats in his hometown. So you almost want to do the inverse region lock, something like that. I don't know. What do you think, Todd? Wait, so is that deal where it's just the broadcast, not the actual like live stream, is that basically every single league? Like, can you do the same thing in F1? So that's also like, I feel like that would be. Everyone wants that. You're in the, you're in the cockpit. So every deal is unique. And there's no. There are some laws around sports broadcasting that sort of solidified like the blackout periods and made some of that defined some like legal language around that. But really it's up to the leagues to decide how they negotiate these contracts. Whether every game's available, only home games are available, region locking, blackout dates. There's all sorts of mechanics where I don't know how true this is today, but I know that if you have a home stadium and it's full, then you can be much more permissive with the broadcast rights because you've sold out all your tickets. But if you're not selling out the stadiums, then often you won't broadcast as much or you can't broadcast as much. So you'll be in your hometown and you'll go to watch the game and it won't be broadcast because they want you to just go buy a ticket. And then, and then the equilibrium, like the clearing the market, clearing prices that people that are on the fence who are like, I really wanted to watch the game, I can't watch it here. I'll just go buy a ticket. And then over time you fill it out. Yeah, you're going to be very excited about this. Please. Ben Thompson's going to join the show right now. Really? No way. Amazing. That's Fantastic. Someone in the chat earlier said you're Ben Thompson's biggest fan. I am. And you are? I am. We are. That's amazing. Fantastic. So working on getting Ben on to continue the discussion. Okay. Yeah. This will be a lot more extra context because he is the expert in this. In the meantime, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Maduro, we're back in politics land. But don't worry, not for long because we're going into watch land. Because he was caught rocking a Chopard Ganesh. A fantastic Indian watch that is incredibly, incredibly detailed. Look at all these different Swiss made. This is a crazy. I feel like this is sort of a lost art. You know, maybe Mark Zuckerberg should get into this. Wear a watch that has, you know, sweet baby rays on the dial. The sweet baby rays Chopard dial might go incredibly hard. I would love that. Also, it was the Golden Globes. I know Jordi didn't watch because you probably haven't seen any of these movies, but they did in fact happen yesterday. Rob Report has some images of the best watches at the Golden Globes. If the Golden Globes were any indication. Subtle is officially on hiatus, says the Rob Report. This year's red carpet made a strong case for statement watches with bold dialogue. Did we kind of call this originally with the show? Did we the. I mean, no. I mean, the joke early on was like, quiet luxury is over. Yes. Loud opulence. Loud opulence. A lot of these are screaming loud opulence. In fact, I need to return to my. Let's start with the beginning of the slideshow. We need to return to our original statements about, you know, the value of loud opulence. Because I see these and I'm like, I couldn't pull these off. My life depended on it. But the rock was spotted watching a Chopard much like Maduro. But this one is the Alpine eagle frozen summit. Look at all those diamonds. I like it, but I'd like to see. I mean, could we get at least a couple more. Couple more diamonds. Diamonds on here? I think it's a little. It's a little understated. He could have gone with, you know, the rainbow. The rainbow one. The gem set. That's the Rolex with all the dime, the different colored diamonds. Who else is wearing fine luxury watches at the Golden Globes? Adam Scott was wearing a Vacheron Constantin traditional perpetual Calendar Ultra. This is nice. That's a very Nice watch. I like that one a lot. I also like this Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra that Glen Powell was seen wearing. Martin, notoriously, he's an Omega guy. Omega guy. That's right. New fund. Maybe this was a nod from Glenn saying, like, I salute you, hat tip. Yes. He's celebrating 15 billion. He probably read the Packy piece, and he says, you know what? It's time to put on the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra. In terms of Omega Seamasters, this one stands out to me. Gold is a choice, but I think it's working very well here. And you know who else is wearing a Omega Seamaster? George Clooney, also an Aqua Terra. I would love. I would love to know the details of Omega and Rolex and the other brands, like, fighting over people like Clooney. Right? Because, you know, I don't think Clooney's putting on a watch without getting paid. Okay, well, we have Ben Thompson in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV at Ultradome. Fantastic. Ben, how are you doing here? He is good. Thanks so much for hopping on the show in such short notice. I loved your piece. I have takes to drop, so let's go. Let's go. Okay, so, I mean, drop your first takes, and then I want to know, is there anything to what I was saying that Apple actually does read your work, and they do want to do it, but they just can't because of some contract. Oh, I thought you were talking about watches. Oh, no, I was talking about watches. What's on the wrist, Ben? I have a Tudor gmt. Very nice. Very basic, but highly recommended. Tudor's favorite places. And it's covered in diamonds, I assume, like the rocks. It is not. It is very basic with a rubber band, because rubber bands rule. Ooh, okay. Rubber band. That's good. Yeah. So I disagree with your take.

It is. It will make you emotional. It's a very emotional song. It's a trigger warning. I guess it's AI generated, but it hits in. A manufactured storm. Power turned hostile. The rules deformed. Threats in the open. Whispers in hall. Yeah, we should have gotten lighters for this, for sure. Of course. This is on the back that the New York Times reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell. He took to the dropped a video explaining his side of the story. But instead of playing that, we're playing this. We are? Jerome. How I didn't want to cry at the office.