5 cup. Is. Wins. Team death match. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll right. Market clearing order inbound. Compound it. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2, Activate. Go. Golden retriever Mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. 5. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Today is Wednesday, March 18, 2026. We are live from the TPPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's also pull up the linear lineup. Of course, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspace on linear are using agents. We have a great show lined up. We have Matt Wang from Paradigm joining at the end of the show. Cameron from Maximus is coming in person. We got Andy Fang from Doordash, Matt Multisian. We got a great lightning round. Chris from Adquai 2. Chris's. We're going back to back Chris's today. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching tvpn. As always, the big news of the day. More news out of Nvidia gt. You see lots of Nvidia announcements. The stock is up. It's a $4.44 trillion company. Last time I checked, that is big. Nvidia's been on absolute tear and some really promising things with the Grok acquisition already. Or like sudo acquisition, the deal, the Grok partnership, they're already starting to explain a little bit more about how those two technologies fit together. And there's a good, there's some good coverage in certificary about that. But the big news out of Nvidia yesterday was that Nvidia says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China, specifically so Jensen Huang says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time. Of course, chips were banned first from sale for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the Chips Act. That also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. We began following the intel story. We began following the Huawei story. There were a number of different initiatives and then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China. Back in 2022, after the Chips act, which if you want to read up more on it, we interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book, highly recommend it. You should have him back on. That'd be amazing. About that time. Yeah. Ben Thompson's also covered the story throughout. There's a whole bunch of good stuff in certecary on chips in China and the calculus has always been pretty clear, like on the first pass, the first order effects. AI is an important technology. America wants an advantage in the AI race, the AI buildout. So less chips for China means more chips for America, stronger economic engineering, massive chip shortage. Right now you see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched, which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here and, but, and plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers specifically. I mean even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the 2 nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs. But they're, you know, they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So In November of 2022 I was writing about this and I said on a YouTube video, in the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean even the tiniest earthquake. Right, they have to track the weather. Yes. Outside of the facility. Exactly. If the weather outside of the facilities is fluctuating at all inside. Yeah, earthquakes. Taiwan is famous, or TSMC is famous, where they don't even need apparently a, like a, like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know because that's the level of sensitivity over at the TSMC fab. So if you want to keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war. And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans that you'd create an increased risk of geopolitical conflict. And in 2022 the Russia Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously we've been tracking the Iran war and America's military is potentially stretched thin. So the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever. And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained a chip shortage through at least 2030 and the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically their full time job is to advocate for a particular position. I was talking to a friend who is interfaced with a lot of the different groups in Washington and there are like huge think tanks, huge lobbying organizations on both sides because there's so many different interests going on. Yeah, not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts Nvidia actually makes holding up the world economy. Right, that's the meme and that's certainly true. So there are good arguments on both sides. One that keeps getting trotted out is you know, it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab. But there is, there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here. We'll be able to transfer that research and development that happens over there very quickly. But the much more important thing is just that the more the economies are interlinked, the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of TSMC Arizona, Samsung, intel broadly as well as startup fab projects like the terafab. Terafab and there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing that are at least talking about tool making, talking about getting a fab up and running. Nothing that's really taken off. I mean even Samsung is not fabbing any of the leading edge Nvidia chips at this point. But you know, there's incredible economic incentive and people have known that this is an important sort of cash cow business for a few years now at the very least. And so there's certainly been a lot of incentive to put, put plans in motion that might play out before 2030 because there's such a, such a shortage. And so in general we're traveling this like long and narrow Road. But I'm coming around to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with like the first order. The first order logic of just we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy, so we should have them. But going forward, it'll be really interesting to track how China's indigenous indigenization project or their domestic supply chain evolves. They of course have. Yeah, my take has always been even if they are getting chips, it's not like the, the party is going to say, actually our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a drip of H200. Yes, they're still going to keep the momentum that they have just wouldn't be like them. There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from, yeah, you can take some of the wind out of the sails, but they can just spend more. You can slow the momentum potentially. That's the argument. Is that buying, limiting demand. Like there's a local, local fab in China that just says, a chip maker that, that says, okay, well you know, our demand is half as much, so we're going to. So like we can't afford to scale. Sure, we have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer. So you don't get the process level of like execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business. It becomes more of like NASA than SpaceX. That's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Before we move back to the Wall Street Journal, let me tell you about figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma cloud code or Codex or sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products, ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with figma. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So Nvidia and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20A processor Nvidia designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models. But it was reported that the high flyer team behind Deepsea sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200. Or close to it, or closer. Well, it's sort of a moot question now because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version. So the company's fortunes turned again in December when the U.S. said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series of GPUs. So this is not the B200, not the Blackwell, this is the Hopper. But it's still very advanced in China, as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the US government. So there's basically an export tariff. GPUs, or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in training AI models. I think everyone knows this. In late January, after Wang visited China, officials there signaled they would approve H200 sales as well. So there was a big debate over whether or not the Beijing would block the imports of H2 hundreds in order to stimulate the indigenization of the domestic semiconductor supply chain. It seems like these will be going and they will be purchased by Inspire. Local industry to grind harder, basically. But you have a whole bunch of AI labs that are not in the fab industry. They're not involved in the verticalization process, and they just want to train great models because they have real businesses like they're running. They're running Alibaba or Baidu or any. Any number of companies. And bytedance wants good AI and they want the best chips, and they're not really interested in getting into the supply chain at a deep level, at least in the short term. So. But until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In Nvidia's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China, to date, we have not generated any revenue from those sales. Speaking at the company's GTC event Tuesday, Huang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China. We've received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up. Nvidia didn't comment on how much it expected to earn from H200 sales in China, but in the past, the company has said that the Chinese market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year. That makes perfect sense. And Christina over at CNBC got the Original scoop near the bathroom line at gtc. Really? Huang happened to walk by security and asked if he'd answered her earlier question. She said she had one more. You said you got China purchase orders. That means you got the green light from both sides. He said yes. Wow, that is a scoop. You never know as a scoop athlete, you never know where your next scoop is going to come from. Seriously, you got to be ready. The sticking a microphone in someone's face as they're walking by really does make sense with the camera flashes going, yes, yes. Jensen loves answering some questions on a microphone line. Chinese authorities approve Nvidia's H200 chip sales source says. And Tor taxes says Xi Jinping has given up the situation with the H200 sale in China summarized. And it's everyone jumping off and Xi Jinping saying, stop. Domestic chips can work maybe. And everyone at the lab saying, must get cuda, dude. Nvidia is the future falling into the moat and they're falling into the cuda dependency moat. Will be interesting to see the evolution of the, of the. Of the cuda mote as other chips come online. I mean, we've seen TPU become functional. So there are questions about the cuda mote long term, but it certainly seems like not a stopper to demand right now as labs place orders from Nvidia. In other news, JRR Tolkien used Gen Z brainrot slang over 70 years ago. That's how ahead no way he was. And the quote maggots jeered the end Cigars. You're cooked. You're cooked. White skins will catch you and eat you. They're coming. Oh, he's like using it literally like, you will be cooked by the some, I don't know, villain. I suppose. A cry from the Grishnakh showed that this was not mere jest. Horsemen riding very slowly had. This is really hard to read with these hyphens had indeed been sighted. Still far behind but gaining on the orcs. So the orcs will cook you if you fall behind, I suppose. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta. And let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that cerebras solved six years ago, says Andrew Feldman the CEO and founder of Cerebras. Shots fired. Shots fired indeed. He says their next gen inference chip, not available yet, has 140 times less memory and less memory bandwidth than Cerebras. To run a single 2 trillion parameter model, you need 2,000 Grok chips. On cerebras, that's just over 20 wafers. Even paired with GPUs, Grox maxes out at 1,000 tokens per second. We run thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production now. Why when you connect 2,000 chips together, every Internet connect has latency, every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper, if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny chips. We solved this with wafer scale, one integrated system, little interconnect tax. Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebras. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebras versus Ruben plus Grok together on one system and he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a 2 trillion parameter model. I don't know how relevant, I don't know is there. Like, I wonder how this scales relative to, well, what if you're not running a 2 trillion dollar, a 2 trillion parameter model if you're 5x lower, does this number get much more manageable? It does feel like he, I mean, he's talking his book here, but I don't know there probably, but it's a big book. It is lots to talk about. It's a big chip. I don't know, I mean, have you, Tyler, have you ever run into any Grok chips in the wild? I remember the original demo was inferencing Llama that was pretty fast. And everyone was like, yeah, this is amazing. I've hit the API a few times because, yeah, you can like there's just like consumer API where you can run like local smaller models. I had heard you need a lot of chips, but that's not on its face like a huge problem necessarily. But it did seem like they had made some design decisions that maybe painted them into some particular corners, but those corners might be still economically advantageous in certain cases. Yeah, I mean it was definitely still slower than there was like the Chat Jimmy thing. Right? Because that's very much like, it's literally the model. No one can beat Chat Jimmy. Well, I mean do we know that that's what's happening with the Chat Jimmy AI demo? Because like the Grok demo was very much like, we have a chip, here's a demo. And it was actually 2000 chips behind the scene or a bunch of chips together behind the scenes. And so it's possible that the Chat Jimmy AI is doing something similar where in order to speed things up. Sure, yeah. We don't know. I just asked Chat Jimmy, what's your favorite thing about Tyler Cosgrove from tvpn? I couldn't find any information about a person named Tyler, especially in the context of tvpn, which might refer to the Big Bang Theory, a popular TV show, or maybe the Bachelor Paradise, a reality TV tbp. Tvp. The Bachelor Paradise Network. Okay, yeah, that works. It's fast though. It's fast, but it doesn't. I don't think ChatGPT AI has search. Yeah, that would, that would slow. Trying to slow things down. Let's. Let's play this video of. I want to play this video of Jensen. Back in September 2009, Bubble Boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player. And so someone, someone stood up and asked, hey, why'd you invest 4 billion in these companies? I mean, that's reasonable. Well, let's take a walk through history. I make content for investors so they can have the average American and people around the world. Let's play this. This Jensen clip from 2009. September 2009. Jensen walks onto a small stage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. About 1500 people in the room. In Computer Science, if Dave Patterson and John Hennessey and I know that Pat Anaheim is sitting here watching me, you guys are going to go nuts. You need to put a mic on him. This is called CEO Man. This is not computer architect. Now this is called CEO Man. But it illustrates the point that stage so much smaller. Why could. It makes a lot of sense. This is an illustration of co processing. Carlos says, no jacket. I realize there's a lot of words no jacket. He is looking pretty jacked at the end of this presentation. So this is simple math. The first section on top is an example of a program that is parallel intensive. And on the bottom of this applicant program which is doing camera and the way that I simply made it is a serial code Part of the intense parallel intensive program takes about one second to run, whereas the parallel parallelizable part of the code takes 199 seconds to run. Which makes sense. It's an enormous amount of data. Nvidia was a $7 billion company when this happened, you know, very long centralized. Jensen kept saying the GPU wasn't just a gaming chip, it was a computing platform. Kept saying parallel processing would reshape every industry from medicine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just put the video games in the bag. Seriously. Yeah. This was. Yeah. Before training neural networks. Wow. Pretty. Pretty remarkable. 17,000 people are at GTC 2026 now packing a hockey stadium, watching the same guy explain what comes next. Very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. LinkedIn Semianlysis is over there slopping it up. They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll and it will get tons of engagement. We need to do this. Wow, they're just really throwing shots. I give LinkedIn a chance on a long enough timeline, they will all come to X. Yeah, it might take 30, 40 years. They'll make it over to the dive bar eventually maybe. And so I like that semianalysis leans into the particular, like rough edges of every platform. Like I follow them on Instagram and they actually post just like hilarious vibe reels and brain rot. It's just like brain rot. Yeah, yeah, but often it's completely. I'm the only one that's liking them. I comment on a lot of the videos. Yeah, I comment too. It's amazing. Like they are not having broad success. But as far as like what Instagram, it's like, you know, the fine details of, you know, inference max or something. Yeah. And then it's like Minecraft Parkour. Yeah, I was in a few of them because they clipped our interview with Dylan Patel from Cisco a summit and put some, some videos on there. But there's hilarious. There's a hilarious one where it's like it leads in with some, some, some text about like, like, you know, semi analysis semiconductor analyst like explains like this thing and then there's just no audio while he's explaining it. And then it just cuts to me and I'm like. And then it cuts back because we were editing the footage and so I don't even know if it was like a mistake upload or it's like intentional. But it's all very, very funny. Apple cracks down on Vibe Coding apps It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as Vibe Coding apps help people create apps. Vibe Coding apps, not Vibe coded apps. I know it's over for him times two. No, because he doesn't Vibe code on a phone. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. He doesn't Vibe code on a phone. I'm kidding. Apple's move comes as Vibe Coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store. Let's get into Stephanie and Aaron's reporting from the information, Apple has quietly prevented AI vive coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications, from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications. Company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe coding capabilities violate long standing App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when Vibe Coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company by helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple, some of these Vibe Coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown in approval process in some cases, developers say. An Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to Vibe Coding apps. Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believed Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and Vibe Code. Those app makers had agreed to either tweak their apps the way their apps showed customer previews of Vibe coded apps, or get rid of certain Vibe coding capabilities entirely, like making apps for Apple devices. So it sounds like you're able to basically generate an app with repl.it and then like use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit the app to do things that Apple didn't approve of. So yeah, the App Store never heard of Vibe Code. That's what I was looking up. The App Store is always so fascinating. So if you search Vibe Code, you get an ad for repl.it as the first response. Replit is number three in dev tools, has 14,000 five star reviews or reviews then Vibe Code is listed as Vibe Code. Website builder has 3.3k. Pretty solid. It doesn't look like it's charting, but it says learn how to Vibe code. No experience needed. Build websites with professional designs. Much more focused, I think, on static content. But there's been a number of these, like, website builders in the App Store for a very long time. Then Repl it ranks number two when you search for Vibe code because it says repl it Vibe code apps. Then you get sticky. An AI game maker, vibe coder, AI app creator, anything. The AI app builder, vibe code, Claude and Codex. AI with 21 stars. There's a lot of people that are like just. Just jumping in. There's one that's gone. Replit's argument is that they're helping the user generate an app that's just opening it up in a web view. So it's effectively just a mobile. An app built for mobile web. And Apple's arguing that. No, that's effectively in. In the Repl Dot app. Would you download this app, Jordy? I don't know. Insane. I don't know. You can see. But it's definitely Vibe coded. The App Store preview. It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the gig Chad using the computer. It's very funny, but, man, there is so much IP infringement. Love a code not from lovable. Love a code build with Vibe code. I wonder who they're trying to SEO against. Clearly there's a whole bunch of who doesn't love the code that are just trying to steal market share from incumbents that have name recognition. Do you remember that company that was doing Vibe coding on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app. We talked to them at YC Demo Day last year and there's a number of these companies that are trying to be like the AI game Store, sort of like the meta simulator. Like build a simulator and create a harness that's really good at Vibe coding a game. It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it. But you are going to be bumping up against the App Store. You just have to compete with Sam Altman, Dario Amade. Yeah, maybe Amjad. I do wonder if there will be some sort of. I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one, maybe. Or does it come out of Codex and Claude code instead? How do you. I wonder what the barrier and how much distribution matters there for that audience of people that want to Vibe code a game. Yeah, for gaming. I just think Roblox is just going to continue to be like Roblox is the Roblox of vibe coding. And yet we did not build our simulators in Roblox. Yeah, but they're not like massive multiplayer games and we want people to be able to click a link and use it on their phone immediately. We have a new simulator coming, by the way. We're addicted to simulation. We do love simulators. This one we're putting a little bit more effort into and John's already addicted. I would say this one is like just actually fun. Jeremy Giffon simulator was more just like a different way to experience. It was educational. It was educational. Yeah, yeah, it was. For people that didn't just listen to his episode on Invest Psychology, sat down, simulated it. Yeah. But the actual interaction pattern of like guessing and whatnot. Like it was like, oh, this is novel. And then it was like, okay, this is a chore. And then it was like, okay, how many questions are there? 200. There were what, like 60 questions or 40, 48. That's a lot. This is this, this new simulation. You're not going to be able to put it down. You're not gonna be able to put it down. And it can effectively solve some industry wide issues that are happening right now potentially. But we're going for impact, we're going for fun. But you know, Apple's had this long standing policy around do not, do not. Like, like they want to review the software and so you can't create an app that rewrites its software. But yeah, I wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer, like a mini, like sort of peer to peer experience. Because I remember I made, I was like learning how to build iOS apps when I was like a early teenager and I was so frustrated that I had built Pong, but I couldn't just like share it with my dad and say like, hey, you can play this. Like it just wasn't. It was. You can do test flight, right? Yeah, test flight. But, but test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for. It's not like social peer to peer experience. Like you still have to opt into the test flight network. Do all these, do all these jumps like it would be. And it for some reason it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem. When I get a text, a test flight says high key. Tyler could make better Siri and repl it with a thousand dollar budget and replit two massive things. No, better Siri in replit. Oh, better. Oh, okay. Oh yes. For his last thousand bucks in replit, he's down to his Last. He's down to his last thousand bucks. That's a good challenge. Yeah. Maybe that should be the new constraint on. On like. Like hackathons. Instead of it's being like two days, it's like 20 grand is the max budget. And you. What can you do with that budget for the token allocation? 20k is big budget for hackathon. Yeah. I mean, maybe the $200 plan or something like exhaust that. You can't use multiple or something like that. The question is, how much is Apple itself vibe coding? Because the software quality in the apps that I use, Mark Gurman said they're using. They're using cloud all the time, right? Yeah. But to me, I'm saying, so far, my experience, recently, I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone, which is. You were complaining about the photos app. That was just poor design. The photo phone app has gotten a lot. Yeah. John finally came around because the phone app is like, you're like, okay, I'm gonna hit this button. I might be calling this person out of the blue, even though I just want to. And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number, but I still have a lot of people. This is blowing your mind, Tyler. But back in the day, like a home phone, back in the day, people used to have multiple. Multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. It's true. I'm so unk. But yes. Like a work phone. Yeah, like a work phone. I mean, when I was at ff, I had two phones, but. Two phones. Two phones. That's right. But. But a lot of people will have a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a lot. A long time. And the problem with the new. The new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone. If I have a desk saved. So I need to maybe go delete those numbers or like, put them in like a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone. Because I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones. But anyway. Well, the good news, we have our first ever Apple employee coming on the show. Really? Oh, yes, we do. We do. I'm very excited. First. First ever. That's gonna be exciting. Apple employee on the Technology Business Programming Network. That's not. I mean, current Apple employee. We've had X Apple. Yes, of course. But live players. Before we. Let me tell you about Fin AI. The number One AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. And let me also tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests, password resets. So Martin sc We got to go over to SF with Martin Shkreli. Yeah. Wait, oh, okay. This is part two. We're just jumping straight into the. We're going straight into part. Okay, we're going straight into part two. He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing? That's happening now with peptides. Holy shit. I don't know where to start. Pharma basics Most people obsessed with peptides don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s. Overnight, peptide is just a small protein. Peptides 1950. So that's have extremely short half lives. Yesterday 1950, that's like 10 minutes before 8pm yesterday. Yes, correct. Peptides have extremely short half lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So if you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharma. Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics, That's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target. Typically, but far from always the receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion. Next, drugs are rigorously tested. Rigorously, not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmakinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body. Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics. They're linking and building. Exactly. Is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half life? Without this basic information, you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans. But you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea considered a priority. As to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays. Assays, assays. This is gonna be a rough one. This is a rough one also. I guess I didn't a priori, not a priori, brutal A priori exposed. What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis. And you can continue. John. Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rol eye on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab, work done a priori, et cetera. There we go. Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind placebo controlled study. There is often nothing to talk about. If I hear but I know dozens of people. One more time, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Screw the FDA and pharma. Really? Really? Coming from Martin Shkreli. He is saying maybe don't screw the FDA and PhRMA. When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking and this is gonna be a hard one for me. Octreotide. They're thinking some random stuff that's been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softie. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it. But I'm also not stupid and spent 20 years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a clinical trial from a university. If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed. The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it wasn't bpc, BS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument. But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes, there are plenty. That is how I made a living, says Martin Shkreli. But it is not for you world traveler to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. It's not that you're not smart. I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can Decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself. Fly a plane by yourself, et cetera. But Martin, I want to optimize my health. You could fly a 747. I could. That is uptake. I agree. We don't need studies to know that. You could land a. If I needed to. If it was asked of you. Yeah, 100%. But Martin, I want to optimize my health. No, stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma. I have zero doubt you'll change your mind. There are no healthcare professionals that I know of who give an shit about these unapproved research chemicals. But wah. There are actual people. There are actual dying people in the world. Duquesne muscular dystrophy, Pecan lafora. Go fix those diseases. You'll make someone and their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine. This has to end. Interesting. Lots of debate. Yeah, so we are going to. We have a debate. Max Marchioni from Superpower will be coming on Monday at 12 to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor himself. So we're going to have a little debate. Superpower I believe cells, these small proteins and so it'll be an interesting conversation. So Monday at 12 Pacific we can look forward to the great debate. So there's some conversation in the comments here. Michael Drugan says when people talk about peptides they mostly mean things like retatrutide. Reta which is in stage 3 clinical trials and looking extremely good or BPC157 which has tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using. So he's saying look, most people aren't using this stuff. That's like crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the pharmacist. Just another pod guys. This great post would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of reta. Martin does not think, he doesn't like BPC157. He says BPC157 has no evidence LMAO. Retatrutide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly pyrite. I mean the concern, the concern with BBC 157 has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth. Yes. It's not stimulating. It stimulates growth. Yes. And so because it hasn't been studied. Yes. Well enough in humans, that is a risk that people, I think, should be aware of. How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines? Like, is there a real overlap in San Francisco between, like, yes, it might give me cancer in 20 years, but I think we will cure cancer in 10. So if it makes me look good in the next five. But I think it's all about people just want some type of edge. They want to alter their states. It's somewhat. Basically human nature. Yeah. You can make the same argument for why you should wait though. Because then in 10 years AGI will create like a super drug that would just instantly make me jacked. Right. Okay. It's like, you can do it. No one has a decade to wait. You want to be jack now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40. How much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper? There's no amount of money you can. That's right, exactly. You can't wait 10 years. Ridiculous. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles in object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely simple scalable. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless real time experiences. New value are unlocked every day with Cisco. Pretty iconic. Someone hire this kid. Robin Smith is sharing a poster. Warning, warning. This man has been known to increase shareholder value with a QR code out to his LinkedIn. I love this. And his name is Lachlan von Egmond. That's a great name. And he's looking for a job as a summer 2026 electrical engineering intern. And I cannot recommend this gentleman enough. He has the correct mindset to go into a summer internship. Optimizing. Lachlan von Eggman. You should get a job as an electrical engineering intern. But if you don't hit us up. Yes, there's good marketing. Yeah, you can. Maybe we could hire Ben. Maybe we could hire this guy to work on our little electrical engineering problem back here. We got a lot of cords just doing cable management. I think he has bigger, bigger fish. But whatever increases shareholder value. If you can handle cable management in the ultra dome. Yeah, you can. You can go far. Dependable Thermonuclear work ethic. That's a good phrase. Thermonuclear work ethic. He says he's smart with a capital S and he shares his email. So if you're looking for an electrical engineering intern this summer, give. Give Lachlan a call or shoot him a quick email. Let's head over to Eric Suefer. Okay. That mobile dev memo he writes. Private credit and the AI value reallocation starts with a quote. The essence of technology is, in a lofty sense, ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing that is of truth. Martin Heidegger. I like it says, a familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty, which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the G and yesterday carried no interest, was giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals. But he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis. Correct. He was just saying that some of these deals are underwater. Some of these investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities. Sort of the bull case for special situations. Right? Yeah, yeah. Leaving the firm and be like, I didn't really work on it. I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018-2022. I was, I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, like, I don't think we should do this deal. I guess the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds that are being deployed, that have been deployed on different time horizons, that have longer time horizons in general. Right. And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus like a. Versus like a run on the bank where you have like one day where everyone realizes it's kind of like the worm. Like you were doing the worm yesterday. Yeah, it's kind of like a. Like that. Yeah. That does not seem great. It's like a weight. Like when you start. When you start wave. Yeah. When you start to start small and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Right? Yeah. No, so you're. You're six, eight, you're starting the worm. Okay. And you're really tall and you're kind of coming fall like a tree falling, but then you bounce back up like this and you're steadily kind of like losing. I hope that's not where this goes. Let's continue. This framing is incomplete, says Eric Suefer in Mobile Dev Memo. It isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate and where value ultimately accrues. In this piece, he makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. I also argue, he says, that any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there, but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit. That's very exciting. The private credit market. He gives a little history on the private credit market. The private credit market has grown precipitously since the 2020 era. COVID pandemic In a note from the Federal Reserve, you're just like, there will be a rolling collapse. But also I'm excited to grow. You got to hit the air horn for growth. In a note from the Federal Reserve, the authors remark that private is funny, that if you go back to our early bits, we were joking about praying for bubbles, encouraging leverage. People were listening. I'm not saying encouraging ads. Yeah, a lot of things came true. Obviously we were joking. They were bits. I guess some people may have taken it a little too seriously. Isn't there some humor in every joke? Isn't that the point of humor? You mean some truth? Some truth? Some truth in every. What did I say? Some joke? There is some humor in every joke. Yeah, some truth in every. As John Coogan once said, wow, there's humor in every joke. I'm only on my second Diet Coke. Okay, don't talk to me. Don't talk to me until I've had my tenth energy drink. Cheers. Anyway, this is what the Fed had to say Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of non bank financial intermediaries NBFIs over the past 15 years or so, reaching a total asset class size of 1.34 trillion in the US alone by the middle of 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley published in October of 2025 estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025.

Today is Wednesday, March 18, 2026. We are live from the TPP and Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's also pull up the linear line. Of course, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have a great show lined up. We have Matt Wang from Paradigm joining at the end of the show. Cameron from Maximus is coming in person. We got Andy Fang from Doordash, Matt acquisition. We got a great lightning round. Chris from Adquig 2, Chris's. We're going back to back Chris's today. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you, thank you for watching tvpn. As always, the big news of the day. More news out of Nvidia gtc. Lots of Nvidia announcements. The stock is up. It's a $4.44 trillion company. Last time I checked, that is big. Nvidia's been on absolute tear. And some really promising things with the GROK acquisition already or like pseudo acquisition, the deal, the GROK partnership. They're already starting to explain a little bit more about how those two technologies fit together. And there's a good, there's some good coverage in cert about that. But the big news out of Nvidia yesterday was that Nvidia says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China. Specifically so Jensen Huang says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time. Of course, chips were banned first from sale for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the Chips act that also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. We began following the intel story, we began following the Huawei story. There were a number of different initiatives and then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China. Back in 2022 after the chips act, which if you want to read up more on it, we interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book, highly recommend it. We should have him back on. That'd be amazing. About that time. Yeah. Ben Thompson's also covered the story throughout. There's a whole bunch of good stuff in Certecary on chips in China and the calculus has always been pretty clear. Like on the first pass, the first order effects. AI is an important technology. America wants an advantage in the AI race, the AI buildout. So less chips for China means more chips for America, stronger economic engine, massive chip shortage. Right now you see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched, which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here, but. And plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers specifically. I mean, even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the 2 nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs. But they're, you know, they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So In November of 2022, I was writing about this and I said on a YouTube video, in the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean, even the tiniest earthquake, they have to track the weather. Yes, outside of the facility. Exactly. If the weather outside of the facilities is fluctuating at all, it can track inside earthquakes. Taiwan is famous, or TSMC is famous, where they don't even need apparently a, like a, like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know because that's the level of sensitivity over at the TSMC fab. So, so if you want to keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSM chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war. And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans that you'd create an increased risk of geopolitical conflict. And in 2022, the Russia, Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously we've been tracking the Iran war and America's military is potentially stretched thin. So the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever. And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained, a chip shortage through at 2030 and the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically their full time job is to advocate for a particular position. I was talking to a friend who is interfaced with a lot of the different groups in Washington and there are like huge think tanks, huge lobbying organizations on both sides because there's so many different interests going on. Yeah, not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts Nvidia actually makes holding up the world economy. Right, that's the meme and that's certainly true. So there are good arguments on both sides. One that keeps getting trotted out is, you know, it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab. But there is, there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here. We'll be able to transfer that research and development that happens over there very quickly. But the much more important thing is just that the more the economies are interlinked, the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of tsmc, Arizona, Samsung, intel broadly as well as startup fabs, startup fab projects like the Terafab and there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing that are at least talking about tool making, talking about getting a fab up and running. Nothing that's really taken off. I mean even Samsung is not fabbing any of the leading edge Nvidia chips at this point. But there's incredible economic incentive and people have known that this is an important sort of cash cow business for a few years now at the very least. And so there's certainly been a lot of incentive to put plans in motion that might play out before 2030 because there's such a shortage. And so in general we're traveling this long and narrow road. But I'm coming around to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with the first order, the first order logic of just we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy, so we should have them. But going forward it'll be really interesting to track how China's indigenous indigenization project or their domestic supply chain evolves. They, of course have. Yeah. My take has always been even if they are getting chips, it's not like the party is going to say, actually our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a drip of H200. Yes. So they're still going to keep the momentum that they have. Just wouldn't be like them. There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from. You can take some of the wind out of the sails, but they can just spend more. You can slow the momentum, potentially. That's the argument. Is that buying, limiting demand? Like there's a local, local fab in China that just said a chip maker that, that says, okay, well you know, our demand is half as much, so we're going to. So like we can't afford to scale. Sure, we have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer. So you don't get the process level of like execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business. It becomes more of like NASA than SpaceX. That's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Before we move back to the Wall Street Journal, let me tell you about figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make cloud code or codex or sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products. Ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with figma. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So Nvidia and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20, a processor Nvidia designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models. But it was reported that the high flyer team behind Deepseek sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200 or close to it or closer? Well, it's sort of a moot question now because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version. So the company's fortunes turned again in December when the U.S. said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series of GPUs. So this is not the B200, not the Blackwell, this is the Hopper. But it's still very advanced in China as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the US government. So there's basically an export tariff. GPUs, or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in training AI models. I think everyone knows this. In late January, after Wang visited China, officials there signaled they would approve H200 sales as well. So there was a big debate over whether or not Beijing would block the imports of H2 hundreds in order to stimulate the indigenization of the domestic semiconductor supply chain. It seems like these will be going to inspire. Inspire local industry to grind harder, basically. But you have a whole bunch of AI labs that are not in the fab industry, that are not involved in the verticalization process, and they just want to train great models because they have real businesses like they're running. They're running Alibaba or Baidu or any number of companies. And ByteDance wants good AI, and they want the best chips. And they're not really interested in getting into the supply chain at a deep level, at least in the short term. But until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In Nvidia's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China, to date, we have not generated any revenue from those sales. Speaking at the company's GTC event Tuesday, Huang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China. We've received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up. Nvidia didn't comment on how much it expected to earn from H200 sales in China. But in the past, the company has said that the Chinese market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year. That makes perfect sense. And Christina over at CNBC got the original scoop near the bathroom line at gtc. Really? Huang happened to walk by security and asked if he'd answered her earlier question. She said she had one more. You said you got China purchase orders. That means you got the green light from both sides. He said yes. Wow, that is a scoop out there. You never know as a scoop athlete. You never know where your next scoop is going. To come from. Seriously, you got to be ready. The sticking a microphone in someone's face as they're walking by really does make sense with the camera flashes. Yes, yes, Jensen loves answering some questions on a microphone line. Chinese authorities approve Nvidia's H200 chip sales, source says and tor taxes says Xi Jinping has given up the situation with the H200 sale in China summarized and it's everyone jumping off and Xi Jinping saying stop. Domestic chips can work maybe. And everyone at the lab saying must get cuda, dude. Nvidia is the future. Two hundreds and they're falling into the cuda dependency moat. Will be interesting to see the evolution of the cuda mote as other chips come online. I mean we've seen TPU become functional. So there are questions about the cuda mote long term, but it certainly seems like not the stopper to demand right now as labs place orders from Nvidia. In other news, JRR Tolkien used Gen Z brain rot slang over 70 years ago. That's how ahead no way he was. And the quote maggots jeered the end. Cigars. You're cooked. You're cooked. White skins will catch you and eat you. They're coming. Oh, he's like using it literally like you will be cooked by the some, I don't know, villain. I suppose. A cry from the Grishnakh showed that this was not mere jest. Horsemen riding very slowly had this is really hard to read with these hyphens had indeed been sighted, still far behind but gaining on the orcs. So the orcs will cook you if you fall behind, I suppose. Let me tell you about Okta. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta. And let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that circumstances.

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