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More complicated. So maybe you end up, you know, getting a real job or something like that, and instead of committing crime. But where do what. What. What kind of shows up in the data economy booms as criminals exact jobs. Crime goes down, employment goes up. Yeah. So, like, San Francisco has been public this. I think that. I think that crime is down like 30%. Auto thefts are down close to 50%. Wow. Yeah. Since they've rolled this out. So I think. And there was. There was actually like, an unintentional testimonial from a guy who, you know, who had lived in this world. You might have seen this. I remember. We should actually find that clip. Yeah. But he was basically saying, like, prime is over in San Francisco because you're screwed. You know, like, you steal a car, they're going to. The drone is going to show up in 30 seconds. There's nothing you can do. And it is, you know, it's satisfying for me, and I think it's also, you know, for us as a company and for our customers, there's just an asymmetric advantage. Like when there's a drone following you from above. Like, there's a lot you can do. And, you know, I was asking one of our customers, they were showing a video of a retail theft where somebody had had lifted 50,000 bucks from a store or $50,000 worth of goods. And they. The drone got there, it ID the person just as they were getting into the getaway car. They followed the getaway car to the person's residence, then just arrested them. I was like, oh, man, this is incredible. Can you use this video in court? And the chief said, there's no way this is going to court. Right. Like, we've just. We've got this person cold. We've got video evidence of the whole thing from the drone. Yeah. And so it's also just way more efficient. Yeah. Way more efficient for the system that you don't have to go through. Like, a crime shows up and doesn't say, oh, there's a bunch of wiggle room. They just say, okay, they got you dead to rights. Like, you should just plead guilty, plead it out and just do you did the crime. Talk to me about what's on an exponential and what.

A listicle or doing something that doesn't feel like your roots. Well, you know, the roots have been dug up in some ways on publication. Well, we're not seeing a decline in VC podcast viewership. That's true. There are a number of VC podcasts that are racking up a million views. Or interviews with series A or series B founders. Yeah, very, very impressive number. A lot of people think that, you know, technology is niche. Some series A founder that you haven't heard on. They can't attract a million people to sit down and watch them on Zoom talk about their business for an hour, but apparently they can. And many venture capital firms have showed us that it's possible. You do have to pay the people to watch, and the views might be a little low quality. But if you pay, the viewers comment. If you pay. Yeah, they won't comment. That's an extra bill you got to pay. And it's very, very unclear why they aren't buying comments. Because if you're buying the views. No, no, no. The reason is that. The reason is that they are running paid traffic on Meta at their own YouTube videos. Oh, is that what's going on? They're getting the views. The meta ads, as of a couple days ago, were public so you could see them. They're just like, if you're on Instagram, you'll get an ad for a podcast and then people. That was. That was on Meta, I thought, because apparently, because you can actually just run ads for your content on YouTube and then you get people who are in YouTube to click on that content. Now, are they less likely to comment? Absolutely. Like, the example on the right is Dwark Ash. He got a million views and it had 4,700 comments. I went back and checked some of my videos just to kind of know, like, what is the correct ratio? And if I got a video with like a couple hundred thousand views, like, there were probably a thousand comments on there for a variety of reasons. Also, just people saying, like, when the real fans show up, they say, like, first, second. Oh, yeah. Still watching. In 2026, you know, people will just do this and very, very odd just to go buy views because it doesn't create a lot of value and it sort of sets you up for this type of dunk. Although Matt Turk is being nice and not calling out the particular podcast that did this. Max Ference, who runs. He's the general manager of the Dorkesh Patel Podcast, says Deep.

The data. That's hilarious. But statistically it's not good. Yes, but. But on the. On the supplement side, what's interesting, Melatonin. Give me kind of sort of your thesis about the other things that impact sleep. Yeah. Honestly, the one that works is well known, is melatonin. The problem with melatonin is you cannot keep taking melatonin for too long. That's right. So usually we have run a bunch of studies and what we have seen is you should keep it below 0.5 milligrams. Okay. That. Otherwise it creates dependency. Then when you're traveling or you want to adjust for leg, you can go up to 2 milligrams, something like that. But you should stop. Three, four days. Yeah. Not much. Yeah. A lot of people take three to five milligrams every single night. Forever. Yeah. And then they build a tolerance and they don't get anything out of it. Like, you know, you can't just drink caffeine every single day and expect to have the same results. Exactly. Then some people report some benefit with magnesium extravaganda and some of that, but usually the benefits are fairly minimal. Right now, the only one that is very well proven to work is melatonin. Yeah.

Interesting policy. Yeah. Yeah. Jordi, please. How much attention is DC paying to the news out of square? The pushback from or block the pushback from Silicon Valley was, hey, you're blaming this on AI, but it doesn't feel like maybe that's a small part of the reason to do this Rift, but certainly not the entire story. But then a bunch of groups are going to use this as example, number one, as to changes in the labor force due to AI. Well, it's a bad combination because it's all these companies, all these tech companies that overhired in the sort of immediate post Covid, and then now they're also the most exposed to AI. Right. They're the ones that are adopting AI the most aggressively. They do the things that AI is best at. There's lots of software engineering, and so it's both things happening at once, I would say. And that creates an exaggerated sort of fun house like effect of, of the actual impact of AI on the labor market. I'm very skeptical that, like, we're going to see things like that at, like, wide, you know, firm level anytime soon. You know, in the broader economy. I think we could see it more in the software engineering discipline because there are a lot of big software engineering enterprises that hire too many people. Right. So, like, you know, I think that's, that's, that's a very live possibility. But D.C. is D.C. people are going to interpret the news for whatever's convenient for them. You know, and if you, when you play the long game, you have to try to just build credibility over the long term with people. But, yeah, I mean, everyone's going to say this is evidence for whatever I'm on about. Yeah. Hypothetically, how do you think something would play out if, if like, there was a battle on the moon and NASA says, hey, we want to buy a bunch of rockets?

Text. So that is a real use case. We have customers that are doing insurance claims adjustment with drones. So rather than taking out a ladder and climbing up on a roof, you just take it drone out and push a couple of buttons. It automatically digitizes, inspects, the whole thing. The biggest and fastest growing use of our products today is in law enforcement and public safety, where there's just been this huge paradigm shift. So law enforcement has been using drones for like the last 10, 15 years. But historically it was typically a pretty small team. They were manually flown. You know, they would get called out every once in a while if there was an event. But the paradigm shift now is the drone lives in a docking station on the roof of the police department. It can be flown remotely. And when a 911 call comes in, you click one button on a map and the drone will launch itself. It'll fly there, it'll give you real time awareness, and it just changes outcomes because you can see a crime in progress. You can find a missing person. Yeah, we've got a good one here. So this is close to home. This is San Francisco Police Department. This is called drone as first responder. So basically this was a report of a stolen vehicle. They launched the drone. They're following this guy from the air. He doesn't, he doesn't know that they are. So they knew that people would do this. They'd steal license plates after they'd stolen the vehicle. They never actually caught anybody in the act. But with the drone, it's easy. So now he's got his own stolen plate. Oh, he's putting it on the car. Yeah, exactly. So he nicely holds it up so we can read it from the drone. This is not an act. This is a real criminal. No, this is real. Wow. This happened, this happened last year in San Francisco. So now he's tinting the window. So this, this is bad news, right? This is stolen vehicle, cold plated the vehicle, tinting the windows. He's going off to do a bunch of bad stuff. But they know exactly where he is thanks to the drone. They send out a plane closed unit, they roll a spike strip. So he's got flat tires. And that's basically into the story. And this is happening all the time. This is happening like every hour, almost every minute somewhere across the country that cops are responding to calls with autonomous drone. So.

Is that a real business now or insurance agency? Walk me through some of the less everyone knows about Ukraine, what's going on there. But like, how are drones actually getting used in the American economy today in an industrial context? So that is a real use case. We have customers that are doing insurance claims adjustment with drones. So rather than taking out a ladder and climbing up on a roof, you just take a drone out, you push a couple of buttons, it automatically digitizes, inspects the whole thing. The biggest and fastest growing use of our products today is in law enforcement and public safety, where there's just been this huge paradigm shift. So law enforcement has been using drones for like the last 10, 15 years. But historically it was typically a pretty small team. They were manually flown. You know, they would get called out every once in a while if there was an event. But the paradigm shift now is the drone lives in a docking station on the roof of the police department. It can be flown remotely. And when a 911 call comes in, you click one button on a map and the drone will launch itself. It'll fly there, it'll give you real time awareness, and it just changes outcomes because you can see a crime in progress. You can find a missing person. Yeah, we've got a good one here. So this is, this is close to home. This is San Francisco Police Department. Okay. This is called drone as first responder. So basically this was a report of a stolen vehicle. They launched the drone. They're following this guy from the air. He doesn't, he doesn't know that they are. So they knew that people would do this. They'd steal license plates after they'd stolen the vehicle. Well, they never actually caught anybody in the act. But with the drone, it's, it's easy. You'll see. So now he's got a stolen, stolen plate. He's putting it on the car. Yeah, exactly. So he nicely holds it up so we can read it from the drive. This is not an actor. This is a real criminal. No, this is real. Wow. This happened, this happened last year in San Francisco. So now he's tinting the window. So this, this is bad news, right? This is a stolen vehicle. Cold plated the vehicle, tinting the windows. He's going off to do a bunch of bad stuff. But they know exactly where he is thanks to the drone. They send out a plate, plain plainclothes unit. They roll a spike strip so he's got flat tires. And that's basically into the story. And this is happening all the time. It's happening like every hour, almost every minute somewhere across the country that cops are responding to calls with autonomous drone. So take me deeper into that example. That feels like a replacement for dispatching a whole helicopter. That feels like there's probably enough bandwidth at a police department to have someone sort of manually piloting that, even if there's some autonomous.

Me? Yeah. At eight. Sleep. How much data are you studying these days? Oh, we cross billions of nights. He just wanted an excuse. The interesting part is what excites me is because we sell in 34 countries now. It's so interesting. Right. To really think that we are powering this people across the country. Right. Different genders, not different everything. What can you tell us what country sleeps best? Australia. Australia sleeps. There is a specific place in Australia, on the coast, where they sleep like babies. They're like unbeatable. That's amazing. Americans don't sleep very well in the grand scheme of things. What, what's the, what's the thesis there? They're just by. They're hanging out at the beach, they're super relaxed. They're lazy. Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's probably just a local culture where they're still active, but they're probably way more consistent and they have more time for sleep. And then the other interesting thing is sometimes you see weird spikes in a good or bad direction for sleep. We published a long time ago how sleep deep during the election, election day, or there are all these studies about when, you know, you change the time forward or backward, all the time savings time, or probably the Super Bowl. There's a whole bunch of different dates, super bowl, all that kind of things. So it's. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Nvidia earnings, probably people losing sleep. Yeah. Even after Covid, a lot of things changed. People started sleeping way longer after Covid, particularly during COVID was living like an hour longer on average per night, which was pretty impressive. And still today you see the difference across even the different days of the week. Wow. Yeah, that's impressive.

But give us a history. Yeah, look, I think that part of what's happened here is like when we started the company in 2014, drones seemed like toys. You know, they were like toys, people flew them and they've been through this evolution from like toys to like useful tools for expert operators to now I would argue like critical infrastructure. And then the conflict in Ukraine, war in Ukraine, I think just demonstrated to everybody how important these small light drones are from a national security perspective. So I think there's been kind of just increasing awareness of what last 10 years that this is critical technology with very high national security stakes. And you know, from our perspective as a company, like our goal is just to win on the strengths of the product and the tech. And I think that the shift to doc and autonomy really plays to our strengths both as a company and as a country. You can see this in the market like historically DJI had like 70, 80% market share in, in law enforcement and in the dock world, they're still our number one competitor. So like Flock Safety is effectively a DJI reseller. Like all of their drone as first responders. Work is done with DJI drones today, but the scoreboard is flipped. You know, we are, we are winning the majority of these deals even before the FCC action on the strengths of the product and the tech because it's just sort of a different recipe. It's similar, but it's a different recipe to deliver the solution price, people are a little bit price sensitive because the value so high, you know, price is probably DJI's greatest strength. So look, from our standpoint, like our goal is just to have the best products and tech in the world. We certainly benefit from policy and regulatory tailwinds. And you know, I'm, I'm not neutral on this. We have a business stake in it, but I think there's a lot of reasons why we want a domestic drone industry and why that's important for our national security. I mean this stuff, it's to going critical for military, it's critical infrastructure, it's critical for public safety. And so it's exciting to see like huge momentum now towards domestic industry and, and domestic manufacturing. But ultimately the only stable long term solution is to have the best products in tech designed and built right here in the US and that's what we're doing. That's what the factory behind me is doing. I think this new, new chapter of drones is infrastructure is, is a huge opportunity for us as a, as a country and one that we have. Are you thinking about scaling manufacturing capacity over the next decade. I mean, we're all in on it. It's.

Yeah, but how is that, how is the FCC's action impacted your business? I'm assuming that's something that you felt would have been an obvious decision for the government for, for many years prior, but give us a history. Yeah, look, I think that part of what's happened here is like when we started the company in 2014, drones seemed like toys. You know, they were like toys, people flew them and they've been through this evolution like toys to like useful tools for expert operators to now I would argue like critical infrastructure. And I think and then the conflict in Ukraine, war in Ukraine, I think just demonstrated everybody how important these small light runs are from a national security perspective. So I think there's been kind of just increasing awareness last 10 years that this is critical technology with very high national security stakes. And you know, from our perspective as a company, like our goal is just to win on the strengths of the product and the tech. And I think that the shift to dock and autonomy really plays to our strengths both as a company and as a country. You can see this in the market like historically DJI had like 70, 80% market share in, in law enforcement and in the dock world, they're, they're still our number one competitor. So like Flock Safety is effectively a DJI reseller. Like all of their drone is. First responder work is done with DJI drones today, but the scoreboard is flipped. You know, we are, we are winning the majority of these deals even before the FCC action on the strengths of the product and the tech, because it's just sort of a different recipe. It's similar, but it's a different recipe to deliver the solution price people are a little bit price sensitive because the value is so high. You know, price is probably DJI's greatest strength. So look, from our standpoint, like our goal is just to have the best products and tech in the world. We certainly benefit from policy and regulatory tailwinds. And you know, I'm, I'm not neutral on this. We have a business stake in it, but I think there's a lot of reasons why we want a domestic drone industry and why that's important for our national security. I mean this stuff is critical for military, it's critical infrastructure, it's critical for public safety. And so it's exciting to see like huge momentum now towards domestic industry and, and domestic manufacturing. But ultimately the only stable long term solution is to have the best products in tech designed and built right here in the US and that's what we're doing. That's what the factory behind me is doing. I think this new chapter of drones is infrastructure is a huge opportunity for us as a country and one that we have. How are you thinking about scaling manufacturing?

Opportunities that I've had in space. I got the best job in the world right now. Yeah. Do you see part of your mission or part of your legacy being not only the economic opportunity on the moon, the national interest mission on the moon, but actually just allowing more humans to experience space? Is that important? Yeah, well. And they go hand in hand with economic opportunity. Right. So I. I do point out all the time that I actually think one of the most important KPIs is more people living and working in space. Now, for that to happen, I mean, because I'm not a believer. There's a huge tourism pipeline in this because it still costs a lot and it'll never be the safety level of an airliner, so you're still taking a controlled explosion. £1.8 million of thrust sends somebody to 17,500 miles an hour. And when they get there, odds are really good they're not even going to feel good. So we got to crack the code on the orbital economy that some days necessitates more people living and working in space. But if you're asking what I hope the greatest contribution in NASA because it's not landing on the moon, that's just luck, honestly, to be here at a time where President Trump gives us the mandate, the resources from the one big beautiful bill, congressional appropriations, you have all the tools to execute on that. Really, in my mind, it's concentrating our resources here at NASA on the needle movers. Sometimes you get a mile wide inch deep on all the things you're trying to do, but really focus on the things that no one else is capable of doing but NASA, and then empowering the workforce, the best and brightest across the nation get rid of as much needless bureaucracy and things that impede progress. And if you can do that, then things like returning to the moon and building a moon base will be pale in comparison to what we're capable of achieving in the years ahead. Last question. Bit of a funny one the chat asked. We.

And steps. But, but really that's, that's where the partnership with, with OPM comes in. And Scott has been a champion for us here with NASA Force. We, we got to rebuild some of our core competencies here at NASA. You know, we, we made some big announcements last week that said, look, we, if we want to get back to the moon, we want to achieve President Trump's vision within the time frames that have been, that have been established. We're going to have to do things differently. We're not going to launch moon rockets every three years. We're going to try and launch them every, in less than a year. And people are like, that's impossible. I was like, have we, you know, I literally went and got the data from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era saying, you know, we used to do this every three and a half months. We, we literally from, from the time Apollo 7 splashed down to Apollo 8 launch to fly around the moon is measured in weeks. It's eight, nine weeks here. So what do you mean we can't do it? Well, they said, look, we don't have some of the same expertise we used to have. Yeah. During the space shuttle era of turning our mobile launchers around. You know, if you're launching every three years, you build up all this experience and expertise and then they, then they go out after the mission is launched and they go into industry. So we got it, we got to do some things differently right now. And one of which is we got to start bringing in folks back from industry that have the expertise to grow our young talent because we have no shortage of people that want to grow up and work at NASA. I mean, you know, like from the time they're kids, they want to get there. So plenty of, you know, young talent coming in the system. But what Scott and OPM are giving us the ability to do is bring in term based appointments from industry, some brilliant minds from, you know, SpaceX, Blue Origin rocket Lab, all our great tech companies who say, I want to serve my country, I want to stick around for a couple of years under a term based appointment, elevate some of the talent. That's how we're going to get back into turning rockets around in months instead of years. That's how we're going to get back to the moon. So there's amazing part of, just to say, look, this is part of a broader thing that I think you and I have talked about a little bit, which is there's kind of two pieces we're trying to solve on the, you know, the government tech side one is obviously can we get early career young people in? As Jared said, you know, kind of NASA, unlike most of the federal government, actually has done a really good job there. The other piece is how do we leverage the private sector to help make sure that we have much better connectivity with the private sector and public? And so the second part of tech force, right. Was always the private companies having people come in. Obviously we want to basically double down on that now for NASA force and make sure that we've got kind of all those relevant industry partners who are saying, hey, look, we want to have like some of our best people come in second themselves for a year or two, help make NASA as effective as possible and bring up the next generation of folks. And then if people want to go back to the private sector, like, that's great, they can go do that. Yeah. So talk about the type of roles that you need at NASA. When I think NASA, I think Frontier,

A keyboard. Boom. Mic drop. Oh, it has two USB C ports. It is kind of cool that they put the headphone jack a little bit further down. Thought that was cool. And then they're like, check it out. You're never gonna guess this. A camera. We put it on the computer. They're like, hey, we heard you liked having an iPad that you could attach a keyboard to. So we basically took an iPad and put a keyboard. But it's very cool how they like sort of expand the product like show you. Okay, there's the speaker. It's pretty big. It goes on the side. There's two of them. Shows you. But this does not look like a 13 inch computer to me. This looks like an 8 inch computer to me. This looks like a small iPad. And 13 inches is a very normal size. Maybe the model is just like Shack or something. Yeah, yeah. No, I think they actually use some of the big hands to make it like maybe look smaller or something. But 13 inch display, 16 hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So 599 for students, it's $100 cheaper. So 499, that is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made. I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple AirPods Max costs like 500 bucks. Remarkably cheap. A 18 Pro chip, 256 gigs or 512 of storage, four colors. They got it in ramp yellow. They call it citrus. But I think everyone's gonna be. And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone. Yeah. 17e. Yeah. And it has Wi Fi, 6e, Bluetooth 6 connectivity, 8 gigs of RAM, 1080p front facing camera. Like people are sort of like, ah, it's underpowered. But look at the price. This is, this is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap was where was it? Let's see, I wrote about this. So in 2014. So 12 years ago, long time ago, they sold the MacBook Air for 899. And now they have this down at 499 or 599, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap. Cheap for 2026. Cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops. So this is sort of like their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more. Because if you're price sensitive, well, they have a product for you. And there was something similar that happened with the new suite of iPhones where the, the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face and the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful. And a lot of people want that. But there were also a lot of people who were complaining. I just want a thinner phone. Well, then you have the iPhone air and there's going to be crazy trade offs. You only get, I think, one camera. The battery life's not nearly as good. Lags. It lags. But for some people, if they're going to be complaining about all the features of the Pro Max, it's like, well, we got the air for you. Stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. So the other products, they launched MacBook Air with an M5 chip, MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip, how much memory did you wind up going with.

Retriever, Retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. Five, could. I see multiple journalists on the horizon? You're watching TVP. Today's Wednesday, March 4, 2026. New haircut, new haircut alert. We are live from the TVPN ultradement template Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards, billpad accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a little bit of a shorter show. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have Dean Ball coming on to give the other side of the ball versus Thompson argument about anthropic. Then we have Scott Kapoor and Jared Isaacman coming on to talk about space. We're going to the moon and they're going to take us there. And then we have Adam Bry from Skydio, who I actually worked with through Andreessen Horowitz maybe 10 years ago. And then Matteo, CEO of Eight Sleep, has some exciting news. And Dylan's coming on to break down the latest AI agent. Hermes agent. Well, anyway, there was some big news this week. Of course, everyone knew that Apple was launching new products, but there were some surprises. And there's some cool stuff, starting with the MacBook Neo. The more downstream take is like, how is Apple affected by the AI boom? But let's start with the actual products because this thing in the video, it looks so small. It looks like an 8 inch laptop. I guess this is. So this is the MacBook Neo, sort of designed to compete with the Chromebook. It comes in at 4, 599. Well, not even just the Chromebook, just all PCs. Yeah, but I mean, you're not going to get this for like if you're in a professional workplace, go to a desktop with multiple monitors, plug in, you're doing like advanced work. Like, this is for students, this is for the low end or just a personal computer. I think it's designed for people that have an iPhone but don't have a Mac because of cost. Yeah. And now they can have an integrated suite. Yeah, I mean, it's a crazy product. I love the launch video too. It's very weird when they start because it's just this like blank block and then they're adding features to it with cgi. It does a really good job. It's sort of anticlimactic because every feature they add is just like what you'd expect. I Was kind of like, oh, is this going to be a touch screen? And then it's like, oh no, it's just a normal screen. Guess what it has a keyboard. Boom. Mic drop. Oh, it two USB C ports. It is kind of cool that they put the headphone jack a little bit further down. Thought that was cool. And then they're like, check it out. You're never gonna guess this. A camera. We put it on the computer like, hey, we heard you liked having an iPad that you could attach a keyboard to. So we basically took an iPad and put a keyboard. But it's very cool how they like sort of expand the product like show you. Okay, there's the speaker. It's pretty big. It goes on the side. There's two of them. Shows you. But this does not look like a 13 inch computer to me. This looks like an 8 inch computer to me. This looks like a small iPad. And 13 inches is a very normal size. Maybe the model is just like Shaq or something. Yeah, yeah. No, I think they actually use someone with the big hands to make it like maybe look smaller or something. But 13 inch display, 16 hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So 599 for students, it's $100 cheaper. So 499, that is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made. I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple Air pods max cost like 500 bucks. Remarkably cheap. A18 Pro chip. 256 gigs or by 12 of storage, four colors. They got it in ramp yellow. They call it citrus, but I think everyone's going to be. And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone. Yeah. 17e. Yeah. And it has WiFi, 6e, Bluetooth 6 connectivity, 8 gigs of RAM, 1080p front facing camera. Like people are sort of like, ah, it's underpowered. But look at the price. This is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap, cheap was, wow, where was it? Let's see, I wrote about this. So in 2014, so 12 years ago, long time ago, they sold the MacBook Air for 899 and now they have this down at 499 or 599, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap. Cheap for 2026. Cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops. So this is sort of like their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more. Because if you're price sensitive well, they have a product for you. And there was something similar that happened with the new suite of iPhones where the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face and the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful and a lot of people want that. But there were also a lot of people who were complaining. I just want a thinner phone. Well then you have the iPhone air and there's going to be crazy trade offs. You only get I think one camera. The battery life's not nearly as good. Lags. It lags. But for some people, if they're going to be complaining about all the features of the Pro Max it's like, well we got the air for you. Stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. So the other products they launch MacBook Air with an M5 chip, MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip, did you wind up going how much memory did you wind up going with? 48. 48. Is that enough? I feel a little soft. Is that enough to pull up tweets and react to them on a live stream? Apparently you actually have been maxing out something like 32 gigs of RAM, which, which took me by surprise. I have not had, I've not been memory constrained but I do, I do actually love the idea of getting the top end memory which is the thing that constrains you on running LLMs locally. Is that correct, Tyler? Yeah, I mean you can always like, if you have a really model, you can like get around the memory thing but then it gets like super slow because you're like loading it in and out. Oh ok. You're loading it in and out for every token that you're generating. Yeah, you need a lot of memory. So if I go with the 128Gig, the top of the line chip, I should be able to inference like a pretty smart model locally, pretty reliably. I mean it's also like you can always just quantize the models down and so like you can actually run like really frontier like open source models on like pretty normal hardware. Now I'm just purely thinking for you know, doomsday prepping the idea of, you know, you have your library in case you're bored during the apocalypse, you have your DVD collection, you can watch all the movies from start this, that's the big one for you because you're going to be able to watch all of American cinema from the beginning. I still don't think I'd actually watch. You wouldn't do that. What would you be doing? Assuming that the Internet's down in this apocalyptic scenario, you can't scroll, plenty of other things to do. What would you do? Take a walk on the beach. What if you can't go outside because there's nuclear fallout everywhere? You're stuck in your bunker. What are you doing? Whittling. Did you get into whittling? I actually used to love whittling as a kid called it he's not going to be watching movies, he's going to be whittling. I will be whittling while I watch movies, while I inference a local model that I can just ask questions to and get all sorts of history. And there might be a few hallucinations because it's not querying the Internet. Because of course in this hypothetical scenario the Internet is gone, but I would still have access to all the pre trained information and basically the world's best encyclopedia, which would be fun. What else did they launch? In a world where computers keep going up in price, it's kind of wild to see Apple drop a599 laptop, says Theo. A phone priced Mac. Agree more. Fry says, oh man, they're going to sell 5 billion of these things. Yeah, this is, this feels, this feels like more of a no brainer for kids than an iPad. For some reason I don't know if I'm just like old school and I'm like if it has a keyboard it's had iPads with kids just have really bad aesthetics. It does. Kid with an iPad zone and out, right? You get them a keyboard, they're locked in, but you get them there. I think there's something here. You're like, are they day trading? Yeah, yeah, they're doing something for sure. It might be underpowered, but it'll get the job done. And they. I think there's something about, you know, typing on a keyboard that does lend itself to more creation and less consumption. Like the iPad is a media consumption device. That's where most people use it for. Throw on Netflix, Play a game, do something. There aren't that many people that are power users. But as soon as you get the keyboard, you're ready to type, you're ready to work. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also 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. So hilarious chart from Andreessen Horowitz. Apple on capex. Nah, we're good. They looked at the standardized quarterly capital expenditure for Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple and all of the four companies that are working on AI. Amazon obviously through AWS and Anthropic, Microsoft through OpenAI, Alphabet through Gemini, and Meta through MSL. They are all absolutely off to the races going to the moon on capex. And Apple is down 19% since 2015 on this standardized metric that A16Z put together. Very, very funny. And it's just interesting that Apple has been so unaffected by AI costs, not just on the CapEx side, which is where every hyperscaler sort of had to say, yep, you know what, Our business is fundamentally different now. We are not the high margin cash flow generating business. We're going to draw down on that cash. We might be taking on some debt. Like this is a big, big different financial model. It's a very different financial model from years past. And buckle up, you're coming with us. Shareholders and the stocks have done well because a lot of shareholders have believed in the goal, believed in the value of AI, believed in the value of building compute infrastructure broadly, and they've been rewarded for it in most cases. But Apple's just sort of sat that out and said, hey, we're not, we're not going to train a foundation model, we're not going to build a whole bunch of compute infrastructure. We're going to serve Gemini. We're going to serve Gemini and we'll pay them what, a billion dollars a year or something like that. Yeah, it's like, yeah. I mean this year will be really interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what the new Siri actually looks like, what it can really do. We'll start to see that, I think in Q2. Yes. And then separately, we're expecting new devices from OpenAI, right? Oh yeah, Teasing the puck time, whatever you want to call it. It'll be interesting to see if they can kind of break the AI hardware curse that I feel like is. Well, I wanted to think about that because I wonder if the story's over for some of those cursed bad launches. Product like we saw friend apparently has found a little niche. Very controversial but humane, has sold to hp. It seems like they're not working on that product anymore. The pin, the AI pin, but the rabbit R1, I think his name's Jesse, you know that product, there's something there where with enough iterations, I Feel like that might sell well. I was playing with the board the other day, that hardware, it's like a huge screen touch screen that you can play games on. Like there's still these niche applications that I think you could potentially, if you have a hardware team, you have the ability to sell something. It wasn't polished. The AI wasn't good enough. Well, the AI got better. You still have the supply chain. Maybe there's a way to cut through, but it probably needs to be a little bit more niche. Like everyone's going to have one. Tyler, what do you think about hardware in the age of AI? I mean, I think the Mac mini is like a good example of like AI hardware, right? Yeah, no, that's a great example. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what, like how exposed the Gemini APIs will be in iOS because if you, if you fully expose like gemini kit in iOS just like you can call like a Weather API or a Maps API. Like Uber exists because there was like a, there was like a GPS API that you could just call within an iOS application with a couple lines of code and you didn't have to like figure out where the user was because the iPhone just told you that as long as you click like, yeah, share my location with Uber. If you now get an app that has not just Apple's local LLMs that are sort of mediocre, but it can go and call Gemini and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, you start running into like will someone build an open cloth app or something like how much of Apple's AI strategy will wind up being vended into the third party ecosystem which has served them so well for so long. They've sort of turned their back on it. They locked down Apple Vision Pro a little bit more. There was way less uptake there and there's a ton of risk because if I develop a free iOS app that then incurs a ton of Gemini tokens and ton of charges, how do those get passed through? Is Apple just biting the bullet on it? But there's something interesting there where turning app developers loose to build software that takes advantage not just of local LLM capabilities, but Gemini under the hood and sort of wrap it up in a neat bowl that is available to the consumer. Could be very cool. Anyway, the big question that I had and I will get into the essay was so Apple's unaffected by CapEx costs, but they've also with this release, been unaffected by memory costs and the RAM mageddon. So I will take you through how I dug into the question of memory Pricing at Apple. But first, I will tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And I will 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 and password resets. That's a good sound effect. I like that one. I have one, too. Surprise. I can't believe you haven't used that yet. No, no, no. Because I was so burned by the last time I got access to the soundboard, I went too crazy. So there was one. One show where me and Jordi both had full soundboard access. All of the same sound cues, one single show, and it was truly a disaster. What's the. What's the metaphor from Greek mythology? It was the. It was Pandora's box for me. Like, once I opened it, I could not resist and I became addicted. And I was pushing the thing. It is very addicting. And it just didn't work. So we were like, no, let's have Jordi play the soundboard. I'll do other stuff. We found a great bounce as a soundboard artist is when I'm not doing the show. When I'm hanging out on the weekend, I'm just thinking if somebody says something like, we're at dinner, I'm thinking about the sound effect. Yeah. I was hanging out with you and you said something crazy, and I wanted to just be like. And so I opened up my phone, I went to YouTube, and I pulled up that sound and played it. But then I had to turn on my volume and it took me way too long. And the joke had passed. But we have a solution. Tyler Cosgrove over there has been working on a soundboard app that can go on your phone and you can have. We should do a widget, too, so that it's just there on the home screen. Boop. Your favorite soundboard cues. So expect that soon. Anyway, 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. Business today. So the question. I get the strategy of Apple saying, look, we're good with Google handling the AI inference stuff. They have GCP, they have the TPU, they got DEMIs, who's got a book written about him by Sebastian Malabi. DeepMind is great. We're working with them. So Capex unaffected. I understand that. How are they not affected by memory prices? Ram Mageddon has come for us all. And Ben Thompson of Stratecheri and Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball actually had a bet about this and I hope I didn't misspell Jon Gruber's name. They had a bet about this. They said, whoever wins this bet gets a steak dinner. A steak dinner was at stake. And Ben Thompson lost. John Gruber won because Jon Gruber said Apple always overcharges for ram. Getting a. If you went to build a computer or a phone or laptop or iPad equivalent and you just went to retail, getting an extra 128 gigs of memory or a slight memory upgrade might cost you 30 bucks. In the Apple ecosystem, that's like $200. So Apple has built in this pricing buffer for a very, very long time and that buffer really saved them this year. But there's a lot more to it. So many companies are dealing with Ramageddon this year and some stats that are interesting. DRAM prices rose 172% throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since September of 2025. TrendForce expects PC DRAM to roughly double in price just in Q1 of 2026, with LPDDR pricing seeing the steepest increases in history. So every wafer that's allocated to an HBM stack, a high bandwidth memory stack for an Nvidia GPU, is literally a wafer denied to the LPDDR 5X module of a mid range smartphone or consumer laptop SSD. So they are truly commodities. There's only so many of them and they can only go to one place or the other. Apparently OpenAI's Stargate initiative alone could consume up to 40% of global DRAM output as it stands today. And this is the problem because there's only three major companies in the memory category. It's Samsung, SK, Hynix and Micron. Together they control 95% of the global DRAM production. Remember Micron has been trying to build a new facility in New York. Yes. And six people basically blocked it. Oh, we talked about that. But. And the rumor is that it's like foreign funding. Oh, interesting. Actually trying to hold Micron up. Yeah, yeah. I mean Micron has been very. They've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices and so much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called crucial. So if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found crucial Ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X Games branded like PC gamer DDR memory which was like the monster energy of ram. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is. The branding on crucial ballistics is like insane. Anyway, gamers will be rising up soon with monster energies in hand to take the RAM by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time. I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen. Just absolute junk. And then the caption will be like so this is why I can't afford RAM, you know, or this is why RAM is $800 a stick or whatever. And then on the flip side people will say, you know, occasionally there'll be a good AI slot video and people will be like okay, it's worth paying $800 for RAM because this is so good. Right? Goes both ways. It goes both ways but clearly people are feeling the pinch. But Apple fans will be sitting out the fight thanks to a few key moves from Apple that help them avoid disaster this year. So one, Apple has long term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory 12 to 24 months in advance. They also benefit from vertical integration and custom silicon. So instead of buying that consumer grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or Nvidia GPUs for example, they negotiate multi year contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I, yeah, so this is like ram's always been cyclical and so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to set basically like lock up pricing. Samsung's locking up the demand. I don't even. Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three or four years ago. Otherwise they may not have priced price it in the way that they did. Of course the other thing that, that maybe you get to is and seems like still making their default margin. They're just like the opportunity cost is so high. Could we could reallocate. The other thing is is they, they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression. Exactly. Still be so Apple at various times has had over $100 billion in cash. They currently have over 66 billion in cash. Like they can take the hit there. They can also just take a hit to their margins. Every AI lab looking at that cash. Tim, I could really put that to you. They're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of 10, 20, 30 billion into one of the frontier labs. Maybe that changes. I don't know somebody was throwing out like Apple should buy Anthropic or Amazon should buy Anthropic. But I think the price is too high at this point. It's just too, it's just getting away. So I'm not 100% sure about how the manufacturing supply chain for memory works, but I believe that because Apple's specific requirements, it's harder for Samsung to just instantly reallocate product that's been already manufactured in a way where crucial ballistics. If it's going into gaming PC, it's easier to reallocate those wafers. So even if they didn't have those contracts, I think the supply chain's a little bit stickier with Apple because they're vertically integrated. And then, yeah, of course they have the money to overpay. We talked about how the MacBook Neo is this pressure release valve. So even if the memory does increase, they have this, they have the cash buffer. They also have the, they're charging 200 bucks for something that costs 30. If it goes to 60, they can just take a hit on margins buffer. Then they have the contract buffer. Then they also have this Neo where if the MacBook Pro goes up in price, the MacBook Pro buyer is probably less price sensitive. They're like, yeah, you know, this year it was $4,000 instead of 3,000. I'm buying it for business purposes. It's not that big of a squeeze. And then the price sensitive buyer says, yeah, you know what? I'm not gonna go for the $2,000 laptop. I'm gonna go for the $600 laptop this year. And they're still in the Apple ecosystem. But my takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple. To pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation 6 is allegedly gonna be delayed until 2028 or 2029 because of rising memory costs. They're gonna wait it out because there are three players. It's, it's not just TSMC in this case. It does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas at tsmc, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and increase margins once the next contracts go up for renewal. Whereas if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, Samsung wins. And so there's more of this game theoretic like they got to, they have to build. And so I think a lot of people, and Tyler was talking about this with me earlier, like we we all expect this memory shortage to be a few years, not more, not like five or 10 years. So if you push out the Sony PS6 to not bullish. Tyler28, he's bullish. No, I'm very bullish. But I think, yeah, because, because there's more players. Like I think the shortage will be just say you're not AGI Pelt. I mean there is a question about like if you truly go exponential forever and it just like, okay, yeah, there's like, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars of data centers being built. It's like, can even Samsung, Micron, sk, Hynix keep up forever? So we might be living in like a permanently higher price just because like it's a more valuable product. Like we get more. Yeah, this time might be different. Might be different. Also the Nintendo Switch 2 might go up in price next year. It's really bad for gamers. Gamers gaming graphics cards are going up in price price. Nvidia's pulling out of gaming graphics cards or they're skipping a year. So it's mayhem for gamers. But long term, the competition between the memory manufacturers should stabilize prices. But you know, just watching all the big companies that are not Apple get caught flat footed is just crazy to watch because it's not like, it's not like the folks at Nintendo or the folks at Sony are like, oh yeah, first time manufacturing something. Like if you told me that like the team behind the rabbit R1 was like suffering from higher memory costs, they'd be like, yeah, like it's a new company, new product. They haven't like Sony has been making PlayStations for decades and they still got caught flat footed on this. And a lot of that is a testament to the brand power that Apple has. The network effects, the scale. They built that they're in this position and still not getting squeezed even when other hyperscalers are getting squeezed on all sorts of stuff. Tim Cook still underrated. He cooked. He has cooked. And yeah, the operational side of Apple is always just habitually underrated. Even in the face of like slight misses on features and products and marketing and oh, this ad didn't land well. The business is still thriving and dealing with just crisis after crisis. Like the tariff should have been a major crisis. They got through it. This memory ram Mageddon should have been a crisis. They got through it. It's all been very, very good news for Apple. Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And get that Cha Ching ready because I'm going to tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middleman and spend with the phantom card. Apple is exercising the Coase conjecture. They're waiting for open source models to get better, applying pressure to frontier lab pricing, rejecting anthropic overtures. Anthropic wanted more money from Apple. They went with Google and Gemini. This is from Soren Larsen who is an economist who I really respect. It may rather be that impatient buyers have adverse selection revealing actually poor business positioning. So he's identifying Apple's leverage in the system, their, you know, this consumer aggregator and they've been, they've been doing very well. Kyle Harrison says that quote we ran the math. OpenAI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term. The most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning. The less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on device AI before it starts. Well, if the on device AI, it happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario, but it is an interesting thesis. I think that across the frontier labs everyone is just very AGI pilled. They're seeing the increase in capabilities but also these sort of like stacked exponentials. Ben Thompson was explaining this today that when you went from LLMs to reasoning the number of tokens, the number of compute required just to get a single answer when like you know, 10x all of a sudden. And then we saw the same thing with coding agents where these long running tasks are sort of like squaring the amount of compute. And so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand but you get more economic output so it winds up being all worth it. When will Apple release the iPhone? Only other thing on the OpenAI memory side is they plan to sell a lot of consumer devices. Oh, so they might be buying it for that, right? Yeah, so we don't really know. But yeah, I think that obviously OpenAI has kind of rolled back some of that one $1.2 trillion number. But seeing, seeing the growth in demand just in this first couple months of the year starts to look like hey, maybe, maybe, maybe he wasn't so crazy after all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like the, the, the, the models are justifying the compute and I think that we talked about this yesterday a little bit with the orchestrators, just this idea that, you know, where will the next 10x come from? Well, it's probably from just running 10 instances of Claude code or Codex and just firing off ten times as much inference and people are ready to do that. You see it all the time on Twitter, people talking about how much inference they're doing. When will Apple release the iPhone 18 Kalshi has before October at 35% before 2027 at at 34%. What is the chance that they don't release it this year? That would be probably zero. And I think it is. It is zero. So stay tuned. I'm sure Mark Gurman will have good coverage on on the next Nick let's get the Germinator back on. Yeah, well I wanted to invite Jon Gruber to talk about these, but Mark Gurman of course is is welcome at any time, but we have yet to talk to Jon Gruber and he has been covering Apple fantastically throughout his entire career. So he would be an interesting gentleman to talk to. TSMC Gusto first Gusto is the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com submitted a new semiconductor FAB construction construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science park last week. The site is located on Tainan's Anding district adjacent to the F18 fab and covers 15.46 hectares. They're doing more 2 nanometer production, the leading edge with 8 hectares allocated for the production area and 1 hectare for administrative facilities. The project is expected for completion and production start in 2028, says Semianalysis. So we'll see what what happens in the actual CAPEX guide from tsmc. Ben Thompson has been very disappointed with where TSMC has been guiding on CapEx, but maybe this is a shift. I wonder how much faster it will be to build another TSMC FAB over there. If they ramp production of this new facility before Arizona. If they if they eclipse and there's a flippening and this gets to scale before Arizona, it will reveal some very serious problems with America's building and permitting system. I would imagine. Or maybe maybe talent pool. I would certainly hope that both that Taiwan I mean this is their crown jewel. They should they should get this up and running fairly quickly without many delays since they've done it before and they are heavily invested in TSMC of course. More importantly Wendy's US President post new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King See let's let's watch let's rate it. Does he does he put I like the way that he's holding it, you know. Okay. Seems normal. Yeah, wonderful. Kind of. That's a burger. This is good. I like talking. Talking about food in his mouth. Okay. Yeah. Going. Going back for a second. You gotta top it off. He's saying burger. He's not saying product. Product. There we go. Yeah. No hesitation, no hesitation. Wait, wait. What did he dip in the Frosty? Was that. What did he. What did he do at the end there? He. Amazing. He dips a French fry in the Frosty. Whoa. Okay. Okay. Doesn't call it a product. No hesitation. Talking with the food in his mouth. Yeah, yeah. That's bold. That's bold. I'm Giving this an 8 out of 10 if you scroll down. I like Colonel Sanders. After seeing this, just knowing. Also. Also the way he kind of puts the fry in and quickly, you know, kind of pulls. Pulls the hand back. Yeah, it's got style points, dude. Here's a good job. If you're looking for a gig that will bring home the bacon, apply for the job of CEO at McDonald's. Apparently the guy makes 18 million a year. Wait, do they have an open job application? No, but after this, it's entirely possible that if you put on a masterful performance, chomping down, you can make a run. I don't know. It is funny that there's just like one after another of CEOs. This is probably good for all of them. I don't know. This is fun. People are. I want no jump cuts. Somebody should have seen swallow. Somebody should be seen swallowing the food. Oh, okay. People are analyzing. That's somewhat fair. Analyzing the details. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. Berber Ginn came in and shared. Altman defended OpenAI's Defense Department contract in an all hands yesterday, calling the backlash, quote, really painful. This was an example of a complex but the right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us in the short term. He told staff. Yeah, I still. I still stand by that. Given. Given the events that have transpired in the world since last week, like being there to, like, meet. Meet the government. Yeah. Feels like being on. On the right path. It was just. Yeah, it was just odd that the. That like Google strategy was to not say anything, do nothing, win, basically, I would think, or do nothing. Don't go up or down like Gemini, just. But I Don't think Gemini is involved in this contract. It's Grok. It's Grok. Grok was the other one that came in with the same term. So Gemini doesn't have any relationship with the Department of War? I think they do. I thought that there was an. I might be. They might. I just don't think they were involved in this contract negotiation because I've seen. Yeah, I've seen Palantir, like, show that they have, like, three or four models that they sort of, like, mix together to get responses. I don't know. OpenAI announced its defense Department deal on Friday, hours after the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth designated rival Anthropic a supply chain risk. There's still a question as to whether or not that's going to go through. So call. She has it at a 42.8% chance and it hasn't really moved. It's unclear if that's just like staying in tweet land and is like bluster or will there be something there or will there? I mean, I have to imagine that at this point, both the Department of War and Anthropic are talking to each other. Do you have more information? Yeah, Gemini does have deals with the DOD. Yeah. So there was the 200 million one that was in July that was Anthropic was also in that one. And then they did. There was the recent, like, Genai Mil. Do you remember? Seth was tweeting about this. Oh, interesting. But they're, like, involved in that too. Yeah. But what I'm so shocked by is how does AWS have an advantage in 2026 on FedRAMP and, like, federal classified networks? Like, I get that it's, like, hard. You have to do a lot of cybersecurity. You have to really harden the servers. But you would think that Microsoft and Google would have figured out how to fully support the deepest depths of the US Government and get full approval before, like, maybe Amazon would have gone first, but I would have thought that Microsoft and Google would be, like, a year or two behind. And so you would see. You would see Gemini and OpenAI checking those boxes really fast. But I don't know, I guess AWS does have, like, a material advantage there. Still. Altman said that while he didn't regret signing a deal with the Defense Department, he wished he hadn't announced the decision so quickly, telling some staff that it looked opportunistic and not united with the field. And I think that's. I think that's a good point. I agree with him on that his remarks echoed a memo he shared with staff and on X Monday in which he said the deal looked opportunistic and sloppy. A groundswell of AI researchers at the company and across Silicon Valley spent the past few days criticizing Altman and the company for what they saw as a capitulation to the Pentagon by essentially agreeing to a deal that allowed AI to be used in all lawful cases. And we will see where, where, where the laws go. I've been digging a little bit more into like the rules around surveillance. There's, there's actually like a ton of them and it's a very nuanced thing and so it feels like it's hard to bake it down into a single line. But a single line is what hits on social media for better or for worse. Yeah. And so you can see a single line and be like, that's amazing. It's exactly what I think it means. And that could either mean good or bad. So very, very tricky. Scott Besant went on CNBC this morning and said, no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security. Anthropic's attempts to push, to push use clauses into their contracts with the United States government are unacceptable and their products will no longer be utilized by the U.S. treasury or any other government agency. So doubling down there. There was also a story in Semaphore this morning from Reid. He writes, Anthropic's investors don't have its back in its fight with the Pentagon. This is very interesting. Anthropic may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter its own high profile backers. Despite the company's defiance, Silicon Valley's biggest players have remained silent. In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Pete Hagseth, the issue of Anthropic came up. According to two people who were briefed on the encounter. Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon's custom chip strategy. As the largest consumer of the company's Trainium AI chips. And Hagseth has been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk which would make it impossible for many of the military suppliers to do business with the company. Jassy demurred, declining to take Anthropic side. The people said he wasn't alone. Despite Anthropic CEO Dari Amide's very vocal opposition to the Pentagon's demands and rival OpenAI Sam Altman's running commentary on the matter, a number of Anthropic investors have remained silent. One investor told Semaphore that speaking up might further inflame things with the admin, and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. Another said that Anthropic requested they say nothing. Anthropic and Amazon declined to comment. The Pentagon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment as well. The most important thing here is that we get Pete Heigseth on Twitch. Amazon Andy Jassy is sitting down with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth likes Twitter. He likes X. Get him live streaming those press conferences. Put him on Twitch. That's the goal here. Go directly. We'll talk directly to Twitch about the back and forth. Noah Smith summed it up honestly in the Ben Thompson versus Dean Ball debate. We have Dean Ball on the show at noon. I think Ben is right. Noah agrees with Ben. There was just no way or in any nation state, there was no way America or any nation state was ever going to let private companies remain in total control of the most powerful weapon ever invented. This is a big question about like where are we? Like we, like are we there yet? Like, is this the most powerful weapon ever invented? That feels like this feels very much like a training run for something that's coming in the future. And it's an important conversation, but we're not necessarily there yet, so we'll see, dean Ball replied. He said Also, Dean versus Ben is wild and an honor for me as a guy who's been reading Ben since the days of Android, will not commodify iOS and views Ben as a core inspiration for my own project today. Even though I disagree with Ben here, you will hear much more from me on this soon. On a certain podcast. I hope he's referring to tvpn, but the thing is, Ben is anti regulation and does not own the consequences of state seizure of AI. Neither do you. There was another post by Dean Ball. I want to get him to unpack a little bit more, he said. It is so clear that the important fissure in AI politics right now is not liberal versus Conservative, Democrat versus Republican, EAC versus EA or safety versus Anti safety, but instead takes advanced AI seriously as a concept versus does not take advanced AI seriously. And why this is so interesting to me is because it feels like both Dean and Ben are in the Takes advanced AI seriously as a concept camp. So we'll see if he agrees with my understanding of both of their positions. Because it seems like they both are in the same camp of takes advanced AI seriously. But then they disagree about the level of pressure that the government should place on a private corporation and so very, very interested in digging into that. Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make podcode, Codex or Sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. Let's move on to Will Menitis. He has also been chiming in on Darius statements. There's a strange. There's a set of strange little fictions that tech has chosen to believe as some sort of basis set for the perceived morality of their work. Chief amongst these is the idea that the legal system doesn't exist and when it does, it is. It's a precise mechanistic process. Tech is a positive sum in a community which means you pretend that the standard weapons that exist to the modern corporation, coercive litigation, IP blocking and trolling, standard white shoe law firm stuff. Really taking shots at white shoe lawyers is negative sum or something bad we don't do here. This leads to a weirdly formalist view of the legal process that we must avoid it at all costs. But if we must engage in it, then it's a fair and repeatable process that must necessarily yield, if not the truth, then at least the same outcome repeatedly and provably. It's this instinct that gives you Anthropic's odd contract formalism. This is how you end up thinking your best move is to show your cards at the forefront and thinking you've won the hand. There's incredible potential for outperformance available to you for betraying any of these silly norms that Tech uses to feel good about itself. The modern corporation must avail itself of all possible edge and holy wars require holy weapons. So get busy. The idea that sticks with me here is that if we engage in it, then it's fair and a repeatable process. I talked to someone who is doing something with the legal system and he said that like on this particular issue it was a true left right issue. Like a liberal judge would always cite on one side of the case and a conservative judge would always cite on the the other side of the case. So no matter how well he argued, it came down to did his case get a liberal judge or a conservative judge? And I was like, oh well that seems simple. Get a judge that's aligned with your company and your position. And he was like, yeah, bad news. The way they decide which judge I get is they literally spin a physical wheel so there's nothing you can do with that. He's like, yeah, no, it is secure. It's like a real process. And that's by design. Some things are better left in the democratic process to inject a little randomness so that you can't put your finger on the wheel and pick the right judge and get exactly what you want. Like, that's not possible, but it is potentially like the least bad system, but still very stochastic and still very random. And so you wind up in this weird situation where things are not necessarily repeatable. Repeatable is the interesting thing that you can go into an engagement in a legal context and wind up with a different scenario just somewhat randomly. And that is almost by design. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Dario was at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media and Technology conference today and was dropping bombs on defense. He said, we believe in defending America. Anthropic has been working with the national security community for two years. We are the most lean forward on AI acceleration. He says we do not see hitting a wall. This year will have a radical acceleration that surprises everyone. Exponentials catch people off guard. We are at the precipice of something incredible. We need to manage it the right way. I'm very interested to hear, like, the. This idea that he thinks we're at the end of the exponential. I feel like most technological processes. Carpathy was saying this. Maybe he was saying, like, AI is a continuation of previous technological revolutions. That was why he said we're not going to see massive growth in gdp. I think that was his reasoning. Yeah, it's just kind of the same process. Same process. You saw computers and you saw Internet. Yeah. AI. It's the same curve. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, there are people that, like, he's saying there, like, we don't see hitting a wall this year, but it begs the question, like, do you think that there's going to be a plateau? Because at a certain point, like, you plot out the AI revenues and you get to something that's larger than gdp, and the GDP has to move in order to grow. What happens at the end state? What does the end state look like? I feel like we got to talk about this. Me and Tyler were talking about just the general, like, AI safety discourse on both sides always ends with people just saying, like, we got to talk about this. No one has any answer. You know, we got to figure this out, guys. We all got to talk. We got to talk to each other. Yeah, yeah. No one's like, no one's like, I have a clear plan, I think it'll work. You might disagree with me, but this is my plan and this is what we're going to do and here are the steps. And like, I think this gets us the good outcome. Everyone's, everyone's just like, I don't know, it's very, very weird. It just from a comms perspective, it's very. I mean, I feel like that's how decisions get made in companies. Like, if, if a decision is really obvious, you can handle it over text. If it's not, it's like, let's, let's discuss live. Yeah, but I mean, you talk to a lot of companies about, about their plans and I mean, the good companies can think in decades and think like, okay, we're going to do this and then we're going to make a. I mean, the original Tesla plan, we're going to make a sports car and then we're going to make a sedan and then we're going to make a cheaper car. And like, that's the plan. And there was no like, oh, we got to talk about this. It was like, yeah, we're going to make a bunch of cars and then we're going to make more factories to make more cars. And like, this is the plan. We're just not really seeing that from lab leaders at the moment. But still plenty of optimism. The square packing, circle packing discourse has hit the timeline. I absolutely love this. First, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the comics platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So John Bidwell in 1997 found a more optimal way to fit 17 squares into a larger square. The smallest square that contain all 17 looks like an absolutely deranged solution. Everyone would expect that it's just a nice even grid you take, you add one. But if you pack them in this way, you get 17 squares of absolute chaos on the next slide. And someone made a waffle maker. Someone made a waffle maker that optimally packs 17 squares into the squares of the waffle. You will get mocked at breakfast. You will get mocked by anyone except a mathematician, I suppose. Yeah. So Kevin says, for years, society was limited to only 16 syrup squares per waffle. But with recent combinatorial optimization breakthroughs, our research department has achieved previously unheard of densities of waffle syrup. It's great, great news. Very, very funny that this came through and Then someone in the previous post was posting, the universe is not real. Dude, this is ridiculous. I'm gonna fight God because it looks very crazy to pack an arbitrary number of squares within another square. But that's. Someone should do this for cubicles in an office. Can you imagine if you're in the one cubicle that's slightly off kilter and everyone's like, look, dude. Like, you get. You have the same amount of space as everybody else and you're like, yeah, but I'm at a 37 degree angle to the wall and it's driving me insane. That would be very, very odd. Did you see researchers at the University of Southern Denmark developed a limbless soft robot that crawls using air filled chambers and kirigami inspired flaps. You're gonna love this. I hate it. You're gonna love it. I am the Indiana Jones of tech podcasting. I hate snakes. I absolutely hate snakes. Very, very weird. It's over, boys. Says Autism Capital. Very weird. But, you know, exciting that people are working on robotics and I'm sure there's some odd apple. Yeah, I'm sure there's no like ultra nefarious use cases for something like this. We're going subterranean. Anduril's already working on it. What do you got, Tyler? These look like these would be good for like, for what? Medical. You make them really small. Yeah, maybe that's also like. Yeah. Would you volunteer as a trial subject? I think you should go first if you think they're so good. I think you should go first. Someone launched Ciggies app, the most comprehensive archive of Chinese cigarettes to exist on the Western Internet. Discover new packs in their history. Track favorites and packs you already tried. Share your collection. The Chinese cigarette industry is absolutely fascinating. I think it makes like hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for the government. The main cigarette company is nationalized. Oh, wow. And so they make an absolute ton of money. They fund their military with it. It's a fascinating. Yeah, really lovely website. We really got to go into the history of nationalization because the nationalization and privatization is interesting. All over the point, all over the place. I looked into nuclear weapons and how those were nationalized. Fascinating. Sort of like hybrid public private partnerships with a lot of consultants in the private sector. And then obviously the defense primes making the missiles, the ICBMs, but not the warheads. But in the tobacco industry, there are some fascinating examples of countries that start cigarette manufacturing businesses, develop large sort of deeper supply chain operations and then privatize those, and then that when they sell that asset to a Western tobacco firm. There's sort of like a cash windfall for the government that can be very beneficial. They can go build roads with the money or, I don't know, cut people's taxes. But there's the other side of, okay, a company is getting large and then it gets nationalized, but plenty. Are there any other industries that stuck out to you, Tyler, as you were talking about it? I'm still kind of looking at this. There's so many weird, like, ways to view nationalization, though, because, like, so at least in the U.S. like, historically, it's been mostly basically during wartime or if, like a really important company is facing, like, huge crisis. Right. 2008, like, I think GM at one point, Government Motors. Yeah. The treasury owned like 60% of GM. Yeah. So there's like, interesting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But even, like, if you think about tobacco in the us like, almost like having super strong taxes is like, almost like kind of a form of nationalization. Right. Where you're basically taking, like a ton of the profits away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was always the pushback of, you know, if there's runaway profits by the AI companies, just, you know, instead of nationalizing them in that scenario, you can just tax them and then redistribute them. Yeah. There's like this real spectrum. Right? Because, like, if you think of, like, Intel. Yeah. So the government now owns, like, it's like 10% of intel. Right. So, like, but what does that actually mean for, like, running Intel? Yeah. Like, do they have a say, like, right now? They're not supposed to. Yeah, maybe that changes. It's like this, this interesting spectrum. Yeah, totally, totally. Anthropic is on track to generate annual revenue of almost 20 billion. A projection based on current performance more than doubling its run rate. This is from Bloomberg and Zero Hedge says unprecedented damage control leak after leak. Just how bad is it in Matt's slot? Nick says the leak is bad, sir. Really bad. Now everyone knows we're the fastest growing software company of all time. We must put a stop to this. I think what Zero Hedge was getting at was that the reason you leak, you know, strong economic performances is to, you know, allay concerns around, you know, pressure from the government supply chain risk. Because really, the revenue would not be growing if, like, companies were pulling out because they're so worried about the supply chain risk that they gotta. They gotta move on so fast. But still. Yeah, funny. Clearly, adoption is outstripping any kind of pullback from the Department of Treasury and various other kind of organizations in the government. Yeah. R. Karazian over at Ramp has some extra data. He said most people in tech know Anthropic commands the majority of API spend by US businesses. As of January, Anthropic took 50% of spend on enterprise AI subscriptions too. OpenAI still leads on business count, but the biggest spenders go to Anthropic, all from Ramp Data. And Ben Thompson had some extra context here about the data, but I was, I was actually dming with ARA last night and it is fascinating what's happening. The market is so, so big that everything is growing and you see these charts and you're like it's over for this company, it's over for Cursor. And then cursor puts up 2 billion and there's just more and more growth that's happening because of the diffusion problem and the fact that companies onboard and just more and more companies are onboarding to AI tools every day. Ben Thompson said there are some caveats to the Ramp data. It only includes OpenAI and not Azure Copilot or Google Cloud Gemini. Ramp is also probably tilted more towards startups and smaller companies and larger enterprises. That noted it certainly matches the vibes. Anthropic established that coding foothold and has been on an absolute tear over the last six months. In particular in terms of not just its model capabilities but also cloud code and the overall sense that it is in the lead and enterprise ctos are a smaller and more easily reachable set of customers than consumer consumers at large. Meanwhile, an AI subscription business model has always been more compelling for the enterprise than for the consumer space for the same reason that productivity apps always end up as enterprise products, not consumer ones. There's no consumer CRM for example. Enterprise actually enterprises actually value productivity and are willing to pay for it. Consumers don't and won't, which is why the business model makes sense for the consumer space, at least. At scale is advertising. So he's once again ad ad pilled. What else is in the in the news? Eddie Endowment. Eddie put this into context. Even in Q4 of 2021 public SaaS quarterly net new ARR peaked at 2.6 billion. Anthropic has added nearly 11 billion in early 2026. Yeah, this dramatic versus like run rate. Not actual ARR necessarily but still absolutely shocking. Yeah. Tyler said for those traffic track at home, Anthropic just added a palantir in revenue in the month of February alone. Yeah, pretty unprecedented. Howard Linzon said Anthropic pulled off the rare quadruple linde. Great product. People pay for it. People love it and promote it, even though they pay. And the people like Dario's handling of government. Next up, the people tear Dario down. There is this interesting, like, tall poppy syndrome in Silicon Valley a little bit where, like, whoever's at the top gets, like, you know, triple glazed and then it needs to be torn down a little bit. So we'll see where all this goes. But putting AI growth in the context of the shoe market. Yes. Darren Rovel, former guest of the show, shares that New Balance is up almost 20% year over year. 19%. Adidas 13. Lululemon 9. Lululemon's doing well. And then every other brand here in the negative. Puma at minus 8%. Under Armour minus 9.4. Nike minus 10%. And Jordan Brand down 16%. Really insane to see such a huge line. I feel like the sneaker era, the era, the Jordan era, is over for now. Is this more of, like, changing in taste that New Balance and Adidas are growing and Nike is not? Because if they were all. If all of these, like, major household name brands were trading down, I would say, like, oh, this is like the Temu effect. This is the white label effect. This is the Allbirds, the dsc. Like, just more competition from newer brands, challenger brands. But it seems like there's more of just like a reallocation from Nike to New Balance and Adidas. Like, Adidas might just be on a brand tear, doing some good advertising, but New Balance has been killing it with their positioning. Interesting to see total revenue as well. Nike is huge. 46 billion. Adidas is down at 26. Lululemon's at 10. Lululemon has done. Has done really, really well. New Balance, they're bigger than New Balance. Anyway, my portfolio every day at the opening bell looks like D Day says whom on. This is an absolute disaster. It really is so crazy. I was trying to explain yesterday to a friend, like, how the market. I was like, you're probably getting destroyed, right? And he's like, yeah, it's terrible. I was like, well, is this your. It might shock investor friend? Yes, it might shock. You learn that the market overall is like, only down half of the point. It's an absolute tale. Korean stocks are crashing. The Kospi index, the Korea Stock Exchange is down 10%. Korean stocks are crashing, says Joe Weisenthal. The South Korean stock market fell over 8% and triggered a circuit breaker. Jim Cramer said, beware of South Korean spillover to our markets. Wdc, stx, sndk, mu, all still vulnerable. So there's lots of companies that are at risk. We will dig into the South Korean stock market collapse soon. But we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. First, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken it helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, let's bring in Dean Boss from the Restream waiting room. Dean, how are you doing? Good to see you. Good. How are you all? We're fantastic. I've been enjoying your coverage. We had Beth.

Structural intuition for thinking about AI regulatory policy. Yeah, yeah, Jordy, please. How much attention is DC paying to the news out of square? The pushback from or block the pushback from Silicon Valley was, hey, you're blaming this on AI, but it doesn't feel like maybe that's a small part of the reason to do this Rift, but certainly not the entire story. But then a bunch of groups are going to use this as, you know, example number one as to changes in the labor force due to AI. Well, it's a bad combination because it's all these companies, all these tech companies that overhired in the sort of immediate post Covid and then now they're also the most exposed to, to AI, Right. They're, they're the ones that are adopting AI the most aggressively. They do the things that AI is best at. There's lots of software engineering and so like it's both things happening at once, I would say. And that creates an exaggerated sort of fun house like effect of, of the actual impact of AI on the labor market. I'm very skeptical that like we're going to see things like that at like wide, you know, firm level anytime soon. You know, in the broader economy. I think we could see it more in the software engineering discipline because there are a lot of big software engineering enterprises that hire too many people. Right. So like, you know, I think that's, that's a very live possibility. But D.C. is D.C. people are going to interpret the news for whatever's convenient for them. You know, and if you, when you play the long game, you have to try to just build credibility over the long term with people. But yeah, I mean, everyone's going to say this is evidence for whatever I'm on about. Yeah. Hypothetically, how do you think.

That are maintained by a federal institution in the same way that when you release a new cancer drug, you have to test it on mice first. Something like that. Yeah. I think the problem with that is that there's too much to test for because the models can do too much. We don't know what to test for. So we have very clear endpoints when we're testing a drug in a person. We have very clear things that we want to test for. It's much harder to do that in the context of a generalist AI model. So that's one of the things that worries me about licensing. In addition to licensing can slow things down and it can. Regulatory capture is very real. It's a very real thing. I have always thought of AI as being a little bit more like financial services, where the regulation is not actually targeted at the products per se. The regulation is more generally targeted at the entities themselves. So we regulate banks. We don't. We do regulate loans, but we do that by way of regulating banks. We don't, like, have a. There's not a government agency that like, approves every single loan that a bank makes. We. What we do is we look at the entity of the bank and we say, this is. This is a sound institution. This is a soundly governed institution. That's the kind of thing that I think will be. That's. I don't know. Again, I don't think we should regulate AI like banks per se, But I think that is a useful structural intuition for thinking about AI regulatory policy. Yeah, yeah. Jordy, please. How much attention is DC paying to the news out of square? The pushback from. Or block. The pushback from Silicon Valley was, hey, you're blaming this on AI, but it doesn't feel like maybe that's a small part of the reason to do this rift, but certainly not the entire story. But then a bunch of groups are going to use this as example number one, as to changes in the.

Even if I don't agree with every regulatory impulse that Anthropic has, I think that in broad strokes, that's the play. Yeah. How do you. Sorry, Jordan, you go. Yeah. I wanted to ask, like, how much do you think information asymmetry played into the dynamic of the negotiation and the results? I mean, you have the Department of War, who, presumably everyone on that side has some idea that we're about to enter a conflict. And Friday comes around, the Department of War knows they're hours away from a strike. Dario, according to Emil, like, isn't kind of engaging with him. And out of that, maybe the admin says, hey, this is not a partner that we can rely on, and we don't want other groups in the government to be relying on it as well. And it just kind of blows up. Yeah, I mean, so I think some of this is about personality. Some of this seems like it's about personality clashes. Some of it's about politics, undoubtedly. I think some of it is also about principle, though. Right. Like, and I think the DOD is not crazy at all. Like, my. My problem here has never been with the DOD's policy principles. Here. They're saying Anthropic can't put usage restrictions that look like public policy because we set public policy. Dario Amadei doesn't decide when autonomous lethal weapons are ready for primetime. We do. And I think they're 100% right about that. But the solution to that problem is you don't try to destroy the business of Anthropic. You tell Dario, no thanks to the business, and you move on and you find somebody else who will do business. Which is what Dario said in the CVS interview. He said, there's other providers. We can agree not to work with each other. Sure. Yes. Right. That's fine. That's fine. I mean, frankly, the tokens are probably higher margin for Anthropic sold to private entities, not to the government, because their Anthropic is subsidizing them for the government. So it's a bad business. As we're saying, what's a good outcome here? I think we cancel the contract. And look, the other thing is, like, the DOD says, well, we have all these other contractors. There's Palantirs of the world, and Palantir might rely on Anthropic. And so we can't have our contractors, can't be reliant upon Anthropic, because if that's true, then we're still relying upon Anthropic. So it's fine for them to say no one who has usage restrictions like this can do business with any of our contractors. I think that's fine for in the fulfillment of DoD contracts. Like, I think that is perfectly fine. Isn't that basically supply chain risk by any other name? Well, no, because supply chain, sorry, supply chain risk would be specific, would be done at the company level as opposed to, like, at the contract level. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Also, can you, can you explain a little bit?

Superintelligence or something that isn't going to just exist in an unregulated fashion. That's kind of been my point for, you know, for a year and a half now. Yeah. So what's the gap between regulation and nationalization? Because at a certain point, if we're in the nuke analogy, it feels like the government takes that and then they get to decide where they. They point those nukes. And. And as I was reflecting on the. The creation of the. The atomic bomb, I was sort of left, like, optimistic about the American project and optimistic about the way that played out. I don't know if you have a different side, but I feel like the government did get control of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a nuclear war. And the whole concept of, like, the person that you're voting for will have their. They'll have the nuclear football, they'll have their finger on the button. Do you trust them? That is an animating force in our electoral process, whether you like the current admin or the previous administration, whether you trust them or not. But like, Americans vote on that question every four years. And I think that that's a good system. I like that 100%. I think that the nuclear bomb analogy starts to break down. But one thing I'd say about. About nuclear weapons is that it's true that nuclear weapons, you know, we got that and that went, I think, basically pretty okay as far as these things go. But, you know, what we didn't really get is nuclear energy to the nearly to the extent that we could have. Agree with you on this. Yes, continue. Right. And so that created this single regulatory sort of point of failure. Yeah, single points of failure are often problematic in complex system engineering. So, you know, what do you, what do you do? Well, you know, maybe. Maybe we shouldn't have done it. You know, maybe we should. Maybe the government effect on the sort of the equivalent of the consumer side, the economic benefits, we didn't really get those as much as we could have. So that would be one thing, but the other thing is that even nuclear energy, you know, it's not directly useful to you. It is not. Nuclear energy is not like you are not personally going to express your liberty, exercise your liberty through nuclear energy or nuclear bombs, but you will with artificial superintelligence, and you certainly will with today's coding agents. Right. And so the question is like, should the government be able to own that? And my view is that without really substantial guardrails, that is just almost certain to devolve into a profound act of tyranny. And so I think that having the companies separate and apart from the government, but still overseen by the public through regulation, that is kind of like my view as to what is ideal. But the problem is that saying that view a. It's really hard to get that right. Regulation is tough to get right. You want to get it exactly right. And it's possible that all my ideas are terrible and they're, you know, they're all going to go to shit. Right? That's totally possible. But what you want to do is. You want to. Yeah, you want to at least try. Try to get that right. The problem is that that has been. That view has been characterized very often as sort of supporting regulatory capture. So it's like, you know, what did Anthropic expect, the way they talked about these models? Well, maybe they expected for, like, California's SB 53 to pass and for there to be like, modest, technocratic, light touch regulation that only affects the Frontier labs. And like, I don't think that's lobbying for regulatory capture. I think that's actually just the prudent thing to do. Even if I don't agree with every regulatory impulse that Anthropic has, I think that in broad strokes, that's the play. Yeah, sorry, Jordy, you go. Yeah. I wanted to ask how much do you think information asymmetry played into the.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's happening? We're doing great. How are you? We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Please take us through the news today because I'm very excited to hear from you. I'm very excited to be joined by you today. Well, I'm just here for moral support from my good friend Jared. So, Jared, you want to, you want to give him the, give him the news. Fantastic. Sure. And by the way, I appreciate giving me a 100 year time frame on the Dyson sphere, because we'll get to that. It's been, I mean, we're over a half century here just getting back to the moon, so we've got to take things in steps, but step by step. But really that's where the partnership with OPM comes in. And Scott has been a champion for us here with NASA Force. We got to rebuild some of our core competencies here at NASA. We made some big announcements last week that said, look, if we want to get back to the moon, we want to achieve President Trump's vision within the timeframes that have been, that have been established, we're going to have to do things differently. We're not going to launch moon rockets every three years. We're going to try and launch them in less than a year. And people are like, that's impossible. I was like, have we, you know, I literally went and got the data from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era saying, you know, we used to do this every three and a half months. We literally, from the time Apollo 7 splashed down to Apollo 8 launched to fly around the moon is measured in weeks. It's eight, nine weeks here. So what do you mean we can't do it? Well, they said, look, we don't have some of the same expertise we used to have during the space shuttle era of turning our mobile launchers around. You know, if you're launching every three years, you build up all this experience and expertise and then they, then they go out after the mission is launched and they go into industry. So we got it. We got to do some things differently right now. And one of which is we got to start bringing in folks back from industry that have the expertise to grow our young talent, because we have no shortage of people that want to grow up and work at NASA. I mean, you know, like, from the time they're kids, they want to get there. So plenty of, you know, young talent coming in the system. But, but what Scott and OPM are giving us the ability to do is bring in term based appointments from industry, some brilliant minds from, you know, Space X Blue Origin Rocket Lab, all our great tech companies who say, I want to serve my country, I want to stick around for a couple of years under a term based appointment, elevate some of the talent. That's how we're going to get back into turning rockets around in months instead of years. That's how we're going to get back to the moon. So there's amazing part of. I was going to say, look, this is part of a broader thing that I think you and I have talked about a little bit, which is there's kind of two pieces we're trying to solve on the, you know, the government tech side. One is obviously, can we get early career young people in? As Jared said, you know, kind of NASA, unlike most of the federal government, actually has done a really good job there. The other piece is how do we leverage the private sector to help make sure that we have much better connectivity, the private sector and public. And so the second part of tech force, right. Was always the private companies having people come in. Obviously we want to basically double down on that now for NASA force and make sure that we've got kind of all those relevant industry partners who are saying, hey, look, we want to have some of our best people come in second themselves for a year or two, help make NASA as effective as possible in bringing up the next generation of folks. And then if people want to go back to the private sector, that's great, they can go do that. Yeah. So talk about.

Launching with greater frequency and achieving the President's national space policy. Can you walk me through the current top few reasons why the Moon is important? Just as a high level, I want to go back. I'm already on board. But for those people who say, I want to hang out on Earth, why are we going to the Moon? Why is the Moon important? Why is it valuable? Okay, so I'm really glad you asked this question, and there's quite a few answers that go along with it. First, the whole, like, shouldn't there be other things that we should be doing? Yeah, and we do. Percentage of our resources are actually invested into a national imperative goal, like returning the Moon. This isn't the 1960s anymore, where it's four and a half percent of the discretionary budget. It's a quarter of a percentage. And you know who's making up the difference? Private industry. You know, folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are putting billions of their own resources in play to build capabilities for the good of the American people and really all of humankind. So it's not, you know, the taxpayers footing the bill to do this like it was the 1960s. Now, what are some other reasons that we should do it? How about we made a promise to the American people and have for 35 years. Every president for 35 years has said, we're going to return to the Moon. It was only President Trump under his first term when he created the Artemis program. Now in his second term, my first day on the job, where he signs a national space policy that says not only go back to the moon, but also build out a moon base, are we taking steps in that direction? And after $100 billion, I think we owe it to the American people to do it. I'll give you national security reasons to do it. 1969, July 20th. America lands Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin on the moon, brings him safely back to Earth. It sends a message to the world. What else is America capable of doing? Well, if you take 35 years and 100 billion and you fail to do it well, it sends the exact opposite message. That's a real national security implication. Because then it says something's broken. And now I'm going to encroach on America's leadership across all the most important technological domains. Here's another good reason. We don't know what we're going to find. I mean, that's the best part of the greatest adventure in human history, is going out and learning scientific economic research. We will go to the South Pole of the moon. Where there's ice, we will use that as a proving ground for power, navigation, communication, in situ resource manufacturing. The capabilities we're going to need when we someday send American astronauts to Mars. And then we got to be able to bring them back. And the way you're going to do that is probably making propellant on Mars. I'd rather do that two and a half days from Earth than nine months away from Earth. I love it, Jordy. Those bars fired me up. Fired me up. How do people actually.

The retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound five put it. I'll see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today's Wednesday, March 4, 2026. New haircut, new haircut alert. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Temple of Technology. The Fortress Binance, the capital Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards, Billpad accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a little bit of a shorter show. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have Dean Ball coming on to give the other side of the ball versus Thompson argument about anthropic. Then we have Scott Kapoor and Jared Isaacman coming on to talk about space. We're going to the moon and they're going to take us there. And then we have Adam Bry from Skydio, who I actually worked with through Andreessen Horowitz maybe 10 years ago. And then Matteo, CEO of Eight Sleep, has some exciting news. And Dylan's coming on to break down the latest AI agent. Hermes agent. Well, anyway, there was some big news this week. Of course, everyone knew that Apple was launching new products, but there were some surprises. And there's some cool stuff, starting with the MacBook Neo. The more downstream take is like, how is Apple affected by the AI boom? But let's start with the actual products because this thing in the video, it looks so small. It looks like an 8 inch laptop. I guess this is. So this is the MacBook Neo, sort of designed to compete with the Chromebook. It comes in at 599. Well, not even just the Chromebook, just all PCs. Yeah, but I mean, you're not going to get this for like, if you're in a professional workplace, go to a desktop with multiple monitors, plug in, you're doing like advanced work. Like, this is for students, this is for the low end or just a personal computer. I think it's designed for people that have an iPhone but don't have a Mac because of cost. Yeah. And now they can have an integrated suite. Yeah, I mean, it's a crazy product. I love the launch video too. It's very weird when they start because it's just this like blank block and then they're adding features to it with cgi. It does a really good job. It's sort of anticlimactic because every feature they add is just like what you'd Expect. Yeah, I was kind of like, oh, is this going to be a touch screen? And then it's like, oh, no, it's just a normal screen. It's like, oh, like guess what it has a keyboard. Boom. Mic drop. Oh, it has two USB C ports. It is kind of cool that they put the headphone jack a little bit further down. Thought that was cool. And then they're like, check it out. You're never gonna guess this. A camera. We put it on the computer. They're like, hey, we heard you liked having an iPad that you could attach a keyboard to. So we basically took an iPad and put a keyboard. But it's very cool how they like sort of expand the product like, show you. Okay, there's the speaker. It's pretty big. It goes on the side. There's two of them. Shows you. But this does not look like a 13 inch computer to me. This looks like an 8 inch computer to me. This looks like a small iPad. And 13 inches is a very normal size. Maybe the model is just like Shack or something. Yeah, yeah. No, I think they actually use some of the big hands to make it like maybe look smaller or something. But 13 inch display, 16 hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So 599 for students, it's $100 cheaper. So 499, that is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made. I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple AirPods Max costs like 500 bucks. Remarkably cheap. A 18 Pro chip, 256 gigs or 512 of storage, four colors. They got in ramp yellow. They call it citrus, but I think everyone's gonna be. And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone. Yeah. 17e. Yeah. And it has Wi Fi 6e, Bluetooth 6 connectivity, 8 gigs of RAM, 1080p, front facing camera. Like people are sort of like, ah, it's underpowered. But look at the price. This is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap was, wow, where was it? I wrote about this. So in 2014. So 12 years ago, long time ago, they sold the MacBook Air for 899 and now they have this down at 499 or 599, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap. Cheap for 2026. Cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops. So this is sort of like their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more. Because if you price sensitive. Well, they have a product for you. And there was something similar that happened with the new suite of iPhones where the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face and the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful and a lot of people want that. But there were also a lot of people who were complaining. I just want a thinner phone. Well then you have the iPhone air and there's going to be crazy trade offs. You only get, I think one camera. The battery life's not nearly as good. Lags. It lags. But for some people, if they're going to be complaining about all the features of the Pro Max, it's like, well, we got the air for you. Stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. So the other products, they launched MacBook Air with an M5 chip, MacBook Pro. With the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip, did you wind up going how much memory did you wind up going with? 48. 48. Is that enough? I feel a little soft. Is that enough to pull up tweets and react to them on a live stream? Apparently you actually have been maxing out something like 32 gigs of RAM, which took me by surprise. I have not had, I've not been memory constrained. But I do actually love the idea of getting the top end memory which is the thing that constrains you on running LLMs locally. Is that correct, Tyler? Yeah, I mean you can always like if you have a really model, you can like get around the memory thing but then it gets like super slow because you're like loading it in and out. Oh, okay. You're loading it in and out for like every time that you're generating. Yeah, you need a lot of memory. So if I go with the 128Gig, the top of the line chip, I should be able to inference a pretty smart model locally, pretty reliably. I mean it's also like you can always just quantize the models down and so you can actually run really frontier open source models on pretty normal hardware. Now I'm just purely thinking for doomsday prepping the idea of, you know, you have your library in case you're bored during the apocalypse. You have your DVD collection, you can watch all the movies from start. That's the big one for you because you'll be able to watch all of American cinema from the beginning. I still don't think I'd actually watch. You wouldn't do that. What would you be doing? Assuming that the Internet's down in this apocalyptic scenario, you can't scroll, plenty of other things to do. What would you do? Take a walk on the beach. What if you can't go outside because there's nuclear fallout everywhere, you're stuck in your bunker. What are you doing? Whittling. Did you get into whittling? I actually used to love whittling as a kid. Called it, he's not going to be watching movies, he's going to be whittling. I will be whittling while I watch movies, while I inference a local model that I can just ask questions to and get all sorts of history. And there might be a few hallucinations because it's not querying the Internet. Because of course in this hypothetical scenario, the Internet is gone, but I would still have access to, you know, all the pre trained information and basically the world's best encyclopedia, which would be fun. What else do they launch in a world? In a world where computers keep going up in price, it's kind of wild to see Apple drop a599 laptop, says Theo. A phone price not agree more. Fry says, oh man, they're going to sell 5 billion of these things. Yeah. This feels like more of a no brainer for kids than an iPad. For for some reason I don't know if I'm just like old school and I'm like, if it has a keyboard, it's horrible. IPads with kids just have really bad aesthetics. It does. Kids with an iPad just zoning out, right? You get them a keyboard, they're locked in, but you get them there. I think there's something here. You're like, are they day trading? Yeah, they're doing something for sure. It might be underpowered, but it'll get the job done. And I think there's something about typing on a keyboard that does lend itself to more creation, less consumption. Like the iPad is a media consumption device. That's where most people use it for. Throw on Netflix, play a game, do something. There aren't that many people that are power users, but as soon as you get the keyboard, you're ready to type, you're ready to work. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also 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. So hilarious chart from Andreessen Horowitz. Apple on capex. Nah, we're good. They looked at the standardized quarterly capital expenditure for Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple and all of the four companies that are working on AI. Amazon obviously through AWS and Anthropic, Microsoft through OpenAI, Alphabet through Gemini, and Meta through MSL. They are all absolutely off to the races, going to the moon on capex. And Apple is down 19% since 2015 on this standardized metric that A16Z put together. Very, very funny. And it's just interesting that Apple has been so unaffected by AI costs, not just on the CapEx side, which where every hyperscaler sort of had to say, yep, you know what, our business is fundamentally different now. We are not the high margin cash flow generating business. We're going to draw down on that cash. We might be taking on some debt. Like this is a big, big different financial model. It's a very different financial model from years past. And buckle up, you're coming with us. Shareholders and the stocks have done well because a lot of shareholders have believed in the goal, believed in the value of AI, believed in the value of building compute infrastructure broadly, and they've been rewarded for it in most cases. But Apple's just sort of sat that out and said, hey, we're not, we're not going to train a foundation model, we're not going to build a whole bunch of compute infrastructure. We're going to serve Gemini, we're going to serve Gemini and we'll pay them what, a billion dollars a year or something like that. Yeah, it's like, yeah. I mean this, this year will be really interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what the new Siri actually looks like, what it can really do. We'll start to see that, I think in Q2. Yes. And then separately, we're expecting new devices from OpenAI, right? Oh yeah, Teasing the puck time, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they can kind of break the AI hardware curse that I feel like is. Well, I wanted to think about that because I wonder if the story's over for some of those like cursed bad launches. Product like we saw friend apparently has found a little niche. Very controversial but humane, has sold to hp. It seems like they're not working on that product anymore. The pin, the AI pin, but the rabbit R1, I think his name's Jesse. You know that product, there's something there where with enough iterations, I feel like that might sell. Well, I was playing with the board the other day, that hardware, it's like a huge screen touch screen that you can play games on. There's still these niche applications that I could potentially, if you have a hardware team, you have the ability to sell something. It wasn't polished. The AI wasn't good enough. Well, the AI got better. You still have the supply chain. Maybe there's a way to cut through, but it probably needs to be a little bit more niche. Like everyone's going to have one. Tyler, what do you think about hardware in the age of AI? I mean, I think the Mac mini is like a good example of like AI hardware right now. Yeah, no, that's a great example. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what, like how exposed the Gemini APIs will be in iOS because if you fully expose Gemini kit in iOS, just like you can call a Weather API or Maps API. Uber exists because there was like a GPS API that you could just call within an iOS application with a couple lines of code. And you didn't have to like figure out where the user was because the iPhone just told you that as long as you click like, yeah, share my location with Uber. If you now get an app that has not just Apple's local LLMs that are sort of mediocre, but it can go and call Gemini and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, you start running into like will someone build an open cloth app? Or something like how much of Apple's AI strategy will wind up being vended into the third party ecosystem which has served them so well for so long. They've sort of turned their back on it. They locked down Apple Vision Pro a little bit more. There was a, there was way less uptake there and, and there's a ton of risk because if I develop like a free iOS app that then incurs like a ton of Gemini tokens and ton of charges, how do those get passed through? Is Apple just biting the bullet on it? But there's something interesting there where we're turning app developers loose to build software that takes advantage not just of local LLM capabilities, but Gemini under the hood and sort of wrap it up in a neat bow that is available to the consumer. Could be very cool. Anyway, the big question that I had and I will get into the essay was so Apple's unaffected by CapEx costs, but they've also with this release, been unaffected by memory costs and the RAM Mageddon. So I will take you through how I dug into the question of memory pricing at Apple. But first I will tell you about Labelbox RL environments, voice robotics evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And I will also tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees incident resolution for access requests and password resets. That's a good sound effect. I like that one. I have one too. Surprise. Can't believe you haven't used that yet. No, no, no. Because I was so burned by the last time I got access to the soundboard and I went too crazy. So there was one. One show where me and Jordy both had full soundboard access. All of the same sound cues. One single show. And it was truly a disaster. What's the metaphor from Greek mythology? It was the. It was Pandora's box for me. Like, once I opened it, I could not resist and I became addicted. And I was pushing the thing. It is very addicting. And it just didn't work. So we were like, no, let's have Jordy play the soundboard. I'll do other stuff. For me as a soundboard artist is when I'm not doing the show, when I'm hanging out on the weekend. Yes. I'm just thinking. I'm just. If somebody says something like, we're at dinner, I'm thinking about the sound effect. Yeah, Yeah. I was hanging out with you and you said something crazy and I wanted to just be like. And so I opened up my phone, I went to YouTube and I pulled up that sound and played it. But then I had to turn on my volume and it took me way too long. And the joke had passed. But we have a solution. Tyler Cosgrove over there has been working on a Soundboard app that can go on your phone and you can have. We should do a widget too, so that it's just there on the home screen. Boop. Your favorite soundboard cues. So expect that soon. Anyway, 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. So the question, like, I get the strategy of Apple saying, look, we're good with Google handling the AI inference stuff. They have GCP, they have the TPU, they got DEMIs, who's got a book written about him by Sebastian Malabi. He, like, DeepMind is great. We're working with them. So Capex unaffected. I understand that. How are they not affected by memory prices? Ram Mageddon has come for us all. And Ben Thompson of Stratecherie and Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball actually had a bet about this and I hope I didn't misspell Jon Gruber's name. They had a bet about this. They said whoever wins this bet gets a steak dinner. A steak dinner was at stake. Stake and Ben Thompson lost. John Gruber won because Jon Gruber said Apple always overcharges for ram. Getting a. If you went to build a computer or a phone or laptop or, you know, iPad equivalent and you just went to retail, getting an extra 128 gigs of memory or a slight memory upgrade might cost you 30 bucks. In the Apple ecosystem that's like $200. So Apple has built in this pricing buffer for a very, very long time and that buffer really saved them this year. But there's a lot more to it. So many companies are dealing with RAM mageddon this year and some stats that are interesting. Dram prices rose 172% throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since September of 2025. TrendForce expects PC DRAM to roughly double in price just in Q1 of 2026 with LPDDR pricing seeing the steepest increases in history. So every wafer that's allocated to an HBM stack, a high bandwidth memory stack for an Nvidia GPU, is literally a wafer denied to the LPDDR 5X module of a mid range smartphone or consumer laptop SSD. So they are truly commodities. There's only so many of them and they can only go to one place or the other. Apparently OpenAI's Stargate initiative alone could consume up to 40% of global DRAM output as it stands today. And this is the problem because there's only three major companies in the memory category. It's Samsung, SK, Hynix and Micron. Together they control 95% of the global DRAM production. Remember Micron has been trying to build a new facility in New York. Yes. And six people basically blocked it. Oh, we talked about that. But and the rumor, the rumor is that it's like foreign funding. Oh, interesting. Actually trying to hold Micron up. Yeah, yeah. I mean Micron has been very. They've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices and so much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called crucial. So if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found crucial ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X Games branded like PC Gamer DDR memory, which was you know, like the monster energy of ram. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is like the branding on crucial ballistics is like insane. Anyway, gamers will be rising up soon with monster energies in hand to take the the RAM by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time. I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen. Just absolute junk. And then the caption will be like, so this is why I can't afford RAM, you know, or this is why RAM is $800 a stick or whatever. And then on the flip side people will say, you know, occasionally there'll be a good AI slot video and people will be like, okay, it's worth paying $800 for RAM because this is so good. Right? Goes both ways. It goes both ways, but clearly people are feeling the pinch. But Apple fans will be sitting out the fight thanks to a few key moves from Apple that help them avoid disaster this year. So one, Apple has long term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory 12 to 24 months in advance. They also benefit from vertical integration and custom silicon. So instead of buying that consumer grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or Nvidia GPUs, for example, they negotiate multi year contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I, yeah, so this is like ram's always been cyclical. Yep. And so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to say basically like lock up price, Samsung's locking up the demand. They, I don't even think Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three, four years ago. Otherwise they may not have priced it in the way that they did. Of course the other thing that maybe you get to is and Samsung's still making their default margin. They're just like the opportunity cost is so high, we could reallocate. The other thing is they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression and still be. So Apple at various times has had over $100 billion in cash. They currently have over 66 billion in cash. They can take the hit. There's, they can also just take a hit to their margin. Every AI lab looking at that cache, Tim, I could really put that to you. They're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of 10, 20, 30 billion into one of the frontier, Frontier labs. Maybe that changes, I don't know. Somebody was throwing out like Apple should buy Anthropic or Amazon should buy Anthropic. But I think the price is too high at this point. It's just too, it's just getting away. But. So I'm not 100% sure about how the manufacturing supply chain for memory works, but I believe that because Apple's specific requirements, it's harder for Samsung to just instantly reallocate product that's been already manufactured in a way where crucial ballistics, if it's going into gaming PC, it's easier to reallocate those wafers. So even if they didn't have those contracts, I think the supply chain's a little bit stickier with Apple because they're vertically integrated. And then yeah, of course they have the money to overpay. We talked about how the MacBook Neo is this pressure release valve. So even if the memory does increase, they have this, they have the cache buffer. They also have the, they're charging 200 bucks for something that costs 30. If it goes to 60, they can just take a hit on margins buffer. Then they have the contract buffer. Then they also have this Neo where if the MacBook Pro goes up in price, the MacBook Pro buyer is probably less price sensitive. They're like, yeah, you know, this year it was $4,000 instead of 3,000. I'm buying it for business purposes, it's not that big of a squeeze. And then the price sensitive buyer says, yeah, you know what, I'm not going to go for the $2,000 laptop. I'm going to go for the $600 laptop this year. And they're still in the Apple ecosystem. But my takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple. To pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation 6 is allegedly going to be delayed until 2028 or 2029 because of rising memory costs. They're going to wait it out because there are three players. It's not just TSMC in this case. It does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas at tsmc, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and increase margins once the next contracts go up for renewal. Whereas if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, Samsung wins. And so there's more of this game theoretic. Like they got to, they have to build. And so I think a lot of people, and Tyler was talking about this with me earlier, like we all Expect this memory shortage to be a few years, not more. Not like five or 10 years. So if you push out the Sony PS6, you're not bullish, Tyler, he's bullish. No, I'm very bullish. But I think, yeah, because there's more players, I think the shortage will be. Just say you're not AGI Pelt. What do you mean? I mean there is a question about if you truly go exponential forever and it just, just like, okay, yeah, there's like, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars of data centers being built. It's like, can even Samsung, Micron, sk, Hynix keep up forever? No. So it might, we might be living in like a permanently higher price just because like it's a more valuable product. Like we get more. Yeah, this time might be different. Might be different. Also the Nintendo Switch 2 might go up in price next year. It's really bad for gamers. Gamer gaming graphics cards are going up in price price. Nvidia's pulling out of gaming graphics cards or they're skipping a year. So it's mayhem for gamers. But long term, the competition between the memory manufacturers should stabilize prices. But you know, just watching all the big companies that are not Apple get caught flat footed is just crazy to watch because it's not like, it's not like the folks at Nintendo or the folks at Sony are like, oh yeah, first time manufacturing something like if you told me that like the team behind the rabbit R1 was like suffering from higher memory costs to be like, yeah, it's a new company, new product. They haven't like Sony has been making PlayStations for decades and they still got caught flat footed on this. And a lot of that is a testament to the brand power that Apple has. The network effects, the scale. They built that they're in this position and still not getting squeezed even when other hyperscalers are getting squeezed on all sorts of stuff. Tim Cook still underrated. He cooked. He has cooked. And yeah, the operational side of Apple is always just habitually underrated. Even in the face of like slight misses on features and products and marketing and oh, this ad didn't land well. The business is still thriving and dealing with just crisis after crisis. Like the tariff should have been a major crisis. They got through it. This memory ram mageddon should have been a crisis that they got through it. It's all been very, very good news for Apple. Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And get that Cha Ching ready because I'm going to tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. Apple is exercising the Coase conjecture. They're waiting for open source models to get better, applying pressure to frontier lab pricing, rejecting anthropic overtures. Anthropic wanted more money from Apple. They went with Google and Gemini. This is from Soren Larsen, who is an economist who I really respect. It may rather be that impatient buyers have adverse selection, revealing actually poor business positioning. So he's identifying Apple's leverage in the system. They're, you know, this consumer aggregator and they've been, they've been doing very well. Kyle Harrison says that quote, we ran the math. OpenAI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term. The most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning. The less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on device AI before it starts. Well, if the on device AI, it happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario, but it is an interesting thesis. I think that across the frontier labs everyone is just very AGI pilled. They're seeing the increase in capabilities, but also these sort of like stacked exponentials. Ben Thompson was explaining this today that when you went from LLMs to reasoning the number of tokens, the number of compute required just to get a single answer when like you know, 10x all of a sudden. And then we saw the same thing with coding agents where these long running tasks are sort of like squaring the amount of compute. And so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand but you get more economic output so it winds up being all worth it. When will Apple release the iPhone? The only other thing, only other thing on the OpenAI memory side is they plan to sell a lot of consumer devices. Oh, so they might be buying it for that, right? Yeah, so we don't really know. But yeah, I think that obviously OpenAI has kind of rolled back some of that one $1.2 trillion number. But seeing, seeing the growth in demand just in this first couple months of the year starts to look like, hey, maybe, maybe, maybe he wasn't so crazy after all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like the, the, the, the models are justifying the compute. And I think that we talked about this yesterday a little bit with the orchestrators, just this idea that, you know, where will the next 10x come from? Well, it's probably from just running 10 instances of Claude Code or Codex and just firing off ten times as much inference. And people are ready to do that. You see it all the time on Twitter, people talking about how much inference they're doing. When will Apple release the iPhone 18? Kalshi has before October at 35% before 2027 at at 34%. What is the chance that they don't release it this year? That would be probably zero. And I think it is. It is zero. So stay tuned. I'm sure Mark Gurman will have good coverage on on the next Nick let's get the Germinator back on. Yeah, well I wanted to invite Jon Gruber to talk about these, but Mark Gurman of course is is welcome at any time, but we have yet to talk to Jon Gruber and he has been covering Apple fantastically throughout his entire career so he would be an interesting gentleman to talk to. TSMcusto First Gusto is the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com submitted a new semiconductor fab Consum construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science park last week. The site is located on Tainan's Anding district adjacent to the F18 fab and covers 15.46 hectares. They're doing more 2 nanometer production, the leading edge with 8 hectares allocated for the production area and 1 hectare for administrative facilities facilities. The project is expected for completion and production start in 2028 says Semi Analysis. So we'll see what what happens in the actual CAPEX guide from tsmc. Ben Thompson has been very disappointed with where TSMC has been guiding on CapEx, but maybe this is a shift. I wonder how much faster it will be to build another TSMC FAB over there. If they ramp production of this new facility before Arizona. If they, if they eclipse and there's a flippening and this gets to scale before Arizona, it will reveal some very serious problems with America's building and permitting system I would imagine. Or maybe, maybe talent pool. I would certainly hope that Taiwan, I mean this is their crown jewel. They should, they should get this up and running fairly quickly without many delays since they've done it before and they are heavily invested in TSMC of course. More importantly, Wendy's US president post new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King See let's, let's watch. Let's rate it. Does he does he put. I like the way that he's holding it.