--:-- Speaker 1: You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, 11/12/2026. We're live from TBPN. I'm the technology of fortune of finance. Capital of capital. Capital of capital.
--:-- Speaker 2: That's Let's see if we can retain our voices Oh, we're across the show.
--:-- Speaker 1: That'd be a question.
--:-- Speaker 2: I am struggling today.
--:-- Speaker 1: You're struggling today?
--:-- Speaker 2: It kill you to put on some merch? Would it kill you to put on some merch?
--:-- Speaker 1: I would love to put on
--:-- Speaker 2: some merch. Launch day.
--:-- Speaker 1: Should I go change right now? Bring me some...
--:-- Speaker 2: The wait is over. I'll throw a sweater If you're looking at the chat, merch.tvpn.com is live. The code chat will get you 50% off.
--:-- Speaker 2: Have at it.
--:-- Speaker 1: Huge day. We're very excited for all of you. Thank you so much.
--:-- Speaker 2: Long time
--:-- Speaker 1: Thanks for supporting us.
--:-- Speaker 2: In the making.
--:-- Speaker 3: Thank you
--:-- Speaker 1: so much for hanging out in the chat. People don't understand how important the chat is to making the show great. Everyone in the chat brings us fact checks, breaking news, funny questions. Sometimes they just are messing Really good with to get us to drink the Diet Coke with two hands. There's a whole language of inside jokes between us and the show.
--:-- Speaker 2: Trying to get us to flash bang at inappropriate times.
--:-- Speaker 1: Never flash bang. Never. No. It's been a joy. It's been one of the most unexpected joys of building the show. We started this not live and I had no idea what going... I thought going live would just let us get Give
--:-- Speaker 2: you podcast the news real time.
--:-- Speaker 1: It's actually this interactive thing that makes it very different from TV, very different from podcasting. And it's why when we talk to people about the show, we call it a show. When we say we're a talk show, we're a live show. And it is something that is different than other media formats. And we've been really fortunate to have a bunch of hilarious and great people hanging out in the chat with us for years now. It's been it's been a fantastic thing. So thank you. Hopefully, everyone got a chance to order. And maybe I'll put on a piece of merch later.
--:-- Speaker 2: Let's pull up... Let's actually pull up the merch.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Pull it up. We can walk walk walk you through it.
--:-- Speaker 2: I wear a size large and everything. I'm six one. I'm responding to the chat.
--:-- Speaker 1: We get it, Jordy. You're six one. We get it.
--:-- Speaker 2: I I know that makes me a short king in your world, John, but I'm doing my best.
--:-- Speaker 2: okay. Flight to
--:-- Speaker 3: China So is right
--:-- Speaker 2: most underrated item in the drop is our Nicey jacket.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, I thought you were going
--:-- Speaker 2: Since 1792.
--:-- Speaker 2: This jacket, the construction of it, We worked with my dear friend, one of my oldest friends in the world, Sebastian, on this drop who spent his whole career in the fashion industry as a founder. And I'm already losing my voice. This this jacket just turned out amazing.
--:-- Speaker 1: Well, while we're talking about the New York Stock Exchange, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock We also, of course, have to tell everyone about Ramp, our presenting sponsor. And you'll see Ramp all over the merch. Time is money, save, bargain reviews, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole
--:-- Speaker 2: lot more all in one place. Second item that I want to call out
--:-- Speaker 2: Because it is not just an item of clothing, it's a step forward for mankind. True. Because part of the reason this drop took so long is that we were perfecting the plain white tea. So you have the TBPN plain white tea.
--:-- Speaker 1: People have been working on this for decades. Yeah. Decades, generations.
--:-- Speaker 2: In in some ways hundreds of years many many brands before us have tried Yes. And failed to make the perfect white t shirt. We could have, you know, come out with a bunch of apparel, you know, over a year ago. But because we were so deep in the lab perfecting this t shirt, it just took time.
--:-- Speaker 2: thank you for your patience. But we finally did it. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it.
--:-- Speaker 1: I think... Well, what was it?
--:-- Speaker 2: And it's literally a blank white t shirt and it just says TBPN on the tag.
--:-- Speaker 1: And obviously... It's sort of like an if know you heard that. Sebastian worked really hard on that. But I think we also put 9,000,000 of compute behind that, working on that.
--:-- Speaker 2: I don't think we're talking about the exact amount but it was quite the swarm.
--:-- Speaker 1: Everyone was worried about the swarm. No one
--:-- Speaker 2: had applied 7 figures of test time compute to the white t shirt problem.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. But that's one the benefits of our overall strategy here
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. TBPN. That's right.
--:-- Speaker 1: Quartering the market. Anyway, I wanna I wanna understand your mindset. I wanna understand your mindset because you're losing your voice. How do you... How does that make you feel? Good. You think you might not be able to do the show tomorrow? You have the opportunity.
--:-- Speaker 2: I have the opportunity to do this show tomorrow.
--:-- Speaker 1: You're feeling a little stuffy.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm just... I got... I think I got a frog in my throat.
--:-- Speaker 1: Good. Good. You're a little stuffy? You're a little sleepy today? Good. You have the opportunity to get better podcasting while sleepy? Good. Yeah. We're in the Jocko Willink mindset right now. This is this is what will take you into the future for sure. For sure. You know who needs to embrace the Jocko Willink mindset? NVIDIA shareholders. Jensen Wong got caught with a second extramarital affair. Good. You have the opportunity to get a new job, work...
--:-- Speaker 2: I a I need a, you know, transition. Okay. Because... We can transition. This is the greatest business tragedy of my lifetime. Yeah. And it is... The whole thing is, like, so unfortunate, so disappointing, you know, irrespective of the fact that Jensen, you know, seemingly made the decision to have have these affairs and bears responsibility for that, but it doesn't stop the situation overall from being like deeply, you know, tragic for pretty much everyone involved.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. You called me yesterday and I was a little under the weather still. And you said like, you know, a second affair has hit the timeline related to NVIDIA. And I didn't put it together that it was Jensen and the vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. I just thought it was something else going on in the chaotic NVIDIA world. It was in fact related to him. The news is Jensen Huang resigned as CEO this morning less than twenty four hours after it was reported that he has a second affair, this time with a colleague who reported directly to him. The New York Times says the relationship was with Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's chief VP of healthcare, and that the two were seen being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during GTC in March. And so NVIDIA CEO CFO Colette Kress will be taking over as interim CEO. We'll take you through her career and and what this means for the company while the board searches for a permanent replacement. She's been at NVIDIA since 2013. So a lot of people there's there's some people on the timeline that are like, this is not that big of a deal, but it is of course an enormous deal because first, it's a spy and second...
--:-- Speaker 2: Who's saying it's not that big of a
--:-- Speaker 4: deal?...
--:-- Speaker 1: Plenty of people that are in the team Jensen. If you go through the timeline... Oh.
--:-- Speaker 2: It's pretty evenly his situation is not that big of a deal. I think the implications of Jensen being out, I don't think anyone
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, would true. Deny True. True. But there are definitely people...
--:-- Speaker 2: But you're this into perspective, like Jensen has been running and building NVIDIA longer than I have been alive. Yeah. My entire life up Yep. Until this morning, Jensen has been CEO
--:-- Speaker 1: That's great.
--:-- Speaker 2: Of NVIDIA Yeah. Running it day in and day out. Yeah. And coming from a different era where founders didn't have, you know you know, extreme control over their businesses. Right? Yep. So despite being founder led this whole time, he...
--:-- Speaker 1: He doesn't have super bugging Not
--:-- Speaker 2: not in that much of a different situation than like a hired gun. See...
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. In that he had a board
--:-- Speaker 2: That has been incredibly loyal, and it's obviously very easy to be loyal when your Yeah. Stock has when a CEO is leading the company through this sort of like historic appreciation.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. But affair with a subordinate is, I believe, like a very, very clear line in the sand in the NVIDIA code of conduct applies to everyone. It's a legal issue immediately. It's not a complex morality debate or question about how does how does this impact his relationship with his family. And none of that matters. It's cut and dry. It's the board has a job to do in this case because it's it's specifically with someone who reports directly to you at the company, which is against the rules that NVIDIA has agreed to and put forward and created like a whole structure every company has. But it's worth it's worth restating that this is I I saw someone as soon as the news dropped said relationship with the subordinate, it's done deal. He's out. And and they were cracked. And and now, Colette Kress is running the company. So she's been at NVIDIA since 2013. She was always at the top of my list for the most powerful women in tech. There's been whole push for powerful women in tech and I've always been just she's been still underrated. Her, Susan Lee, Sarah Fryer, there's so many others. Anat Ashkenazi, Ruth Parrott, there's so many powerful women CEOs. Shotwell. Yeah. Yeah. And she's been among them who they haven't a lot... She has not been someone who's been talking at conferences constantly and going on the podcast circuit, but clearly immensely immensely powerful, deeply entrenched in the business from going back to 2013. Clearly, been there during multiple growth stages, multiple contractions, seen every piece of the business. So this personally gives me a lot of confidence to go forward with business as usual for NVIDIA, the company. It is interesting that she's being framed as an interim CEO, not being framed as a potential successor, but we'll see where all this goes. We have Dylan Patel from Semi Analysis coming on the show at noon Okay. To break down a little bit more of
--:-- Speaker 2: what... Business as usual in terms of the operations Yes. And just making sure that the trains run on time. Yes. The big question is around like
--:-- Speaker 1: Deal making.
--:-- Speaker 2: Deal making Yep. On the supply chain side, on the on the on the customer side Yes. And on the sort of like capital market side. Given the the sort of like shake up, I can't... I imagine that that NVIDIA will maybe pump the brakes on some of this like sort of wild deal making in terms of, you know, operating as that central bank of AI. You have to think that there's been a bunch of big deals in the works, things like NeoLabs, inference platforms. There will be some motivation from NVIDIA to like, you know, project confidence and and hopefully not pull out of deals that are sort of on the finish line.
--:-- Speaker 2: Right? But you can imagine like the the everyone that's been in the pipeline to raising capital from NVIDIA is probably questioning like, can I really lean on this anymore? You know, if, like, two weeks ago, it was, like, thumbs up, handshake deal, like, And let's get something now, I don't think you can really lean on that capital.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yes. So two sides of the NVIDIA coin of the business model of the role that NVIDIA plays. One is make GPU, sell GPU. Right? And CollectCres is clearly completely able to go to all of the buyers, understand their demand forecast, how many GPUs they want, in what quantities, at what time scales, go to manufacturers, get them made and packaged on time, get them delivered on time. That is not the problem. Do do you do you debate that or...
--:-- Speaker 5: I mean, there's something about like TSMC famously, the relationship is very much like not set in stone. It's Yes. Based off mutual respect or whatever. Yes. And that's like extremely important that they keep that. And it seems like more and more that's like kind of the main moat of of NVIDIA.
--:-- Speaker 5: Is kind of Yeah. Maybe you can just use AI
--:-- Speaker 1: to Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To be able to push aside and and maybe Apple goes back to being the number one important one or or TPU or or Trainium. There's a whole bunch of other folks in the chip design and production world that would love to jump to the front of the line at TSMC. So I agree with you. The other thing, the question of like, you know, can you still be the central bank of AI without the central banker of AI? That is your core contention. The other question is on talent. I think that there is a question like Jensen is a founder mode CEO and he's an engineer. And if he's now going to be if the new NVIDIA CEO is going to be competing against the head of the TPU program, the head of AMD, the head of Tranium, the jalapeno. I'm sure Anthropics working on custom chips. And then we just talked to 12, you know, new chip companies on the show in the last month. You have so many different startups where if you're a an elite level talent, previously Jensen could give you a call and say, hey, I want you to come into this organization. I want you to work for me. We're the biggest. We're growing really fast. I can give you a three x stock appreciation because I just did and and we can make a big grant for you and I can do... I can play very aggressively and fundamentally, you still are joining a founder led company. So come here instead of going to Google or Amazon or somewhere else or even AMD.
--:-- Speaker 1: And and that pitch becomes more difficult in Yeah. The post Jensen era when you could be looking at a at an etched, at a at a cerebris, a jalapeno program, at, you know, Fractile. Like, there's so many of these companies that offer the founder led journey to a prospective hire. And so that is a big big Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: You know, on the other side, on the on the capital side, it's possible that you go from Jensen acting as the banker, GP, whatever you want to call it
--:-- Speaker 2: To investment by committee.
--:-- Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. Is much better.
--:-- Speaker 2: That's just gonna be a lot slower Right. Which slows things down. Yep. The big question I think everyone has is like, I don't... I can't imagine Jensen just going dark Mhmm. And sitting back. The the the sort of like next five, ten years, it's gonna have to go in front of Congress. There's active DOJ investigations. He's gonna be licking his wounds. But this is somebody worth, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars could join any company
--:-- Speaker 2: Could, you know, invest in a seen amount of his own money and getting something new off the ground. And I think is gonna be very, very motivated to make something happen. Sure. And we'll have to wait and see how some of these investigations, you know, pan out.
--:-- Speaker 2: If there was real wrongdoing outside of the affairs Mhmm. Then we could be looking at a different situation. But I think Elon, if I'm... If I remember correctly, is basically like, why don't you join TeraFab, you know?
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Was that... At what point in the saga was... Did that happen?
--:-- Speaker 2: Things like this morning? Because you guys
--:-- Speaker 1: This morning. That is that is a is a strong support.
--:-- Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe But Maybe
--:-- Speaker 1: mean the I I would say that the tech community is divided on this question. There... As I read through the timeline there are clearly folks who are in the pro Jensen camp, whatever that means. Maybe that means he needs to apologize or step into a different role. But there's nuance there and then there's people that are in the anti Jensen camp. And it is and it does align with business interests. You know, if you are a startup that was building on open source models and you just watched the biggest champion of open source go down, you're probably upset.
--:-- Speaker 2: Chad is saying he's 63, you know, seen Jensen's schedule and been in the room with Jensen a number of times over the last couple of years, he has the energy of a, you know, 25 year old. And I don't think he's going to be thinking, you know what? I I I would have been retiring in a couple years anyways. Like, this is not somebody that you... That I at least ever imagined retiring.
--:-- Speaker 5: He's apparently in the in the information they say he planned to run the company for another sixty years. Wow. With no succession planning.
--:-- Speaker 1: Sixty years? He's gonna run until he's a 100 and...
--:-- Speaker 2: So that's what I'm saying, like, after after, you know, some of these investigations get resolved, I think he will be extremely motivated Yeah. Because I bet you he has a pretty good idea of like who's behind like the timing of... There's a lot of
--:-- Speaker 1: tinfoil hat on the timeline today. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: Do we still have our tinfoil hat? We might need to pull it out.
--:-- Speaker 1: Need to pull out the tinfoil.
--:-- Speaker 2: We should have released a tinfoil hat in the Merch store. We should. Branded tinfoil hat. Team's looking around for it.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. So there was some speculation in the chat around the question of was Trump referring to Jensen in that sixty minutes interview. That seems to be the consensus interpretation, but there's been no confirmation. There's been a lot of back and forth there. The Wall Street Journal is basically wall to wall NVIDIA coverage today as Jensen steps down or is removed as the CEO of NVIDIA. So Collette Kress was named Interim Chief Executive. She was a longtime Lieutenant of the departing CEO Jensen Wong and oversaw the chipmaker's finances during its climb to become one of the world's most valuable companies. A veteran of the tech industry, Kress, I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal. Kress joined NVIDIA in 2013 after holding finance roles at Cisco. Let's give it up for Cisco. Microsoft and Texas Instruments. Crest has overseen the aggressive expansion of NVIDIA's balance sheet which the company has used to provide financial backstops for customers in exchange for buying its artificial intelligence chips. So she's definitely been in the room for the the becoming the central bank of AI. Whether she's been driving that or not is a different discussion. But she's certainly overseen it and
--:-- Speaker 2: been Yeah. Would I would hope that when Jensen wants to rip 20,000,000,000 into something Yeah. He's getting, you know, the two thumbs up Yeah. From press first.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, there's still some debate over like how much of that was central bank bailouts versus how much of it was just good deal making. Like Perplexity was sort of losing its luster for a while where people were like, oh, well, like, if if Perplexity's plan is to be a Chat GPT competitor, the ship seems to have sailed on that broadly because a lot of the hydrated UI that comes with perplexity on the early stage. I know you were using the product for a little bit.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. Started the show, I was like daily driving perplexity.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. And it was nice because you pull the hard
--:-- Speaker 2: images. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: All of that's been built into checking.
--:-- Speaker 2: The web search was And
--:-- Speaker 1: Gemini and Claude. And so that that spot in the market felt like it was you were gonna only have a very small slice. You'd be like the duck duck go of the category and and you were never going to be like a Google sized entity. At the same time, I'm glad we're having Dylan Patel come on because he's he said he's using Perplexity Computer and Semi Analysis fairly often and using it to use different models and Persistent agent. Persistent agent. So it'll just be interesting. So that's a it was sort of a weird deal at the time because it felt like Perplexity was on a downswing in terms of overall vibes. It felt like there weren't many venture capitalists that were excited about leading another round in the tens of billions. Jensen came in, and it was like, is he saving the company, or is he actually just making a very sharp bet and has the only balance sheet that can actually make a smart bet at that time? So we'll need to see the the the the scorecard for Jensen's deal making is still very much out in the TBD. It could look genius. It could look like, oh, wow. He really was just backstopping everything, and a lot of those companies wound down over the next five to ten years. So it was really just this, like, you know, scattershot attempt to to keep the overall market healthy, which it clearly has done. But there's also the world where he just is able to clock a good company that VCs are seeing the right thing and they don't necessarily have the balance sheet to go after. So TBD. So, Kress praised Wong on Thursday in a statement saying that she will continue, quote, building the extraordinary building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last thirty three years. In a note to staff, Crest thanked them for their dedication throughout an extraordinarily difficult period leading up to Wong's resignation on Thursday. Quote, we play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution and we have important work ahead of us, she said. Kress will take over a company that has been badly shaken by the scandal surrounding Guang. Nvidia has shed more than $600,000,000,000 in market value this week. Guang's departure after two extramarital affairs includes one with suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee is likely is likely to leave lingering scrutiny of both NVIDIA's dealings with China and its huge balance sheet. NVIDIA has used its massive reservoir of cash to bankroll the broader AI industry, a practice Crest has defended. Critics have argued NVIDIA's efforts to prop up demand across the industry has left it more vulnerable to a downturn, but Kress has characterized the deals as savvy investments. Quote from her, she said in August, we recognize the scale of this support and we know that some will call this circular financing. We see it differently. The equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent. And so she has been, you know, optimistic about their financing strategy, but again, a lot of these marks are TBD. We'll see where the companies land. But she has also been at times receptive to investors' concerns, pumping the brakes in August on a landmark agreement to help OpenAI secure data center project after a negative market reaction. Crest joined NVIDIA at the urging of her two sons according to a 2023 interview she gave to an Israeli newspaper. At the time, NVIDIA was working to broaden beyond its traditional market of PC gaming into new business lines such as chips for cars. Quote, the best thing I could tell any type of CFO coming in, be careful how much time you spend thinking about the trends that you've seen in the past and have a good understanding of how things... How quickly things could move going forward, she told the Journal in 2016, just three years after she joined. Kress said she was drawn to NVIDIA because of Wong, whom she described as a visionary and a culture she described as essentially ego less. We're a rather flat organization, she said in 2018. We actually don't have org charts. We kind of know who works for who. NVIDIA's corporate governance has come under scrutiny this week as engulfed... A scandal engulfed the company. NVIDIA had no succession plan in place for Huang and its board had no chair before Thursday when it named longtime director Harvey c Jones to that role. The board has full confidence in Colette to deliver on our commitments to shareholders, customers, partners, and to each of you, Jones said in a note to staff. The board is starting to search for the company's next CEO. I saw I saw Doug over at semi analysis throwing some names out there. There's a whole bunch of questions. Maybe they'll pull someone from Apple. Maybe from someone from the NVIDIA bench will step up. We'll see. What do you think, Jordy?
--:-- Speaker 2: Chat is saying that a third... There's a third affair confirmation for it.
--:-- Speaker 2: Anyone can drop the link in. That would be helpful. I just searched it. I'm not seeing it.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. Well, we'll stay on top of it. It was NVIDIA's bet on AI that turned the company into a global behemoth. It also turned Krass into one of the America's wealthiest self made women according to... Ranked higher than Beyonce in Forbes latest list from June. NVIDIA's recent stock slide has cramped her net worth, though Kress holdings of NVIDIA were still more... Worth more than $800,000,000 as of Wednesday's close. She received $14,000,000 in total compensation. Last year, she graduated from University of Arizona and received an MBA from SMU in 1996 according to her LinkedIn page. She married David Kress, a former Microsoft executive who got his start in the company's mail room. And they have two sons.
--:-- Speaker 2: Amazing story.
--:-- Speaker 1: Fun story. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, NVIDIA is all over the news. Jensen Huang has been ousted as NVIDIA CEO, if you're just tuning in. Dylan Patel says NVIDIA board needs to chase down Charlie Kawas and Johnny Siruji. They're the only somewhat viable replacements. And so there was some back and forth on this whether or not they had the right shops. I think they have Apple DNA, but... Or Broadcom. But we'll see. We'll see.
--:-- Speaker 2: In other news, it it sounds like Outlook is down.
--:-- Speaker 1: Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is down. Hacks are down.
--:-- Speaker 2: Just Just users are Okay. Reporting an
--:-- Speaker 1: Well, stream's still up, so no no time for email. You just have good. You can watch more TBPN, I suppose. Fabricated knowledge, Doug O'Laughlin over at somebody else's. Is not gonna lie. I know a lot of you are on X. If you're a big active manager, you should email the board tomorrow saying that it's a conduct violation, but it's in shareholder interest. He stays. Make a transition plan. I don't know. The company is not set up to run without him, like full stop email. And so this is what I'm talking about where there is this debate and there's people on on both sides saying he should remain or he should depart. Although, it feels like the departure has happened and he's out. So we will see.
--:-- Speaker 2: We'll what see happens. Sean Maguire is saying now that Jensen is out, my pick for his successor would be Nikesh Arora. My opinion Jensen was so important for the AI ecosystem because he was technical aggressive and had the credibility required to be aggressive. What Nikesh did at Palo Alto the last eight years is remarkable and reflected in his stock which is up 10 x.
--:-- Speaker 1: Multiple TBPN
--:-- Speaker 2: businesses He's as one of only a handful of people who have the credibility required to be aggressive on day one. Nikesh has the three attributes listed above while being a world class deal maker and having all the necessary... Losing my voice, the frog the frog is rising up Good. To keep NVIDIA at the center of the AI ecosystem. There's no easy choice, but he'd be my go to.
--:-- Speaker 1: Mhmm. Tyler, what do you have for us?
--:-- Speaker 5: Yeah. So Reuters is reporting that he had a relationship with a second employee.
--:-- Speaker 1: Do we have any more information on that?
--:-- Speaker 5: Just just the headline. Okay.
--:-- Speaker 1: Well... Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: To be honest, my my hunch at this point is that we'll see at least four or five more come out.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, mean, when you find an ant in your when you find an ant in your kitchen, the... Is it? The expected number of ants is not one? Yeah. Isn't that it? Right? Something like that. Well, we of course love Nikesh Arora and we love Console. Console builds AI agents that are an 800 IT HR and clients for giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Nikesh, of course, came on the show when he acquired our sponsor console. So there's some other people that are making a name in the surrounding coverage of the Nvidia Jensen Huang saga. The 31 year old trader, he called out Jensen Huang's China problem and he shorted Nvidia six months ago. Six months, no one really noticed. Culper Research's report all that changed this week. Ben Cohen has the story in the Wall Street Journal. Should I take everyone through this, Jordy?
--:-- Speaker 1: So when Christian LaMarco decided to start his own short selling firm, he named it in honor of the spies who gathered intelligence for George Washington during the Revolutionary War. He had watched a television show about the Culper Ring which secretly tracked the movements of British forces almost two hundred and fifty years ago. Have you seen this show, Jordy? It's called What do you mean? Turn. It's fantastic. It's such a good show. It's not on HBO or any of those like super premier things so it feels a little like, oh, you're just watching a TV show. It doesn't feel like a movie yet but it just gets better and better and better. By the end, I was like, I should have been paying better, more attention at the start because it is a fantastic show. I highly recommend Turn the whole Culper Ring is a fantastic story. It's... I think it's it's pretty accurate about the history. But that's what he named his hedge fund. Now he's caught up in his own story involving national security, the President of The United States, and spectacular allegations of modern espionage. Six months ago, Culper Research published a report outlining its case against NVIDIA, which just today is down 5.65%. It opened lower at the open and has popped a little bit, but still down significantly over the last over the last thirty days after the... Over the last six months. NVIDIA had become the most valuable company in the world by making the chips that power the global AI economy. His investigation raised questions about NVIDIA's business in China and what he called an uncomfortably close relationship between CEO Jensen Huang and a woman named Alice Huang who was an executive at one of the major the company's major business partners in Southeast Asia. The 40 page report summarized the firm's short position in a simple thesis. This is not a bet against AI, Culper wrote. We are short NVIDIA for one reason. The company has a significant China problem. At first, nobody paid much attention to the 31 year old short seller whose research typically focused on companies most people have never heard of. The day his report about one of the most important companies on the planet was published, Jensen Huang touched down in Beijing aboard Air Force One on a state trip with President Trump. And if you remember, that was a very, very odd trip because Jensen was not added to the guest list initially and then was added at the last second and actually boarded the plane in Alaska. I remember we were like, that is... Why is he in Alaska? We're making jokes about like, oh, g... GPUs. Maybe it's cold up there or something because we couldn't really put it together. Well, was because we now know that there was a lot of back and forth on whether or not Jensen should be on that trip, whether it makes sense, whether it's good to have him on or off. There was a lot of debate going on internally. So the next day, Nvidia stock hit a record high. So this was like the peak Jensen is in China with Trump, everything. Like, if there's business to be done there, it's getting done. Sometimes people don't care about what you have to say. Sometimes they sometimes people care, sometimes they don't. Lamarcko said in an interview, good. It's in this case they cared six months later. Six months later questions about Alice Wong, her coziness...
--:-- Speaker 2: This is a question we've been asking this week Yeah. To ourselves is like why did it take so long for this story to come out in this way? Yeah. Because again, in the New York Times, in October, as early as October 10
--:-- Speaker 2: Of last year, you had Mega Speed, you had Alice
--:-- Speaker 2: You had all these names in the New York Times. Yeah. It was obviously a suspicious situation. And so it feels strange that a lot of this information you could have found out at any point over the last year. Why did it break, you know, over the last week?
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, does time up with the midterms. People are thinking that maybe there's more there's more power in the... In in Washington to actually go after something like this. There's a lot of there's a lot of these theories and we'll we'll get to many of them. This week, those questions turns into revelations that NVIDIA CEO was having an extramarial affair with a woman who's now suspected of working for Chinese intelligence services. Culper's report went from being ignored to becoming a rare piece of security analysis to go viral. I've never seen anything quite like this, he said. As his research blew up, so did his phone. He muted notifications from X where his Nvidia posts have racked up millions of views and turned down TV interview requests. NVIDIA has lost more than 1,000,000,000,000 in market value and the stock is down 20% since Culper's report, but it's unclear if the epic corporate fiasco has made Lamarco money. He declined to say how much he's earned from the most prescient call of his career or if he's still shorting the company. Of course, there were some... The stock had traded down through June and then rallied to basically all time highs October 5, October 6. So as a short seller, timing is everything. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So Lamarco grew up in Upstate New York and discovered the world of investing as a finance major at Grove City College, a small Christian school in Pennsylvania. One day, Lamarco drove to Carnegie Mellon for a stock picking contest where he would compete with Ivy Leaguers. His goal, he said at the time, was to prove that Grove City students can compete with students from the best schools in the country, LaMarco said. He he... Him and his teammate went long Nexstar Media Group and won second place in a $100 prize. Since finance recruiters weren't in the habit of visiting Grove City College, Lamarco knew he
--:-- Speaker 2: Do you think he creative? Does that count as sort of achieving his goal? What's Second place?
--:-- Speaker 1: No. Oh. Yeah. You got second place? Good. You have the opportunity to go on or short NVIDIA. Since finance recruiters weren't in the habit of visiting Grove City College, Lamarco knew he would have to be creative and aggressive to get attention. He emailed his own research to hedge funds and got a job at a long short firm in Chicago where he worked from 2017 to 2019. Then he moved to Pittsburgh with a few months of savings and struck out on his own. His firm needed a name he remembered. Turn, Washington Spies. It's AMC show. That's right. AMC show that he first watched in high school... In a high school friend's basement. He thought the Culper Ring's work monitoring British troops in occupied New York had something in common with his own. Similarly, he wrote, we take an exhaustive investigative approach to investment research. Before long, he moved to New York himself and began working out of a Brooklyn apartment while his Shiba Inu begged for treats. He's on the Doge train. I like it. Like a Shiba Inu. Like other short sellers, the sleuths at Culper say they are out to expose deception, financial irregularities, and all the ways companies scam investors, and of course, make a profit. Since its founding, Culper has targeted dozens of public companies, mostly small cap stocks, but Lamarco and his two analysts have taken on powerful forces. Before last year, a window and glass manufacturer hired Elon Musk's attorney and sued Lamarcko for defamation after he alleged the company had links to the Sinaloa drug cartel. He also tried to make a $1,000,000 wager with Jimmy Fallon offering in his report to pay up if the late night host flew in electric air taxis made by Archer Aviation, a company whose CEO appeared on The Tonight Show and a company that Culper was betting against. He had never he never heard back. So he was trying to get some money on the line with Jimmy Fallon over Archer, which has been a controversial company for a long time because a lot of excitement and and promotional videos. But they have yet to properly ship or or, you know, have customer usage reports.
--:-- Speaker 2: Let's get more into some of the Please. Reactions. Please. Take us through. Even Tay Kim last night said you can't have an affair with a direct report. It's over.
--:-- Speaker 1: It's over.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yep. And that is coming from... Very strong. One of the strongest defenders of NVIDIA throughout every up and down Yeah. Over the last few years.
--:-- Speaker 1: Before we move on to the next
--:-- Speaker 1: Post, let me tell you about MongoDB. It's the only thing faster than the AI market. Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. 10 out of 10 for the sound board today.
--:-- Speaker 2: What else is going on? People are talking about whoever bought Jensen's jacket for $960,000. Of course, the proceeds went to charity. I think like it or not, this jacket is now worth more in my opinion. It's like the craziest story in technology history, in many ways, could argue business history. Like we've never seen we've never seen a fall from grace like this, and I think the jacket is just Jensen owns that jacket forever. DA, who was on the show last week, says it's interesting that almost no one in the tech sector seems to think that lying to shareholders and cheating on your wife, presuming she was unaware, are fireable offenses, but yet NVIDIA's board members did. Everyone's hot take on this began with, of course it is bad, but the unspoken part is money over everything, sign of the times. Sean Maguire disagrees. He says this has nothing to do with money. This is about America winning in AI, which is interesting because then you have to make the argument that selling chips to China is part of America's strategy of winning in AI, which is again, you know, there are arguments for, but, you know, strong arguments again. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: The the jacket discourse is very interesting. I agree with you. I think the jacket is a piece of history, probably more valuable, but maybe finds its way into museum at some point. Yeah. What's interesting is that it feels like people are maybe trying to front run Jensen stories to promote limited items and limited jackets. Do you see this thing in Vanity Fair? So Vanity Fair just posted yesterday. Jensen Huang did have an ill advised affair. He did not wear vintage Saint Laurent. I think that's how you say it.
--:-- Speaker 2: There was a viral post where I think somebody used AI.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yes. But why? Why are you putting him in a different jacket? Because you own a lot of those jackets and if it goes up in value you can sell them. Is that why?
--:-- Speaker 2: Did just say he looked pretty good in Saint Laurent.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. So Jensen, so the news of the Affairfield acts with memes about Chinese spies and mistresses in various... In variety of configurations by Monday evening. It had reached the fashion world's stylish netizens. The Instagram account hiddenNY, an anonymous digital mood board and cultural platform, posted a series of images in studded leather jackets. The caption read Jensen in Heidi Salmon SLP studded leather jacket after admitting to an affair with child... With Chinese spy. It is well known that Wong is a leather jacket enthusiast, one sold for $960,000 But despite Wong's penchant for black leather for a black leather moment, it appears that he was not wearing this particular jacket as previously shared by Hidden in a variety of other accounts. A quick run through an AI image detector debunked Wong being a slim maniac, what slim manes fervent fans often call themselves, at least in this particular case, Synth ID, the Synth ID detector created by Google DeepMind to identify AI generated or enhanced media by OpenAI, Google or others detected the images posted by hidden and others used online appeared to be edited with AI image generation. So people are swapping the jacket out.
--:-- Speaker 2: I've never seen somebody memed this hard outside of maybe Charlie Kirk. Yeah. And the irony in this situation is that gen... It's... They're... All the generations are powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The thing that, you know, his his creation.
--:-- Speaker 1: His creation
--:-- Speaker 2: is... Bern Hobart says on one hand boards have to do what they have to do. On the other hand, he's a guy who's worth a 150,000,000,000, knows everyone in hardware, named his company after the Latin word for spite, he lives in a state where you can't enforce non compete. So Oh. Like I said earlier, you know, after I'm sure that Jensen is already plotting his next move.
--:-- Speaker 1: His comeback.
--:-- Speaker 2: There's always, you know, there's always a world where you have a situation like with, you know, Sam where there's, some sort of comeback, but I think it's harder to pull off with active congressional DOJ investigations with a public company. Way different situation. Much much different situation. And so I would expect after he gets through this period, there's a comeback story that could involve joining, you know, SpaceX Yeah. Working on TerraFab Yeah. Could involve something net new. But he's probably one one trip away, one visit from Taiwan away from having a pretty, like viable...
--:-- Speaker 2: Like it'll be interesting if he can like... If everything he's ever said about NVIDIA's moat, he can sort of...
--:-- Speaker 1: I take it back.
--:-- Speaker 2: Take it back and just show that like it really... The moat is was him all along. Interesting. I... You know, it's not hard to imagine a world where he can, you know, rally the right group of people to go and be, very competitive again in this category. And it's not like he's gonna be like, you know what? I'm actually gonna get into the harness business. I always wanted to I always wanted to build a sort of a light wrapper around the Frontier Labs. It's just... There's one thing this guy's gonna do. And there's billions of people that would happily back up the truck.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. What is the Chinese stock market doing? Are they reacting positively to this or negatively to this? We know we discussed that the AI trade in China was falling off a cliff. I'd love to know a little bit more on are there any correlations because I saw one post that was like the index fund investor can't be rugged because it showed the S and P 500 chugging along even though Nvidia has sold off so much. If you're in the broad index, you're doing okay. But I'm interested to know what's going on. The information has some more some more details here. Relationship with a woman from whose Chinese firm obtained the banned NVIDIA chips in which The US suspected was providing information to Chinese intelligence services. The move comes as several former employees told the information that Wong was widely believed to be in a separate relationship with Kimberly Powell, the vice president who ran healthcare technology related initiatives of the company, and reportedly directly and reported directly to Wong. The alleged relationship was widely discussed by employees for years, these people said. The New York Times early reported that video evidence of the affair between these two executives have been shared.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. And part of it is like it shows as incredible as Jensen is, it shows like an extreme lack of judgment or potentially like an addiction that he would think that with the amount of enemies that he has in the world, people that benefit from him, you know, being knocked off of his horse. Totally. Why do you think you can, you know... We're now seeing three. Yeah. If there's three, there could very well be many many more.
--:-- Speaker 2: Right? And the idea that you could do this given that you're on video Yeah. Every single day of the year. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally.
--:-- Speaker 2: You just... It's yeah. Again, there's so many... Like part of why people are having so much fun with like, you know, conspiracy theories right now is that there are so many people that benefit in very meaningful way from this series of events. Right? It's like you can make the argument for geopolitical adversaries, other other chip manufacturers, you know, certain, call it, religions slash political movements, right? The sort of who benefits. People have been posting that with EA in all caps. Sure. Now the idea that it really at the end of the day is just surprising that given how much his company is in the spotlight, this didn't come out, you know, last year. It makes sense why they hired the crisis, you know, comms firm.
--:-- Speaker 1: A year ago.
--:-- Speaker 2: A year ago.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yep. Makes sense. Let me tell you about Shopify then we'll get the update from Tyler. Shopify is the commerce 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. Tyler, what'd you find?
--:-- Speaker 5: Yeah. So the Star 50, which is like their... The Chinese index of a bunch of like AI supply chain firms, chip companies, It was down like 40% over the summer. That was that big number. And then in the past month, it's down 8%.
--:-- Speaker 5: It's not... Doesn't seem to be like really
--:-- Speaker 3: Quarterly.
--:-- Speaker 5: That much based off this news. Last week, it's up 11.5%.
--:-- Speaker 1: Because, I mean, the immediate impact you would think would be you no longer have a strong soft power CEO who is biting chip controls at every turn. And so I would expect that the net number of GPUs that make it to China in one way or another decreases over the next few years.
--:-- Speaker 5: Yeah. But I mean, you know, we've heard news about the Chinese government preventing Chinese companies from actually getting the chips even when they're already in China.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. I think it's it...
--:-- Speaker 5: The situation is is pretty complicated.
--:-- Speaker 1: think that's two factors. I think that like if you are a Chinese AI lab, you have to deal with the US government and the Chinese government but at the end of the day, you want to develop a great model and you wanna do that in a way that doesn't get the Chinese Communist Party to mess with you or or hurt your business or attack you or put you in jail or do something else. And you also want to you also need to get a yes from the American supplier and the U. S. Government. And so ideally you want all three of those aligned and just because one will still push back against you, well you have one yeah. In this case the government's going be the US government's going be pushing back more. That's just extra extra
--:-- Speaker 5: Yeah. These things are very overdetermined.
--:-- Speaker 1: Dirt in the gears. Extremely overdetermined. Extremely overdetermined.
--:-- Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton was sharing thoughts on the situation. Really? What'd say? From her side, and again I don't I don't know I don't know what's true at this point. Mhmm. Like it just feels like an extremely chaotic information environment. She was saying like Jensen never got a defensive briefing about Alice Wong being a suspected asset or or spy.
--:-- Speaker 1: You should have been listening to TBPN a year ago.
--:-- Speaker 2: We didn't explicitly say that we were... She was a spy but we were like this whole thing is like really...
--:-- Speaker 1: Basically said to watch out. We didn't know anything. And so... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The vibes based defensive briefing is maybe in the in the future.
--:-- Speaker 2: I don't know. Put hat. On the Nick Carter says, if I had to guess we're gonna find out it was a deep state coup in conjunction with China Hawks and the admin Jordan Schneider.
--:-- Speaker 1: What does he say?
--:-- Speaker 2: Fires back. Palmer said China wants Jensen out, so I want him in. I thought... Jordan says, what exactly was on China's wish list from Jensen that he did not deliver on? Yeah, it's this weird thing where the Chinese labs clearly want NVIDIA GPUs, but China itself is holding NVIDIA GPUs in Hong Kong, not allowing them into the country. And so you can't... I don't think you can look at China as a sort of monolithic, you know, group. It is very... There's very clearly mixed interests Yeah. In the country.
--:-- Speaker 1: I'm I'm just interested. I like I I like I I'm I'm very interested in Palmer's take here. I don't understand what evidence there is that China wants Jensen out. How is that like what what data point are we looking to? I I can't tell what China wants ever because I can't read Mandarin and and also I don't have access to their closed door meetings of what they are planning. It's very...
--:-- Speaker 6: Isn't there
--:-- Speaker 2: isn't there a whole history of like US intelligence assets in China just getting wiped off the map?
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so. I have no idea. I I I I I have no idea why they would want Jensen out. Why... Yeah. It seems like they would want him in. I I don't know. Even even just the basic the basic spying, I I don't know. It it it's a very, very confusing situation. So I'm sure we'll learn more and that's what, you know, the investigations are are for basically. Jordan Annos summarizes a screenshot from semi analysis's most recent post. Here are the clear benefits of the current regime where Chinese labs are able to access GPUs remotely and not in China. Profits flow to American companies. The US can monitor what Chinese labs are doing. The US can cut off their access to GPUs through politics or by force almost instantly. American companies such as Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Super Micro, and Dell all depend on Chinese companies for their supply chain. American companies such as Nvidia and AMD employ Chinese engineers who live in China to develop hardware and low level software for their GPU systems. Yeah. These two countries are just so intertwined. It's it's never going to be as simple as like, yes or no. Should we work together or not? Like, everything is everything is more complicated.
--:-- Speaker 2: Gavin Baker says, well meaning, patriotic. Actually, I'm gonna have Tyler read this because it's gonna destroy my voice. Good. Tyler, you can, you can push and I and I get to I get to listen.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Let's do it.
--:-- Speaker 2: Here you go in your inbox.
--:-- Speaker 5: Oh, this is pretty long. Well meaning patriotic China hawks who are not AI experts are putting American national security at risk. China had zero chance of ever catching American AI with the export strategy that Jensen supported. Their labs would have continued training using less powerful American GPUs, which meant American labs would have always been ahead given scaling laws. And in the event of a conflict, we could have simply turned off all the Southeast Asian clouds. Simply stated in AI terms, America had machine guns and we were giving China muskets to prevent them from developing their own machine gun variants. Given that it looks like China hawks will get their preferred policy, China will likely soon have a chance of catching American AI by going down an alternate, less power efficient AI hardware path. They almost certainly would not have gone down this path if less powerful GPUs were still available in China and via Southeast Asian clouds.
--:-- Speaker 2: Totally disagree with that last sentence, but continue.
--:-- Speaker 5: And it will be much less stable world if China pulls even or ahead of America and AI after developing their own alternative AI hardware and gives this technology to Russia, Iran, and North Korea. And all of this will be possible if the China hawks get their preferred policy.
--:-- Speaker 1: I hope Dorkash does some very vague interview that's a metaphor for this situation. Did you see the the fall of the Incas interview that he did?
--:-- Speaker 2: It was about humanity and...
--:-- Speaker 1: Sea Shepherd. He's like this expert in how the... How how when more advanced civilizations got to South America, they just steamrolled the Incas and Aztecs. And it's just an interesting history lesson, but then of course it's like a metaphor for super intelligence taking over and whatnot. Let's see. Makes you grapple with this idea of higher form of intelligence arriving. I hope I hope that's how this is processed in the Dwarkash universe. That would be a that would be a fun way to to deal with it. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences, new value with Cisco. Last piece of somewhat unrelated news, so I know we've been talking about this for almost a full hour. We do have Dylan Patel coming on in just a few minutes to discuss it further. But GPT-six Cyber is launching today. Andrew Curran here watching the livestream and was about to post the screenshot, but Lisan Al Gayebe beat him to it. So he's quoting him. As you can see, things are progressing at speed on Exploit Jim. The upcoming cyber model beats GPT-six Cyber, GPT-six Astra. You're seeing higher and higher benchmarks and a a pretty significant jump in what is just a few months. So good news there for defenders. If you are running a company that you're worried about being under attack, you need to get access to these models as soon as possible so you can defend yourself because it seems like every week there is a new cyber attack going on. Holy moly. OpenAI is cooking very hard, says Choblin. Great. None on X. OpenAI showed an upcoming unreleased cyber model hitting 77% on exploit Jim. Of course, this is particularly tricky benchmark because you you have to let the model hack and then you have to let make sure the model knows what it can hack and what it can't hack. So it has to it's almost more of an alignment test than a hacking test. We know that these models are capable of generating novel zero days and running all sorts of different exploit strategies. But can they stay aligned? Can they stay focused on not cheating the test and delivering great results? And so GPT-six Cyber is at 52.6%. Gemini IV Carbon is at 54.8% better than GPT-six Cyber. Claude Mythos 5.2 is at 39.2%. But the new upcoming cyber model is at 77% on exploit gym which is very very exciting. Anyway, should we do a little palate cleanser, Jordy? Should we go in a completely different direction talk about mini trucks while we wait for Dylan Patel to join?
--:-- Speaker 2: One more one more post. Okay. Brooks Otter Lake says, you walk a knife's edge when you put on a leather jacket. Every fiber of the garment is telling you to act the bad boy. I'm surprised he held out as long as he did.
--:-- Speaker 1: Leather jacket. Is there?
--:-- Speaker 2: Very much true. It's like it's telling the world I'm a rock star.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. It's rock star.
--:-- Speaker 2: Rock star.
--:-- Speaker 1: Does does the leather jacket matter? Because when I think leather jacket, the leather... I didn't grow up in the era of like eighties hair metal. So I don't that's not where I go when I when I think about leather jackets. Think...
--:-- Speaker 2: You wanted to find a middle ground, it would be like a Roman weave. Oh. You know, it's a little bit more...
--:-- Speaker 1: Is the Roman weave a get out of jail free card?
--:-- Speaker 2: I think it's like, you know, the best of both worlds.
--:-- Speaker 1: It's a nothing burger.
--:-- Speaker 1: got a little Roman weave on you.
--:-- Speaker 2: It's like you're a good guy but you're also a bad boy.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. You know? It's a good guy gone bad? No. Bad guy gone good. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing. Not the opposite way. Right?
--:-- Speaker 2: I do think we have to get to this story. It's obviously important but let's...
--:-- Speaker 1: Let me tell you about public first. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and modern markets with AI agents for investing on public. And we have Dylan from Sunny Analysis coming back on the show. Missed him. It's been over a week since we hung out with him later. Is that a And he's not foldable?
--:-- Speaker 2: Not a duo. It's a Samsung.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, Samsung. Living in the future. How long have you had that?
--:-- Speaker 6: I've had this for... I've had foldables for three or four years. Wow. Ahead of the curve. Ahead of the curve. Always.
--:-- Speaker 1: What is your duo review? Is that going to be enough to pull you over? Were you only in iPhone Air. IPhone Air. Okay.
--:-- Speaker 6: IPhone Air. Okay. Foldable Samsung. This is the elite class.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, two phones.
--:-- Speaker 2: You're Priestly class.
--:-- Speaker 1: This is screaming a firewall between the investing arm and the research arm here.
--:-- Speaker 6: One one for one for work, know.
--:-- Speaker 1: One for Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.
--:-- Speaker 6: One for one for personal.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. There we go. There we go. Good. Well,
--:-- Speaker 6: I'm I'm afraid to say that both Jordy and and and and both of you guys, John and Jordy
--:-- Speaker 6: Only have this phone number, not this phone.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh. Wow. Well, I can fix that. Wow.
--:-- Speaker 6: To be fair, I only...
--:-- Speaker 2: Hey. I'm updating my priors. I'm updating our priors on our on our friendship. I thought I was texting the personal the whole time. Wow. I thought we were like that.
--:-- Speaker 1: Like that.
--:-- Speaker 2: Look look only this...
--:-- Speaker 3: I said this one.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Stay safe out there.
--:-- Speaker 2: Do you guys keep a a... Do you guys try to predict black swans? It's effectively it's effectively impossible by definition but I found myself two weeks ago thinking like actually trying to like rack my brain on what is what is the most like unpredictable outlier scenario that could change the game on the field and I think we I think we got it. Unfortunately, I didn't I didn't... I of course...
--:-- Speaker 6: What were your what were your guesses?
--:-- Speaker 2: I don't know. I think I think a lot of them were much more around individual players in the in the financial web of the entire trade, but...
--:-- Speaker 1: Well, big one the big one that everyone's been like waiting for is is like some results from the next training run that shows that there's not another leg up beyond coding. That there is something... That taste is the new mode and for so many white collar jobs, it really does matter that you can sit across the table from someone shake their hand. And so, we're never going to replace the lawyer or the doctor or even augment them to the tune of because you don't even need to do the job displacement thing. It's just the fact that a software engineer can deploy a $100,000 worth of AI in a year without people blinking. That hasn't happened for the marketer, for the salesperson yet. And if that does happen, the revenues do go to a trillion dollars. But if it doesn't...
--:-- Speaker 6: I don't if it's a black swan though. That's not...
--:-- Speaker 1: No, it's not black swan.
--:-- Speaker 2: That's...
--:-- Speaker 6: I think that's like something we can all debate,
--:-- Speaker 3: right? Exactly.
--:-- Speaker 2: No. But another another another thing I would say is like I was very confident that at least for the next year Jensen would not let a company, an AI company valued at north of $10,000,000,000 fail. Like period. Like he was like, I don't, I'm not going to have that headline. I have the ability to give any company a meaningful up round and keep everyone in the game because a lot of people want the headline even though in the grand scheme of things right now, a $20,000,000,000 company could go to zero, wouldn't really have that much impact, But it didn't feel like Jensen would even tolerate that kind of headline just because the bears would sort of sink their teeth into it and and have a nice tasty meal.
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's it's... I think I think the black swan is this, right? I think we we've all predicted all sorts of things. Totally. Even with all the knowledge and insight and you know, rumors. I mean, I had even heard about like, you know, rumors which I didn't like Yeah. Put much credit to. But like people in the industry are like, oh, yeah. Jensen does this with someone at... I mean, at Nvidia. I was like...
--:-- Speaker 2: No. But but that's another... Yeah. That's another thing we've asking. Right?
--:-- Speaker 6: No. You like, you know, you hear... To
--:-- Speaker 1: this extreme degree. Like like this is so different than the Bezos story, so different than the Gates story, so different than the Elon story. Like it is so entwined with the actual business and the business dealings and geopolitics and domestic Elon
--:-- Speaker 6: Elon has slept with employees.
--:-- Speaker 1: But not to this Not
--:-- Speaker 6: with a spy.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: His get out of jail free card is that he has like 15 baby mamas. So it's you can't like pin that on Yeah. And and and he has a lot more control. Think the question that we've been We're getting way
--:-- Speaker 1: more control.
--:-- Speaker 2: We've been asking ourselves is like we on 10/10/2025 we talked we specifically named Mega Speed, we specifically named Alice Wong, we talked about how the whole situation was suspect. Like a lot of the details were basically out in the open, and there was even... There was... All these videos were public, you know, and you could read into the videos and be like, alright, this looks like at the very least like a pretty close relationship.
--:-- Speaker 6: Mhmm. I mean some of these videos have his wife and his daughter in the same room. Right? That's the thing that's like...
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which which kind of meant the like the the basic analysis was like, okay, well, if if the whole family is there, probably nothing's happening. Like, maybe this is purely maybe he's the purely rational economic actor. He's playing it as aggressively as you can to grow the business internationally. We don't like that from a chip export position. If you're a China hawk, you don't like that. But there is the letter of the law and we rarely like CEOs don't get fired for pushing it right up to the letter of the law. And so if you're selling the absolute max like the h 20 which was designed to get around the the chip exports like a lot of China hawks didn't like that but they were like, ah, like that's the letter of the law. You found the loophole. You found the edge. And so it it is it is just a complete black swan in that it's so much further than what anyone...
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. So so overall total lack of judgment just given that this guy as as for as many friends as he has, he has an equal seemingly an equal amount of enemies that stand to benefit from this. What do you think happens to the the Nvidia AI central bank deal pipeline? I assume if you're a number of these companies you can't lean on, oh yeah, Jensen, you know, wanted to do 2,000,000,000 and now it seems like those investments like when it comes time to actually sign the docs will probably be going to committee.
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. I think I think like that's the biggest like worry for NVIDIA is that now it's like a committee of people doing stuff. Yeah. And that's just going to make decisions slow. Technically, they could fall behind because of this. Obviously, the other big aspect... There's sort of three main things, right? There's the technical side. NVIDIA is so ingrained in helping make decisions there. There's no one clear technical lead. I mean, maybe Jonah is, but then, like, there's a lot of people who are also directly reporting to Jensen doing technical stuff, so it's hard there to move as fast. Supply chain wise, right, NVIDIA wants to make aggressive things, do aggressive things, lock up supply, convince the supply chain to do things that they've never done before in terms of technology and supply, and locking it up to NVIDIA. And that's probably a lot harder to do given, you know, whoever the CEO is, is probably not as charismatic as Jensen and they're not going to, you know, be like, Yeah, sure, NVIDIA. You can have 60 of my capacity or 70% of my capacity, at a price that's below market rate. Like, that's just probably tough. And then the third leg of it is like, you know, NVIDIA is propping up a lot of things in the supply chain, right? Open source in America would not exist without Jensen. Both Reflection and Thinking Machines are pushing the open source frontier in America, and both of them have massive investments in backing from NVIDIA, as do many other companies across the ecosystem. And all these application companies rely on, you know, open models, right? Whether it's the Harvey's, the Instincts, the Sierras, they all use open models. Mhmm. All the inference providers, which are, you know, multiple of the 10 plus billion dollar companies, all rely on open models from China. And if we're slamming the hammer down now on China way harder because the biggest defender against restrictions was Jensen and his team, what now happens is given their credibility is out the window and they're being investigated and subpoenaed and whatever is going on on that side, then there's going to be a lot more restrictions, in which case Chinese models are, you know, do they continue to progress at this current pace? And if they do continue to progress, do they open source everything? These are these are real questions out there. I think the biggest loser is the open source ecosystem for sure Mhmm. You know, if you're talking about outside of NVIDIA. Mhmm.
--:-- Speaker 1: How do you think about the technical role of of the CEO position at NVIDIA? You know, you see Jensen, you hear about the deal making, you see him at events and on podcasts and news hits. I think if there's some deep... Deeply technical work that's happening, that's behind the scenes. How how real is that? Is he involved in the architecture of the next chip? Or is this something where he... Like, his technical role is more recruiting and finding the next generation of great No doubt,
--:-- Speaker 6: like inspiring people and bringing them in. He's not designing the architecture. Yeah. But when there's a decision... Know, I think the common thing that everyone sort of, you know, who's following NVIDIA ends up seeing is that you hear real valid things about option a, b, and c. Mhmm. And NVIDIA could be doing all three at once Mhmm. And then at the last second Jensen is pushing all the way behind one.
--:-- Speaker 6: it. Now if there's a b c and d, which which one gets chosen? Is it a committee? Who's who's deciding? Who's now chosen a and getting all the suppliers on b and c to not be pissed off and push behind a.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That's the founder mode thing.
--:-- Speaker 6: And if a starts fucking up
--:-- Speaker 6: You switch to
--:-- Speaker 1: b That's on a really And
--:-- Speaker 6: see things.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I remember in Meta at one point, they had two different operating systems for their virtual reality strategy. They had XR and AR and VR or something. And like, it was just so much extra work being done. And then Zuck had to go in founder mode and be like, look, there's going be some people that are getting reassigned. There's going to be some layoffs. Like, it's going to be aggressive. And that's the benefit of the founder mode company. So who is on the shortlist for potential successors? Can Colette not do it? Are there that does she not want it? How does this develop from here?
--:-- Speaker 6: I'm not sure what Colette wants. I think she's awesome. But at the end of the day, she cannot lead technically the company. Sure. I think internally, the two people that I think would be best suited would be Ian Buck and Jonah Alvin. Mhmm. I think that Ian is great. I think Jonah is not so much in the public light, but he's technically like Mhmm. The closest to the leader, and is technically like in charge of most of the technical orgs. And so I think those are the two that are the most important from that perspective. But like, you know, yes, Ian is charismatic, probably, you know, really probably pretty good at wheeling and dealing, not nearly as good as Jensen will ever be. But then is he going to be as good on the technical side? Is he going to be as good on the supply chain side? Or Jonah, is he going to be good on the supply chain side? Or is he going to be good on the wheeling and dealing? And so, you know, I don't know if, you know, someone can be propped up and not... And take over the role of Jensen, like, in that way. And if you do, like, if Jonah is now or Ian is now in charge, do... Is the stuff that they were in charge of fall down to some extent, like, in terms of, like, the focus that they had on it, the relentless effort? So now my favorite picks for CEO would be from an external perspective.
--:-- Speaker 6: It would be Charlie Kwas and Johnny Shoji. These two guys... Charlie is number two at Broadcom and has been for a long time and is fucking awesome. Yeah. And Johnny is the head of hardware at Apple, he's the one who's basically led the chips team and strategy. Those are the only two people, I think, in the world that can, navigate a supply chain, and technical details like like that. I think, there are... You know you know, it'd be better if it was Hak Tan or Lisa Hsu, but I don't think either of them will do this. I think they're just like
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. What about leaders from Trainium organization, TPU organization? I mean, you're highlighting Apple. There's plenty of people that are leading huge semiconductor efforts, but they're still two rungs down from the true CEO or the true founder.
--:-- Speaker 6: Would Andy be Jassy is the one who wanted to buy Annapurna Labs. Well, he's not going to leave Amazon's CEO to be NVIDIA's CEO.
--:-- Speaker 6: You take some steps down. I think there are really great people there. I really love the teams at Amazon. They work and move super fast. I think Google's awesome. But I don't think they have like a single person that could do all of the above. I mean, if anything like, you know, I think, Amin Verad is at Google is like, you know, the lead of all this infra stuff, but I I I don't know if... I've never asked him. I just have a feeling he wouldn't want to do this. Right? I have a feeling that like the leaders of Tantum, I know they very much want to be in the background and, like, you know, of all the Amazon chip stuff, I don't think they want to do this.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. What about a wildcard? Sean Maguire was throwing out Natasha Aurora, someone who's, you know, already in the CEO seat but not running a trillion dollar company. Is... Do you have any
--:-- Speaker 2: Humble expectation? Just a just a couple 100,000,000,000.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Tiny company.
--:-- Speaker 6: Right? I I don't know Nikesh too well. I met him once. I mean, I think he's awesome. But like technically... Like, Palo Alto has shipped hardware. Right? Like, that's definitely a part of their business, but like
--:-- Speaker 6: Is it is it the same thing as NVIDIA leading edge, doing crazy stuff? I mean, like, look at... Blackwell was amazing. Blackwell, if they did not do what they did with Blackwell, they would have lost a lot of market share. They decided at the last second what to do. I mean, shoot, you know, with with Volta, they added... They decided to add the Tensor Core like three months before they taped it out. Who would have said, yeah, let's just push out the current thing. Let's add it into the current thing. They would have been like, oh, let's add it to the next thing. Yep. If they add it to the next thing, how much further behind would they have been in AI? NVIDIA never would have established dominance.
--:-- Speaker 1: Right? Yep.
--:-- Speaker 6: It's these tactic... And and and it's not like you're fighting like no no no knocks against Palo Alto Networks, but their competitors are like not that amazing versus Nvidia's fighting an Open AI chip team, a Broadcom chip team, a Google chip team, an Anthropic chip team, a Meta You chip know, these guys... Amazon chip team. These guys are fucking good. Like, you know, AMD. They're all really good. And all these startups, right?
--:-- Speaker 1: They need to talk
--:-- Speaker 6: about. The startups, they're all good. Yeah. It's not like they're incompetent. Know, I think it's it's it's very different, right? You know, as great as Lisa Sue is, she took down intel who's incompetent, right? Like what is what is the person who defined a category and created it and kept all the invaders at bay? It's very different than being second place or, you know, making smart tactical business decisions, innovating on something, you know, that, you know, once there's already a category established, it's just very different.
--:-- Speaker 2: Mhmm. How do you think Chinese labs are reacting and and updating their their roadmaps?
--:-- Speaker 6: It's it's no, it's an open secret that the Chinese labs are super... Working super closely with NVIDIA. Even if NVIDIA is not selling them chips directly, they have engineers constantly from both The US as well as their Shanghai offices going to these labs, talking to them, helping them optimize, understanding what they're doing and bringing those optimizations over to NVIDIA software stack and open source. I think the Chinese labs have already started updating. Right? Companies like Xipu who are, sanctioned and DeepSeq are heavy users of different types of chips. Xipu supports like seven different Chinese accelerators. They're not as good as NVIDIA's, but like, hey, they work. DeepSeek is super close with, Huawei. There is there is a lot of probably updates on priors. And it's the Chinese labs that relied heavily on Nvidia probably are weaker now than the Chinese labs that relied heavily... That were like already diversifying. You know, I think it's the same applies to Anthropic versus OpenAI. Mean, obviously, OpenAI has their own chip and has been working on it longer, but they're 90 plus percent NVIDIA, whereas Anthropic is like one third or less NVIDIA. And so it's just a completely different level of like impact on them. OpenAI works more closely with NVIDIA than than Anthropic does. Hey, this is a positive for Anthropic versus an OpenAI. Hey, Anthropic pushing back open source and, you know, open source being weaker now. This is great for Anthropic, right? Like these sorts of things flow through not just the Chinese labs, but also American labs. In general, the closest source is winning.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
--:-- Speaker 2: Any predictions on how this will impact the the Macours and and various, like, data companies given that there's gonna be more scrutiny on on basically any type of business relationship with China?
--:-- Speaker 6: I I don't know about Macours specifically, but I do know a lot of the data companies sell tons of data to China. Actually, it's a really funny way to distill. Even if the Chinese labs don't directly have the closed source models, some of the biggest customers are all the data companies like the Mercours and so on and so forth. And so they generate data and their pipelines for generating data involve a lot of language models from the frontier labs and extracting and filtering and all that. And if you're making environments or whatever you're making with these frontier models and you sell them to China, that's a some in some way you're kind of distilling the info out of them. It's not like traditional distillation. I imagine selling chips to China is going to be in a lot on lot more scrutiny. Renting chips to China and clouds is going be under a lot more scrutiny. Selling data is something that has not had any scrutiny yet, and it will probably fall into the guise. Right now, will focus on hardware, but it... There's, you know, Jensen and, you know, all the people in NVIDIA that were defending, you know, Lutnick and David Sachs, all these people that were, like, sort of preventing, you know, some of the restrictions on NVIDIA into China Mhmm. Are heavily, you know, especially Lutnick and Jensen are heavily discredited now in any argument to, you know, allow China to have some stuff. I I... You know, we have been pro certain types of restrictions for years. It's been our biggest point of contention with NVIDIA. You know, I think they
--:-- Speaker 6: They really dislike that. You know, they they didn't... They they, like, could understand when we were excited about AMD or, you know, Google, and they viewed that as like a... Can out engineer them. But I think like when it came to like China, it was a different aspect. Right? You know, and and now the cover is gone, and and, you know, we... I I kind of hope that, you know, the government is is smart with the restrictions, like, right? Make sure that chips don't get sold of certain kinds. Really, iron packed. Make sure TSMC and and memory companies don't sell to China, make sure equipment of high end is not going to China that makes chips, you know, maybe maybe some restrictions around data. But don't, you know, restrict renting chips. Right? Mhmm. There's sort of a whole waterfall full or renting chips from, let's say, hyperscalers. Maybe restrict random chip companies like Mega Speed from renting chips to China. Yeah. Right? Or re... Diverting, but maybe not the, like, hey, if Google's gonna rent to ByteDance, maybe that makes sense because Google can always pull away the chips when they need to, or if the government tells them to, and Google can always, know, charge way more margin to ByteDance, and so that makes ByteDance less profitable than Meta. You know, these are the sort of things that are, like, you know, relevant for US competition and leadership. And that's what... Hopefully, restrictions are not like... You know, obviously, pendulum will swing and there'll be a lot of brash actions, but hopefully, focus is on how do you make America win.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. No. I like it. I remember when you branded yourself not as a China hawk, but as a bald eagle, and I thought that was a good way to put it. How are you reflecting
--:-- Speaker 2: The video
--:-- Speaker 6: you guys made is so good.
--:-- Speaker 1: We got to repost that. Yeah. We got to repost that today. How are you reflecting on the predictions in AI 2027? When I look at the model capabilities, I feel like it's incredibly accurate. We're completely on track. Huge congratulations to the whole forecasting team there. I'm still a little uncertain about two predictions. One is they forecasted that there would be a 100,000 person anti AI protest. The midterms were kind of that, so I don't I think the midterms might kind of stave off a little bit of that. But, the more interesting question is right around this time, AI twenty seven predicts that in around November 2026, China wakes up. And, I've been sort of interrogating that. It's very hard to get accurate data. How do you feel we are progressing along the line of like China waking up? Is this an example of China waking up because they're honey potting our most powerful AI CEO or are they asleep?
--:-- Speaker 1: other side of that John. Caught.
--:-- Speaker 2: You have to... There there there's always a possibility that they believe NVIDIA chips have backdoors in them and...
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh they don't want them there. Okay.
--:-- Speaker 2: Jensen is Jensen's the asset.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a million to fly hot.
--:-- Speaker 2: Doesn't it doesn't seem like you're waking up if you're like, hey, there's a bunch of GPUs in Hong Kong, but keep them there. We don't want them in here.
--:-- Speaker 1: That's a good point. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: How would you be processing That makes you think that there's some group that has much longer timelines.
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. I would say, as far as AI 2027, I mean, I'm I'm very AI pilled, and I thought AI '27 was was a big stretch, but hey, turns out 70% of the verifiably, like, like things that they predicted so far this year have turned out to be accurate, Which is incredible. Incredible. Right? Like Yeah. I I I'm still skeptical on like, you know, some of the diffusion aspects, but I think RSI is looking more and more true. Yep. China waking up is probably a big big likelihood. Mhmm. That's the other thing, right? If we go too gung ho on the pendulum of like banning stuff in China, does China now swing their pendulum and prevent the supply chain? It's, you know, every Nvidia server has China content.
--:-- Speaker 6: Every Google TPU server has China content. Yeah. Like, every every one of these things has China content. China can stop it if they want. Sure. So there's some level of like, actually, like, please, you know, what is the what is the amount of stuff that you can... Minimal amount of stuff you can give China in AI and give them in everywhere else sort of to prevent them from cutting off the supply chain. Yeah. Is a view of the world that could be, you know, construed. As far as like, you know, China waking up, it it it's it's probably possible. Right? I don't... Another one that you mentioned like China, honey potting Jensen. I actually don't think she's a spy in the colloquial sense.
--:-- Speaker 6: And I don't think she's a honey pot in the colloquial sense. She's a well connected individual in the Chinese, you know, business world and family. Her family's well connected. And if you're well connected in China... Shit, if you're well connected in America, will talk to intelligence agencies when they tell you to. And you will tell them the shit that they want to hear. I just don't think people are going to be like, you know, no or like, you know, there's just a lot of pressure there.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. The CIA was asking me for your personal phone number and I had to tell them to take a hike. It was brutal. I feel like we got to figure out where he got that jacket. But John, can you get us Dylan Patel's personal phone number? And I said, look, I'm kind of second fiddle in his world. Yeah. Just a professional connection. Yeah....
--:-- Speaker 6: Work phone up until a few months ago.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. I I am a little less hurt. No.
--:-- Speaker 6: But anyways, I think Yeah. I think that, you know, just be... You know, they they were getting some info. Yeah. Right? She was clearly like showing everyone on WeChat she is close to Jensen and can get them chips in China. Yeah. Jensen, did he know? Probably. I mean, I don't know. But like probably he knew. Yeah. Just... But like Super Micro didn't have to honeypot Jensen to ship billions of dollars of servers to China. Yeah. Right? Like this is like... Yeah. Know us. I think I think there's a lot
--:-- Speaker 1: more They might have been having an affair. We don't know. Let's not jump in. I'm sure. I'm sure. Anyway, what does this mean for the venture capital community? We've seen a lot of VCs sort of rallying around Jensen. Is that purely because of the open source ecosystem? Like, what does it mean for the other mean, you mentioned wrapper companies, but are VCs effectively out of the big lab trade and so that's why they're rallying around Jensen a little bit more than you expect?
--:-- Speaker 6: You know, before I answer that question, know, it'd be, you know, Jensen has the, you know, it it depends on how bad this stuff is. Right? Right? There's a lot of info coming out. I don't know. Yeah. But if thinner China stuff is like really gung ho, what if Jensen just like goes to China and starts a
--:-- Speaker 1: you know, a 100
--:-- Speaker 6: Wild million card. Instead of like... I don't know. Don't know. Like, you know, that's a that's a... I don't I don't
--:-- Speaker 1: know what this is. But but Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 2: Why would why would he not go to Taiwan that Because
--:-- Speaker 6: The US still has interest in Taiwan I guess I would say. I mean I mean it depends on like did he break laws?
--:-- Speaker 6: Right? True. Is he is he going be called in front of Congress for months and months and months and
--:-- Speaker 6: Berated and he broke Like I I don't know.
--:-- Speaker 1: If he didn't break laws I think he's going to St. Bart's.
--:-- Speaker 6: But anyways, far as the venture ecosystem, you're totally right. They're out of the lab trade. The labs are going public. OpenAI probably just did their last round. Yep. It wasn't that great. And then Anthropic is going public. Yep. You know, they they got liquidity.
--:-- Speaker 6: of but them then like everything downstream, right? Like all of these inference clouds, how can they secure compute without credit and without financing and without a backstop? This is a real challenge. Yeah. Who's going to be willing to do that? And then how how does how does, you know, Base ten and Fireworks and whoever go from a billion dollars of revenue to $10,000,000,000 of revenue without access to compute and without Chinese models being, you know, continually updated and sold, externally? Yeah. This is a big challenge and risk. Likewise with all these companies like Instinct and Harvey and Sierra who are making awesome businesses, can they continue to ramp and improve the capabilities of their product or do they have to turn to closed source models? In which case, if they have to use closed source models, their product is a wrapper. But if they can switch to open source models and they own the customer relationship, they're not a wrapper. Yeah. And so I think like this is a big big worry. I think, you know, Jensen is the venture ecosystem's strongest ally and he's propped up a lot of companies. NVIDIA's very active in venture and investing. So, you know, I don't know if they're going be as active now. Mhmm. Mhmm.
--:-- Speaker 1: I had one last question. Jordy, do you have anything? I think the... What
--:-- Speaker 2: a... Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Sorry.
--:-- Speaker 6: I'll tell you my phone number. 789998212.
--:-- Speaker 1: Wait. What is that from? Is that...
--:-- Speaker 6: Oh, come on.
--:-- Speaker 1: That's a regional commercial from Georgia or something.
--:-- Speaker 6: No. No. No. Is that? It's a... Is
--:-- Speaker 2: it that song? There's a song about it.
--:-- Speaker 1: Right? In LA we only know Dos Vente Dos Vente Dos Accidentes.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. I know 867... Soulja Boy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Soulja Boy who's now an AI spokesperson. He...
--:-- Speaker 6: You know, it's it's Soldier Boy is so cheap to hire.
--:-- Speaker 6: I went on a boat, some startup for their like series, whatever, launched. They rented a boat, hired Soldier Boy 25
--:-- Speaker 1: k. Wow. Maybe at the next time.
--:-- Speaker 6: And he performed. He performed like like an hour long. He had his whole entourage, DJ come.
--:-- Speaker 1: We need him with semi analysis con 2027.
--:-- Speaker 6: Speaking... We're not a venture backed company that loses money.
--:-- Speaker 1: GPT-5.5.5. You surprised by the, like, the moderate jump in progress? I saw the 5.2. Was was it Mythos five
--:-- Speaker 6: point think it Got
--:-- Speaker 1: like 16%. I mean, it speaks to the quality of the benchmark that it wasn't immediately 100%. But take me through a little bit of your reaction to the results there.
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. So, GDPX and our benchmark, we launched Yeah. We tested Anthropics model and launched it and it took a day or two to run the tests but Yep. More like two days. But anyways, it was was such a big improvement in some areas, software engineering and chip design.
--:-- Speaker 6: And and it was... There are areas where it just didn't improve at all. Interesting. Which was like really interesting. I mean it speaks to reinforcement learning environments are the vector for scaling.
--:-- Speaker 6: If you do not have unique data in environments in certain spaces, you will not scale quality of model in those places. Yeah. And so chip design drastically improved. Right? Exactly. And I think it speaks to like what is Anthropic's focus? Well, just hired a bunch of chip people and we're making a chip. Yeah. And we're making model way better than a chip. Yep. And in the past Anthropic's view was we're not going to make a chip because it's not AGI pill. By the time we get a chip out, it's too slow. Mhmm. Now, the model can make the chip. So it's like, you know, I think I think they're really accelerating on that, front. Likewise, software engineering continues to gain like mad. Yeah. Anthropic is so much better than everyone else in software engineering and chip design. Mhmm. It's incredible. And then other areas, they just didn't improve. I think I think it speaks to the volume of like how important data is
--:-- Speaker 6: In these data companies and these data vendors. But also, you know, the durability of like some of these categories. Right? Some of these categories, they didn't improve on at all and like they're probably not spending a ton of data on. Yeah. Or, you know, maybe the benchmark is just so difficult, like, you know, that like it's it's... It did improve slightly in all domains, but generally scaling size is not going to get you improvement in every benchmark. You really have to scale techniques, algorithms, and data.
--:-- Speaker 1: On the data side, how much value is there in, like, the data flywheel, the data that comes through the harness directly just given to the company, to the lab for free versus bought from a data broker specifically? Do you have a balance on how valuable each is?
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. So we've we've established a relationship with a lot of the chip design data companies Mhmm. And and AI chip design companies. And Drop pick, as far as I understand, buys very little of this. Okay. They've been building it themselves. Yeah. Is is the only answer. Right? How else would they do Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: That makes sense.
--:-- Speaker 6: And but at the same time, like some of the spaces like bio, you know, Drop X started their own wet lab. Yep. And they're collecting data there, also they're buying a lot of data elsewhere. Sure. So I think it's it's it's, you know, I think other folks have different strategies Yeah. You know, in terms of what do I build internally, what do I build externally. But I think the data vendors are really important. And given models are getting so good, a general large scale data vendor where we're connecting you to a bunch of people that are like, okay, data labelers, that's not what's valuable. Right? It's experts. It's experts. And so if you're an expert in material science and you're making data there, you can make a great business. But how scalable is that actually going on?
--:-- Speaker 1: Totally. Totally. Yeah. We'll find out next time you're on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll let you get back to work. Have a good one. What a week. Goodbye. Good luck. What a week. One for the history books. Have a great day. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents can meet the can meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Up next, we got Eric Newcomer coming into the TBPN UltraDome, the new Kuman agent. Founder, journalist, host. Welcome to the show.
--:-- Speaker 2: How are there? There he is.
--:-- Speaker 7: Great to be here.
--:-- Speaker 1: Thanks so much for coming on the show. Give us what you're up to.
--:-- Speaker 2: And you you you... I... You were pulling all the strings with the Jensen stuff make How can
--:-- Speaker 1: I get? Make this during
--:-- Speaker 2: Cerebral Valley?
--:-- Speaker 1: Let me do... Let me put on the the gumshoot journalist hat and leak it. Right?
--:-- Speaker 7: Yeah. Newcomer, we're hosting our event of the year Yeah. At the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Hey, Monteneja from General Catalyst on stage already. Ryan Daniels of Crosby. I'm gonna interview Nikesh Arora Fantastic. Later today, Ali Goetzee. So Fantastic. Yeah. It's a lot of fun and we released a list of the top 100 AI companies. So this is
--:-- Speaker 1: There we go.
--:-- Speaker 7: On a Newcomer Super Bowl today.
--:-- Speaker 7: Super happy to be on this show.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. I think I went to the one with... Did it used to be specific on voice? This is just AI generally? Take us through some of the history of the Cerebral Valley Summit strategy.
--:-- Speaker 7: Well, literally, I cofounded this summit with Max Child and James Willstrom, who are my college friends. They had a beautiful office in Hays Valley back in 2023. Mhmm. They're like, oh, you're flying to California for your bachelor party from New York, like, host an event in our office. And then I started texting and I think was like Miles Grimshaw Yeah. Bucky Yeah. Who was at Kleiner Perkins, a modest stability. Within like forty minutes, they were like, yeah, we're down to speak. I was like, oh my god, this is gonna be a real event. Had, you know, I think Samsung is a sponsor, Daniela at Anthropic spoke, then sort of most famously, Ali Gotzi bumped into Naveen Rao at Mosaic ML at our speaker dinner
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
--:-- Speaker 7: And then acquired his company for Yeah. $1,300,000,000. Wow. And so that that was a great headline So much in Business Insider. And so we've been doing Cerebral Valley basically twice a year. This November 1 is sort of our, you know, hallmark event.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. What what are the key questions that, people are trying to answer today at Cerebral Valley?
--:-- Speaker 7: We're leaning with Jensen. Definitely. We're not afraid. Just What
--:-- Speaker 1: do what you what's this mean?
--:-- Speaker 7: Yeah. You know, I think people are giving different answers. I mean, there's a lot of everyone, like, whenever people pull me aside, you know, I bump into somebody for two minutes between conversations and they're they're immediately giving me their download of what they've heard, who might be the next CEO, what it means. I mean, I think early takes are that, you know, Nvidia Nvidia had such centralized power that does open up some room for other chip makers. He was such a Yeah. Deal maker in cheap. So it diffuses power a little bit, but... And I think people are saying, you know, there's been an overemphasis on sort of the fair angle and an underemphasis on the China piece of it and the sort of revenue coming from... Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. It's interesting. There's been a bunch of high flying semiconductor startups, Cerebras, Etch to Fractal was on the show yesterday. There's a number of others. And it's it's always been eye popping valuations. And the thesis beforehand was, well, if you get 1% of market share, it's $50,000,000,000 because NVIDIA is a $5,000,000,000,000 company, so maybe you can underwrite it. But now, it actually does feel like the the the playing field is much more open. And it's got to feel pretty good to be one of those companies today. Is that...
--:-- Speaker 7: Yeah. Have the etch co founder on stage so I can't say what he's going to say but
--:-- Speaker 2: he's Is coming
--:-- Speaker 1: it Gavin on the on stage or...
--:-- Speaker 7: I forget which of the co founders it is honestly. I'll have to go look. It's not my panel.
--:-- Speaker 1: It not my problem. I mean,
--:-- Speaker 2: the timing is just very interesting because every single player in the ecosystem needs to like
--:-- Speaker 2: Try to forecast now how this single, you know, the fall of one man is gonna impact open source, inference providers, which impacts the application layer companies, which impacts, you know, ends up impacting the the companies doing routing. And and, of course, you know, the the chip makers are some of the few that are... Haven't haven't been getting Jensen bucks, you know? So it's like, if anything, they, again, it it creates some kind of lane that they can, you know, imagine there's gonna be less control over some of these very scarce suppliers which which might open up interesting opportunities. But, yeah, first and foremost, bad bad time to be an NVIDIA bag holder.
--:-- Speaker 7: Yeah. Right. And people... Nobody wants the bubble to burst. Right? Like, what they don't want is this... One
--:-- Speaker 1: of your former guests, Teddy, Trent certainly wants it to burst, you know? This is... I invited Ed.
--:-- Speaker 7: I invited Ed to come. That'd be I think afraid afraid of the AI bulls in the room. Don't know. I couldn't get him to do it.
--:-- Speaker 1: I feel like he would he would be getting fired up like kind of the...
--:-- Speaker 7: Get like some investor Yeah. Argue with him but Yeah. Wasn't to
--:-- Speaker 1: Exactly. How are you thinking about the VC realignment post midterms, post Jensen story?
--:-- Speaker 7: I know. That's the main thing we thought we'd talk about, the blue wave. Yeah. I mean I mean, HT, CEO of General Catalyst
--:-- Speaker 7: Was saying we should be non barrister again. Know, I think part of the answer is, oh, you know, a lot of Silicon Valley became very republican, very pro Trump. Maybe the answer is to, you know, try to try to be like, you know, the defense juggernauts where you you... Maybe you have a slight tilt one way or the other, but you Yeah. You know, build relationships with both parties. So I think people are waking up to that. I think I think most people think they're gonna get around the data center issue. Right? If the elections were a sign that the American public hates data centers, does that mean all of a sudden all the data center businesses are in big trouble? I think, know, I was literally talking to Byron Dieter before this and he was making the point that, you know, maybe you have to pay a higher tax, it hurts your margin
--:-- Speaker 7: Slightly, but there is some negotiation that can be had to get data centers still built on planet Earth. So I don't think people are freaking out about that piece of
--:-- Speaker 1: it to be... Looking at the the donation data for the Midas list of venture capital firms seeing like, do they donate to the Republicans or Democrats over time? And there was a realignment and a shift, but it shifted from like 90% Democrat to like 70% Democrat, which felt crazy. And then there was a lot of talk on podcasts and x and whatnot. But Silicon Valley just like shifted to the right, but the... There's still just a huge amount of blue because it's California because it's Silicon
--:-- Speaker 7: But the blue people are cowards. I don't know. They're much less vocal, much less willing to, I don't know, go on podcast and talk their politics, you know, besides like Reid Hoffman or Yeah. It's been pretty quiet.
--:-- Speaker 1: They were kind of fighting with one arm tied behind their back I suppose. But, yeah, it'll be interesting. Definitely more room for for folks on the left to like, you know, get on podcasts and yap and make noise. We'll see. Well, congratulations on Cerebral Valley.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. Is it is Thank you. To think about is it... Is Vinod the most outspoken venture capitalist on like on on the left?
--:-- Speaker 7: Vinod's just never been a great friend to the Democrats, you know. He's he's very loud Sure. But it's not... He's, you know, an independent first and foremost. So he's... I agree with you that he's stuck to his principles, but, know, he's he's got a sort of variety of opinions that sometimes don't don't align him
--:-- Speaker 1: with the...
--:-- Speaker 2: A also Or his own or his own, you know, NFL team.
--:-- Speaker 7: Right. Or portfolio company or he he says what he wants.
--:-- Speaker 2: Honestly, props to that.
--:-- Speaker 1: Was it Mike Moritz? Mike Moritz was was still a big donor Right. During the last cycle. And so Definitely. Like most of the firms have like one partner that's kind of stayed the stayed the line
--:-- Speaker 7: even though Lawrence is not part of Sequoia anymore.
--:-- Speaker 1: No. I'm not sure. But he's still like in that Midas list like or high aura important Silicon Valley broadly.
--:-- Speaker 7: I mean, Reed Hoffman was one of, you know, the first Talarico donors. Definitely did more... Some of the more, like, thoughtful...
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. And Mike Moritz, he he was always in, the Financial Times with, like, an essay, not, like, the duking it out on Joe Rogan. So, like, even though he didn't get quiet, he just took his message to a different place. And so it was... I don't think a lot of people read those essays, honestly, in in Silicon Valley. Maybe occasionally, but...
--:-- Speaker 7: He stuck to his principles. He's just not at the center of the VC business anymore. Totally. So I don't think it had the same weight.
--:-- Speaker 2: Oh, well. What... Assume Jensen gets through these investigations and he's free to do what he pleases. What do think he does? You think he joins?
--:-- Speaker 7: What's the next act?
--:-- Speaker 2: Joins Ed Zitrin, goes to China, joins space...
--:-- Speaker 1: I think he's going to Saint Bart's. Think he's going to Saint Bart's. We're gonna see bottle service. It's gonna be a Jeff Bezos repeat.
--:-- Speaker 7: I just think, you know, people of this stature want the next thing to be as exhilarating. You step your foot off the gas and you're like, oh, life's good, like, I can have fun. I agree with you that it's sort of hard to imagine he finds the next next act at this level. I think the most likely is, you know, the Bob Iger type situation where it's like, I can't get away from the company.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, you think you're
--:-- Speaker 7: I don't... I mean, what do
--:-- Speaker 7: I I don't know the board dynamics you're asking I'm me to sound not... That is not a prediction, but I think if he was to have a next act...
--:-- Speaker 1: Reported. Newcomer predicts that Jensen will be back, and he's in favor of it. He loves it. Forget it. Forget Forget it. Know, we're over it already.
--:-- Speaker 6: I know it.
--:-- Speaker 1: That is a word.
--:-- Speaker 7: We need to know a lot a lot about what happened here. And
--:-- Speaker 7: I I think it's gonna be hard for him to get some amazing landing anytime soon.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. There's more questions than answers still. Well, fortunately, Cerebral Valley exists for exactly that purpose to ask the questions Exactly. Pontificate about the answers.
--:-- Speaker 2: Give our best to everybody at and the congrats. Will.
--:-- Speaker 7: Thank you so much for having me on.
--:-- Speaker 1: A great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have the author of the bitter struggle. I'm gonna tell you about Codex. Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Teddy Collins, the author of the bitter struggle on his new book, US China AI competition shaping policy inside the White House. Teddy, welcome to the show.
--:-- Speaker 1: you doing?
--:-- Speaker 3: Doing well. Thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Speaker 1: Thank you for hopping on. First
--:-- Speaker 2: question, did you orchestrate this takedown to promote your book? We're asking all of our guests that today. I mean, It's just too convenient for you, Teddy. I don't know. It's hard to it's hard to...
--:-- Speaker 3: I, you know, I'm I I am following the news like everyone else.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. So, take us through the thesis of the book. Take us through the process, how long you've been working on this, and I'm sure we'll have a bunch of downstream questions, because we've been debating all show. Is China waking up? Is the relationship between The US and China going to change? And if so, how?
--:-- Speaker 3: Maybe I'll start with the the book process because, I mean, for those who haven't been been part of writing a book before, it's... The publishing process just takes very long time.
--:-- Speaker 3: And given the speed that AI moves at, that that poses quite a challenge. We had to lock down the text to, like, basically near the beginning of this year, which meant almost all of this was written in 2025. In most domains, it was kind of okay. Yeah. But, obviously, a ton has happened in between when we finished writing it now. So this was, like, pre mythos. This was pre hugging face, OpAI incident. Yeah. And so it's one of these things where where trying to write something like this in a forward facing way that remains current, can be quite challenging. I think that most of the sort of core themes that we had remained pretty relevant, but anyone who's picking it up today will probably be wondering, well, why isn't this incident mentioned? Why isn't that incident mentioned?
--:-- Speaker 3: In terms of the core message of the book, in brief, you know, my coauthor and I worked in the White House during the Biden administration on a number of AI issues. And this will sound crazy today, but in 2021, when we ended the administration, AI was not a thing that most policymakers were really paying attention to.
--:-- Speaker 3: And so it was pretty greenfield in terms of thinking through how The United States should tackle this set of issues. In the book, we try to take a lot of those considerations in terms of kind of the intersection of technical issues and policy issues Mhmm. The types of things that we previously presented to the national security adviser, the president, etcetera, and present them instead to the general public because there are, I think, very, very difficult trade offs that societies, especially democratic societies, will have to take to account. Yeah. In the book, we break it down into sort of three main struggles that are the core structure. The first is the struggle for democratic nations to establish and maintain a leading capabilities. Yeah. The second is the struggle for governments to understand and make use of this technology effectively because right now, as you talked about on your show before, there's a big gap between the private sector and the government. And the third is the struggle then to make sure that the technology doesn't become deeply unsafe and doesn't take us away from democratic values once we've melted it.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's very it's very... It's such a complex situation with what's going on with NVIDIA, but, there still is this, like, idea in the back of your mind where, if you're making a thing, why is the government telling you that you can't sell it to somebody? Like, that's a new thing and the conversation has completely changed. The capabilities have changed. I have updated, but I, at the same time, I do understand that if I make a soda, it's kind of like, am I... This America. It's land of the free. I should be able to freely sell it wherever I want. This is a special case. It requires extra attention. On China, I'm very interested in this question of China waking up. There's been this prediction in 2027 that China will wake up this year. And maybe that happens, maybe that doesn't, but I'm interested in the the philosophy that China brings to bear with the AI race because we've been tracing back through the five year plans. China has been investing in indigenous chip supply for thirty years more. Yeah. That's right. And when I saw Dwarkash Patel post his AGI predictions of who wins, he has these probability densities and he says, if AGI comes soon, America wins. If AI comes later, China wins. It was... It felt like it was an accurate prediction, but it was also just a reflection of the strategy of China that they think that, like, slow and steady wins the race. That's always been the the philosophy, and that's why we didn't see a Taiwan invasion in the last two years. Yeah. It's like, yeah. We'll get there.
--:-- Speaker 1: We'll we'll... When it happens, it happens. I'm Xi Jinping. I'm gonna live till the 150. I'm not going anywhere. I'll take care of it when I take care of it. But can you give me more nuance with that? Do you agree with that? What do you think China is thinking around the AI race?
--:-- Speaker 3: Yeah. Maybe first, I'll I'll speak to the the... Your point about, like, if you make a Coke, like, you know, why should you be able to sell it anywhere, which I think is, like, a very, like, a very fair question. Yes. You know, as as as my colleagues in government will testify to, like, I honestly took some convincing on some of these policies because my instincts are also pretty laissez faire. Yeah. I do think there are some areas that are exceptions. You have some spectrum from, like, Coke on the one hand to... I think very few people would say that, let's say, during the final days of World War two or during the peak of the Cold War, The United States should have been selling technology relevant to building nuclear weapons to the Nazis or to the Soviets. And I I I think almost everyone would agree with those two points. And then the question is, like, along that spectrum
--:-- Speaker 2: Where's the
--:-- Speaker 3: exactly do you draw the line?
--:-- Speaker 3: And that is the subject of innumerable, you know, discussions in the situation room with all of these cabinet secretaries who are, like, now trying to pour over the details of, you know, well, how many nanometers are the nodes, you know, in these chips versus those chips and so on. And and it's tough. It's tough. You know, we we did our best. We, like... I stand by kind of, like, the places that we drew lines in retrospect to, you know, maybe there were some things we did on slightly differently, but, it's it's it's a question of degree not absolute principle, I would say. Mhmm. And, yep, in the book, discussed kind of in detail, like, do we think that various types of chips fall in different categories and so on? To your to your question about, like, China waking up, I mean, this is gonna be a very unsatisfying, like, response, but, like, obviously, it's it's very hard to tell in part because China is at the highest levels of government, just, like, much much more close than United States. So they don't have their debates as much in the open. And as a result, it's it's a... There's a lot of kind of... You know, this term people used during the Cold War of a Kremlinology, trying to read the tea leaves in terms of, like, who's being invited to present things to the Politburo Standing Committee and so on. I think the short version is if you look at the statements from Chinese policymakers and from Chinese industry leaders, there is definitely, like, more interest in these sort of fantastical and sometimes terrifying future scenarios, AGI, ASI type situations than there was a couple of years ago. I think it's much less prevalent than it is in The United States, especially if you look at the tech industry. There are some people like,, CEO of DeepSeek, talks about AGI a lot, like, done since DeepSeek was founded. But, yeah, the the, like, the modal discourse is much closer to AI as a significant, but on the whole, like, somewhat normal technology. Mhmm. And so this question of, like, what does it take to get... You know, to have senior policymakers, like, really wake up
--:-- Speaker 3: I think it's very, very, very hard to say. Very hard Yeah. To
--:-- Speaker 1: How much of... How much do you agree with this opinion that China is more in favor of open source AI because it's commoditizing their compliments. They are an industrial powerhouse, an engineering powerhouse, manufacturing powerhouse. Their economy is not driven by services. It's not driven by software engineering, lawyering, financial work. And so this will actually make them more competitive if there is all of a sudden an infinite pool of labor, an infinite number, a country of lawyers in a data center or something that they can access. And then secondly, they have an incredible jobs program. They will just they basically have UBI if they need because they'll just build more houses and trains to nowhere. And the the average citizen in China is optimistic about AI because the government will take care of them if they lose their job.
--:-- Speaker 3: I think I'm a little bit skeptical. Okay. A couple reasons. One reason is that at the end of the day, like, someone is... Someone still has to foot the bill Mhmm. For using these systems, whether they're open source or not. Like, they still take some amount of energy to run. Right? And so this is why, like, a lot of people choose to use models, whether they're open source or closed source, like, most people aren't hosting them, like, on their own infrastructure or something. Right? So you're, like, you're still paying for, like, these multiple levels of the stack. Yeah. I think the other thing that's tricky is that the, like, the... Obviously, unemployment issues that China faces are, like, very significant. So I think the idea that these things will... And and, like, the state can only pay for so many of those cranes to nowhere. Like, eventually, the bill comes due in some capacity. The final thing I'll note is that on this point of sort of the enthusiasm for AI in China versus The US, I think that that is directionally correct, but there's some really good work, especially from Jeff Ding, trying to unpack that. I think that the gap is less significant than... It it... It's like an easy story to report on. It's like, look at this survey result, you look at that survey result. Yeah. It's often kind of apples to oranges. Sure. And I think that that makes it hard to say, like
--:-- Speaker 3: Okay. If you did, like, in the exact same conditions, you took, like, the median Chinese person and the median American, and you said, like, what do you actually think about this? What if it takes away your job? What if it poses bio risk, etcetera? I think that there would be, like, a decent amount of convergence.
--:-- Speaker 1: That's interesting. I have I have... Jordy, please.
--:-- Speaker 2: In in all your studies, have you been able to find a single critical industry where China said we're happy to let the the The United States or its allies just just handle this one?
--:-- Speaker 3: I am not aware of any.
--:-- Speaker 1: Podcasting. They don't have a Joe Rogan. That's right. That's right. They don't have a Joe Rogan.
--:-- Speaker 2: They're like, we'll let you guys keep
--:-- Speaker 1: I mean, quite ironically, it's free,
--:-- Speaker 3: like, speech. You know, the the next talent that they're gonna try and... That they're gonna try and
--:-- Speaker 1: win I don't think they can do it. I mean
--:-- Speaker 3: find the next Joe Rogan.
--:-- Speaker 1: They can't win in free speech. Like, that is
--:-- Speaker 3: That is... Yeah. That's the enduring... Like, advantage of democracies.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Home defense maybe, civilian gun manufacturing. These are things that the Chinese economy is not excited about building up anytime soon, I suppose.
--:-- Speaker 3: That's right.
--:-- Speaker 1: Can you give me your high level understanding of the level of China hawkishness on the left and the right currently? Because when I think hawkishness, I think I think that's more of a Republican issue, but it feels like chip sanctions happened under Biden. There were... There was trade war under Trump, but Yeah. At the same time, we saw a lot of people from the Trump administration advocating for chip sales to China. And then post midterms were in this new revelation. And so is... Are are the Democrats more anti selling GPUs to China? I I haven't really been able to parse that out from just the data center debate, which is so much more narrow.
--:-- Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, honestly, the events of recent weeks
--:-- Speaker 3: Make it even even more complicated because if I think this sort of perception of the the tech rights and what that means in terms of, like, how Democrats react to that.
--:-- Speaker 1: Totally.
--:-- Speaker 3: So I think this is all pretty fluid. I think that your characterization is has been historically accurate, and this is one thing that has kind of been shifting more recently. One thing that's worth noting is that, the the expo controls, like, on chips, actually, the sort of sanctions began in in Trump one.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, that's right.
--:-- Speaker 3: And and then there was kind of this sort of sort of steady, layering
--:-- Speaker 3: that happened during Biden. And some have been been pulled down during Trump two, but, like, the the majority of them, like, core of them have stayed on. So there are a lot of interesting dimensions here. One is that, it's an area of, relative bipartisan agreement in congress.
--:-- Speaker 3: And then I think when you get to the executive branch, it seems to depend a lot on the individual personalities. Sure. I I honestly have trouble these days just, like, keeping up with the the news, but there seems to be a lot of coverage of, like, let's say, you know, commerce versus treasury versus the president himself in terms of those individuals' views on these questions we were talking about earlier. Like, exactly where do you draw the line? So, yeah, in in in a nutshell, would say, historically, I think that your characterization is correct. These days, I think it's it's much more mixed, and I don't think it breaks down super cleanly along party lines. When when when we were in government, we were surprised, I think pleasantly surprised, by, like, the degree most of the time of bipartisan support for this stuff as long as it was approached thoughtfully and not in, like, you know, just a reactionary nativist way.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating because, there are plenty of people in artificial intelligence right now who competition with China is effectively a single issue vote for them. Like, that is the most important debate. They think this is existential. It's a it's a winner take all. It's a huge deal, much bigger than anything else that's being discussed. And yet, if I if I meet someone and that and they're just talking about AI and and China and geopolitics, I can't instantly clock them as being a Republican or Democrat. And that's the nature of our current political situation, which which could be an advantage because it's not... It hasn't been hardened onto one side and you don't have that reactionary. So I'm I'm certainly hopeful that things can move forward... Final...
--:-- Speaker 3: Yeah. And I mean, maybe one observation is like it's it's been it's been very interesting sort of for me personally having now lived on both sides of this. I I worked at DeepMind, then I was in government, now doing an AI startup. And, like, these two... The the tech world and the government world Yeah. Which, have been sort of talking to each other more and more Yeah. But just sociologically, like, really separate. And so, like, a couple years ago, think it was the case that, like, people in the tech world... I mean, it's a huge generalization, but, like, didn't think a ton about, like, geopolitical tensions and the relationship with China. And people in the government world knew very, very little about AI. Yeah. And now those things are getting closer, but, like, it's still... I I think it's hard. I think most people will be surprised if, like, you drop them in the middle of the White House, At least, you know, from my experience or to make it less political, just like any piece of government. You drop them in the of government. You drop them in the of, like, big tech company. Sort of how little mutual awareness there is in these two worlds. Sure. Jordan?
--:-- Speaker 2: Take a wild guess. What do you think happens with NVIDIA's roughly 4,000 employees based in Shanghai doing r and d and software development and a number of other things? Sales, of course. It's gotta be a weird weird Friday.
--:-- Speaker 3: Truly... Yeah. I I really have no idea. I mean, it... It's, kind of going back to this point of, like, the spectrum between, you know, selling Coca Cola to things that are, like, super sensitive. It's like these, it's really easy to focus on these aspects of very sharp bilateral competition between The United States and China. And then neglected it, like, all of these things, like supply chains, companies, etcetera, like, people are buying, selling things, of course, like, between China and The United States all the time. Lots of Chinese companies have employees in The United States. Lots of American companies have employees in China. Like, where where each of those goes as different lines get drawn, really, really hard to say. I realize that's evasive, but, yeah, I basically, have no idea. But...
--:-- Speaker 2: No. Don't think we don't think we know, but it was always it was always, you know, an interesting question there.
--:-- Speaker 1: Get out the crystal ball and answer us. Okay?
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. Mean, my my uncreative response is like,
--:-- Speaker 3: these days the AIs are pretty good at forecasting things.
--:-- Speaker 6: Yeah. Maybe that's... Would be
--:-- Speaker 3: my best job if I'm pricing likely a different app.
--:-- Speaker 2: Before you leave, what what's the elevator pitch for your startup? Oh, Now you're gonna have a bit more time with the book out.
--:-- Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, inherent, we are a quickly growing London based NEO lab, and we are interested in two questions, which is what is the future of scientific discovery
--:-- Speaker 3: And what is the future of human cooperation and organization? And we think that those two things are actually part of the same problem. We should say, you should approach science not as something that you're trying to automate in a box and hand over to the AIs, but as something that's like a human machine teaming problem. So they're trying to build these agents and this platform for teams to tackle the hardest problems in r and d, but in a way that is safe and that empowers humans and and where humans actually have insight into how these problems are being solved. And it also makes the most of the areas where humans retain a competitive advantage Yeah. Taste, creativity, and so on.
--:-- Speaker 1: So going after the the specifically unverifiable rewards, things that can't Exactly. Just be Exactly.
--:-- Speaker 3: Makes perfect sense. Domains that are sort of underspecified, nonverifiable. This is an area where, like, taste really matters. Yep. Humans have, like, in general, the best humans have, like, a better sense of taste in these systems. How can you structure an institution around AI capabilities such that you're getting the best of both the the people and the machines?
--:-- Speaker 1: I love it. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Great when you have more news, from the company and progress. I'm really excited.
--:-- Speaker 3: Absolutely. Would love to. Thanks for the time.
--:-- Speaker 2: Chat, Teddy.
--:-- Speaker 1: Congrats. Forget to buy the book. Buy the merch and also buy the book, The Bitter Struggle is available for sale now by Teddy Collins. And we have our last guest of the show, Joe from Luminal, the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Joe. Are Here he is.
--:-- Speaker 4: Yeah. From Flixaromniglass.
--:-- Speaker 1: It's been a gong less show so far, but we got some Kind of a nightmare news.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yes. It it was. But introduce yourself. We've talked about the company before, but give us the elevator pitch and then tell us about the round.
--:-- Speaker 4: Yeah. So I'm Joe. I'm the CEO of Luminal. Luminal is... I describe it as a software defined accelerator company. And so, you know, basically, all AI accelerators have a hardware component and a software component. And what we realized is there's actually a lot of accelerator companies that can make the hardware component and only one that can kind of make the software component. And they're they're worth 5,000,000,000,000 now. May have heard of them right now. And so, you know, what we realized is we should really go out and solve the real bottleneck here, is the software component. We should basically unlock... Build this compiler stack to unlock all this heterogeneous compute that's coming online. Mhmm. And so I think, you know, today we've really heard the starting gun for this race to commoditize compute. Yeah. I think that's gonna... You know, we're really excited about it. But, yeah, that that's the... A little a
--:-- Speaker 2: little suspicious that you timed your you timed your fundraising...
--:-- Speaker 1: Tell us about the fundraise. How much did Yeah. You
--:-- Speaker 4: So we we raised 25,000,000. And thank you. And... Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't blame him. Jensen saw our compiler and he knew it was time to bail. Yeah.
--:-- Speaker 1: Oh, that's what happened.
--:-- Speaker 7: Okay. Okay.
--:-- Speaker 2: This goes deeper than deeper than I thought.
--:-- Speaker 1: What what what is your go to market? Are you partnering with a particular hyper scale or particular chip startup? Do you want to work? Like, who... Where is the key customer to help actually grow and produce the product?
--:-- Speaker 4: Yeah. So, I mean, we kind of partner with everybody. We partner with the chip companies to build the compiler for their chips. Yeah. We go and directly license out to other neo clouds and foundation model company... Foundation model labs and inference providers. And then we also run an in house lab and... Or an in house inference cloud. Sorry. And so that's kinda targeted at, you know, larger customers that own their own hardware, we license directly to them. And smaller companies who want to basically just have us host the the the inference, we go and host it ourselves.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. How is how is demand at the chip level changing over the last couple months or even couple years? I mean, we went through the the the the reasoning leap, the agentic leap. Like, what are your customers asking for? What are you making sure that you can deliver at like a dollar per watt level?
--:-- Speaker 4: Yeah. So I mean, fundamentally, it all comes down to cost. Mhmm. Speed is good, but speed beyond a threshold isn't super useful. People almost 10 times out of 10 when given faster or cheaper will pick cheaper. And so we're always very focused on throughput. And we really like accelerators that have a big throughput focus. So, you know, our work on Trainium, for instance, we get excellent results out of Trainium. On our cloud, we're doing, you know, something like a 100,000,000,000,000 a month and, you know, we're ramping a lot of that on Trainium. And we get, you know, pretty phenomenal even against, like, Blackwell Ultra, pretty phenomenal price performance Yeah. On on Trainium. So we're really excited about that.
--:-- Speaker 1: How far are you along with discussions with some of the new chip companies? I'm thinking about an Edge or Cerebris. There's a whole host of other companies that are actually doing the fab work to make the chips. And they sometimes have different trade offs, but do you have a role to play with them as they come online over the next couple of years?
--:-- Speaker 4: Yeah. So I mean, have conversations with all of them. One of our first partnerships to to make the compiler back end was with Positron.
--:-- Speaker 7: And, you
--:-- Speaker 1: know, I believe
--:-- Speaker 4: you guys have had Mitesh Yeah. On. So we're we're big fans of Positron. We're actually ramping their their Atlas chips in our cloud right now as well. Fantastic. So we love them. And, yeah, I mean, really, what we're concerned with is it actually is faster to bring up a compiler back end than it is to tape a chip out. So we actually come in pretty late in the process of Sure. Of building a chip. They generally come with a completed design to us. Yeah. We kinda figure out the lowest level software primitives, wrap them, and then, you know, go on up from there.
--:-- Speaker 4: so we were able to, yeah, get to Positron support within a few months with working with them.
--:-- Speaker 1: That's awesome. Wow. Alright. Jordy, anything else?
--:-- Speaker 2: No. Really impressive progress.
--:-- Speaker 1: Hugely impressive progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations.
--:-- Speaker 2: I'm sure you'll be back soon.
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure the
--:-- Speaker 2: term the the b term sheets have have already hit the inbox. Well,
--:-- Speaker 1: it works out. Hopefully you're not on Outlook because if you're on Outlook, you're gonna have to wait for the term sheet. But thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.
--:-- Speaker 2: Great to hang out. Congrats.
--:-- Speaker 1: Have a good one. Goodbye. Well, we made it through. We had the opportunity to get better at podcasting while a little under the weather and we did it. Is there anything else that's hit the timeline? The chat has been very helpful in keeping us up to date. There have been rumors of a of a third third Jensen affair. I don't know how confirmed that is at this point. Tyler, have you been tracking this at all?
--:-- Speaker 5: Yes. That was confirmed in Reuters.
--:-- Speaker 1: In Reuters.
--:-- Speaker 5: Okay. So this was like a second In... Employee.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. Yes. And of course, the employee line is is is firmly in the sand at NVIDIA. But they have already taken the action because Jensen is no longer the CEO. So not a huge update there, but still worth sharing. Also, if you just tuned tuned in late to the show, merch.tbpn, we did a merch drop today. I believe there's some items that are still in stock, but...
--:-- Speaker 7: Yeah. There's socks. In some
--:-- Speaker 5: small sizes or extra large sizes.
--:-- Speaker 1: Okay. We have a few sizes depending on your size. Go check it out. Merch.tbpn.com. We have a whole host of of products available, of course, hosted. But thank you for being with us. Thank you for tuning in during this tumultuous time in technology. We have a real wild run of shows next week. We'll be at Tomorrow X in Austin on Tuesday and Wednesday interviewing many of the top investors, CEOs, founders in this industry understanding more of what this news means for the technology industry as well as just what's going on with the AI trade broadly. Did we forget about how it gets till Christmas?
--:-- Speaker 2: People are asking to see the white jacket which is now sold out in every size except the XXL which is bad because I went to the the team tried to find what I thought was my personal white jacket. It is gone.
--:-- Speaker 1: It's been pilfered.
--:-- Speaker 2: Somebody Somebody
--:-- Speaker 1: stole it.
--:-- Speaker 2: Somebody had their hands in the in the merch jar.
--:-- Speaker 1: But we did we did forget the the Christmas count, so we gotta tell everyone how many days until Christmas because that's that's why you come to this show. That's why you come to this show. There are forty two days until Christmas. And in a coincidence, NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. So counting it down. Christmas came early with the merch drop. Go pick something up. Put it under the Christmas tree. It's never too early to start your Christmas shopping. But I know if you've been watching this show, you you were... You got your Christmas shopping done three months ago. I got... I need to see it.
--:-- Speaker 2: Yeah. The next merch drop will not take almost two years. So...
--:-- Speaker 1: The camera's tracking me. So I'm losing ground. There we go. No. Oh, it's moving me up. Well, thank you for tuning into TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com And have
--:-- Speaker 2: Good luck out there.
--:-- Speaker 1: Thursday ever. Love you. Bye.
