All the crap you never needed

April 8 2026 First Quarter: Tip-Off and The PA Playbook The interview tips off with some lighthearted banter as the host rolls an old VHS tape of Governor Josh Shapiro playing basketball in the 1990s, followed by some immediate trash talk about the Knicks and 76ers. The host quickly pivots to policy, attempting to set up a rivalry by contrasting Shapiro's success in Pennsylvania against Gavin Newsom's struggles in California. Shapiro politely declines the comparison to focus on his own stats: Pennsylvania has cut taxes seven times and boasts an unemployment rate below the national average . Shapiro outlines his signature "Get Stuff Done" (GSD) strategy, heavily emphasizing his "money-back guarantee" on building permits . He notes that out of 40 million permits issued, the state has only had to refund five, and he scores a major point by explaining how cutting the wait time for a barber's license from 20 days to a single day puts thousands of dollars d...

April 6 2026 (from NotebookLM) Introductions & The Early Days of Palantir The Meet-Cute: Trey and Shyam recount how they first met. Trey interviewed at Palantir in its early days, wearing a full suit and CIA cufflinks. Despite the fashion faux pas in a t-shirt-heavy startup, he was hired to help build their government business. Palantir's Origin: Shyam explains that Palantir started post-9/11 with the thesis that privacy and security shouldn't be a zero-sum game. Their goal was to expand the "efficient frontier" so society could have more of both, initially focusing myopically on counterterrorism. The Philosophy of War & Silicon Valley's Awakening Deterrence is Key: Trey states that war is "categorically bad," but to protect your interests, you must build capabilities that are so intimidating that adversaries never consider picking a fight. Silicon Valley's Forgotten Roots: Shyam points out the irony of the tech sector looking do...

April 29 2026 (from NotebookLM) The Introduction and Background The Setup: The hosts introduce Steve Hilton, a British immigrant and Republican candidate leading the polls for California Governor. Origin Story: Hilton explains his background as the child of Hungarian refugees who fled communism. He details growing up in a working-class family in England and being heavily influenced by Margaret Thatcher, who he credits with saving the UK from the "winter of discontent" and union dominance in the 1970s. "All In": Hilton mentions he moved to California in 2012 for his wife's career in tech. He proudly shares that he renounced his UK citizenship to become an American citizen, fully committing to his new home. Tax Policy and Economic Vision The Tax Pitch: Hilton unveils his cornerstone policy: no state income tax for individuals earning under $100,000, and a 7.5% flat tax for everyone earning over $100,000 . This is designed to provide immediate relief t...

May 1 2026 Fun with names OpenAI revenue and growth issues Apparently missed user target, revenue targets (internal) Reported issues between Altman and Friar - prompted joint statement maybe They are almost trading at the price equal to their spending commitments On the other hand, GPT-5.5 is doing very well and it seems their compute commitments may be saving the day for the coding use case in Enterprise The key chokepoint is power - they don’t have enough to get tokens out Too much red tape 40% of data center jobs have been canceled recently - why won’t that negative trend continue? This will benefit the Hyperscalers - Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon This could help Elon with xAI/SpaceX/Cursor 4 : 2 : 1 typical market share of a mature market Cool MIT paper shows we could reduce inference cost by 10x with no loss of accuracy This could increase usage Maybe Google has cut into OpenAI’s consumer market share Clearly these compan...

April 24 2026 Sacks moved the pod back an hour due to POTUS meeting SpaceX Cursor deal xAI and Cursor collaborating on new AI coding model $60B price for company OR will $10B for collaboration fee/break up fee Cursor revenue $2B end of Feb 2026 - projected $6B eoy SpaceX revenue $22-$26B rumored SpaceX trying to IPO soon Seems the way the acquisition is structured is to not slow down the IPO Grok usage has plummeted This is a complementary acquisition - xAI brings compute and a foundational model - so Cursor brings training data, enterprise clients, expertise and product People are realizing that writing software is where all the value is Thoma Bravo - might divest Medallia Apparently too much debt Maybe TB got their money out and are done with dealing with the company - so debtors are screwed and the equity is impaired Rumors on X that sales team at Medallia missing their targets Maybe AI and agents are hurting There might also be a deflati...

April 17 2026 Mamdani Tax Pied-a-terre tax Dumb because second home will be taxed and thats the most elastic part of the market - so no one will buy second home in NY This is like a dog whistle - asking for United Healthcare CEO type shooting or Sam Altman home firebombing Maybe this is good for hotels This hurt London - land banking - so maybe it will work out for NY Maybe the solution is building more housing - like in Austin Its obviously good for the city to have billionaires park their money in these cities They also don’t consume resources but pay property taxes so its profitable for the city So this will hurt With the London situation rich people moved to other cities in Europe Transaction costs in LA and SF are too high (could be 13% of property) Your property is not safe in blue states - wealthy people will realize that - the political class thinks they can take a chunk of it OpenAI Internal memo shows targeting Anthropic and going after their market shar...