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...

April 10 2026 Brad Gerstner back in for Friedberg Just do stuff - build and don’t ruminate Works at all levels of society and desires Anthropic Mythos Found many security vulnerabilities Good job setting up Project Glasswing - signed up a bunch of amazing companies like Google, Apple, etc to find vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them OpenAI and Google will likely do the same thing with their upcoming powerful models While Anthropic has a track record of scaring people alongside their product releases or fund raising - in this instance it does seem they have been very responsible Frontier Model Forum cooperates and coordinates on items of such high importance Why did they contact these software giants and NOT nuclear reactor makers, airplane manufacturers, airline operators, etc? Anthropic ankles OpenClaw Switch to API usage instead of $200 bundle Are they giving themselves an unfair advantage? Apparent competitors for OpenClaw Hermes Anthropic Claude ...

 April 3 2026 No Sacks 😟 SpaceX IPO $1.75T reported valuation Should merge with Tesla to reduce noise and overhead for Elon Moon manufacturing and logistics might be simpler - lower gravity, no atmosphere, make it easier to move things around without friction Could be a fraction of the cost of doing the same on earth Robots will help move Humans to the moon Could be a fundamental parallel technology infrastructure This is enabling other amazing entrepreneurs - like Vast making space stations, etc This will unleash a huge economy of things that we have no idea about Last mile logistics needs to be built Space garbage collection needs to be figured out Power generation is being worked on Intersection of autonomy, robotics and space travel will expand humanity’s potential Rebuttal to socialists on earth who are trying to stop everything More 2026 IPOs Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks Maybe Stripe, Canva, Cerebras Riskier the further down the IPO chain you’re in Cla...

E265: March 27 2026 Anthropic on a generational run Jensen called Opus 4.5/6 an inflection point (similar as Michael Dell) Anthropic releasing features out the wazoo - incredible pace Company made an early bet on coding/agentic coding - working really well for them They make the best coding products People pitting Anthropic and OpenAI just for drama Both companies seem to be accounting revenue differently and the businesses are quite different Emil Michael apparently smeared in article about his involvement with Anthropic and potential rivals - classic deflection by leftists OpenAI losing share? Risk is low because its very well established Could become the default consumer AI app - like how people pay for phones and electricity - OpenAI could be there Could be new platform like smartphone App store Google has a strong position here - they could release their own OpenClaw - people already trust them Impact of AI on valuations One thing that can help is looking at ho...

March 23 2026 (from NotebookLM) Interview 1: Michael Intrader (CEO of CoreWeave) Company Background: CoreWeave didn’t start as an AI cloud company. They started in 2017 as an algorithmic natural gas hedge fund, pivoted to crypto mining (Ethereum) using GPUs, and then moved up the complexity stack to CGI rendering and medical research. The Pivot to AI: In 2020/2021, they bought A100 GPUs and donated them to a volunteer open-source project called EleutherAI. When those researchers went back to their day jobs, they demanded CoreWeave's infrastructure, which launched their AI training business. Their first large commercial client was Inflection. Where They Sit: CoreWeave operates "above the Nvidia GPUs but below the models," focusing solely on the infrastructure and software integration needed for purpose-built AI clouds. Thinks of Inference as monetization of the training of the model The "Box" Financing Model (Important Concept): Intrader explained how...

March 22 2026 (from notebookLM) Intro Matt Mahan is the current Mayor of San Jose and is running for Governor of California. He grew up in a working-class family in Watsonville, went to college on a work-study scholarship, and spent a decade in the tech sector building civic tools like Causes and Brigade. He decided to run for local office after knocking on 10,000 doors and hearing voters complain about paying high property taxes without seeing basic services delivered. State Spending, Dysfunction, and Accountability California has increased state government spending by 75% ($150 billion) over six years, but outcomes have remained flat or worsened. Mahan points to the state's high-speed rail project as a prime example of a lack of accountability, noting that $14 billion has been spent over 20 years on consultants, lawyers, and environmental reviews without delivering a product. While there is outright fraud—such as $30 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims—...

March 19 2026 No weekly show only for Trump, Jesus and Jensen 🙂 (from NotebookLM + myself) Groq acquisition AI Factory Jensen introduces "Dynamo," which he describes as the operating system for the next industrial revolution's "AI factory". The core technology of Dynamo is "disaggregated inference," a complex processing pipeline that spreads different workloads across heterogeneous computing like GPUs, CPUs, switches, and Groq processors. Jensen states that Nvidia has fundamentally evolved from a GPU company into an AI factory company. Agentic AI The AI industry is moving from simple large language models to "agentic processing," where AI agents use working memory, long-term memory, and utilize tools, which puts heavy demands on storage systems. Because modern data centers must run highly diverse workloads (large models, small models, diffusion, auto-regressive), Nvidia developed the Vera Rubin architecture, effectively expandin...

March 18 2026 (from NotebookLM) Political Identity & "Moral Clarity" Label shift: Fetterman ran as a "progressive" back in 2015/2016, but completely dropped the label around 2021/2022. Now he just calls himself a standard "Democrat". Weird Polling Stat: He noted a poll showing his approval rating is roughly 50/50 with Democrats, but actually higher (in the 60s) with Republicans. Core Philosophy: "Country over party" & "moral clarity". He refuses to just take the opposing view of the Republicans on every single issue, which he says the rest of his party is doing right now. Who leads the Dem Party today? -> He literally said "TDS" (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is governing the Democratic party right now. If Trump likes something, Dems automatically hate it. Foreign Policy (Israel & Iran) Israel: He is "unapologetically" supportive of Israel. Calls it a "just war" and complete...

March 16 2026 Travis Kalanick Bits = CPU, Storage, Network Atoms = Manufacturing, Real Estate, Transportation/Logistics Moved to Austin Very hard to solve CA issues Truth and Justice are the immune system for society - when those are derailed, everything gets worse China is amazing and living in the future Michael Dell Started Dell 42 years ago with a $1000 in Austin Texas Economy growth vs rest of USA without Texas has better growth story Austin is just about top 10 US states 1 out of 10 children born in USA born in Texas More companies in Texas than NYSE AI companies are growing faster than earlier set of companies Doesn’t think AI means fewer jobs - it means we will do more things Invest America Agreed with Brad in 2021 that it was a great idea Previous administration didn’t take it anywhere inspite of discussions Trump seeks out ideas from business leaders Aiming to get $5T into the hands of Americans without 0 If instead this went to the government, it wo...

March 13 2026 Brad Gerstner in for Friedberg Brad got a shout out at the State of the Union Trump Accounts 100K accounts claimed per day so far Millions of kids got their accounts already More amazing announcements upcoming Iran War and fallout Oil prices are up New Ayatollah claims Strait of Hormuz will stay closed BG expects shorter duration of the impacts because Trump doesn’t care about democracy so much (Cheney like) as achieving the goals Chamath thinks this shouldn’t get worse Sacks also thinks war should end soon but more right leaning folks want the war to go much longer Iran could then escalate to hurting oil and gas infra of the rest of the middle east countries So open the strait but can’t refine oil? Also Desalination plants in the region are soft targets This would be catastrophic - would destroy the gulf states from a humanitarian perspective Israel is also getting hit badly - so it doesn’t help to prolong the war Escalation coul...