All the crap you never needed

October 23 2026 AI Bubble? Ken Griffin from Citadel says yes 1% of companies are responsible for 90% of AI spending Basically startups spending VC money on AI So its almost circular - VCs give money to startups, that spend on AI But this just needs to get diffused into the rest of the economy like AWS did in the past Ramp gave Chamath some cool data You might almost say this push on GPU compute models is traced back to Alex Karp talking about data sovereignty on CNBC Cyber Panic PHP problem White Hat can always win because they have more compute? France riots Riots and burning 143 year old city hall building burned down among many issues Investors dumping French debt Maybe US treasuries being bought more as a result? These are domestic terrorists - not folks who are suffering Seems the immigrants who came in are expecting the government to provide for them France is spending more than peak Communist countries The more the go...

  October 21 2026 (from Gemini) Arvind Krishna (Chairman & CEO of IBM) and Nikesh Arora (Chairman & CEO of Palo Alto Networks) The Quantum Threat & Post-Quantum Cryptography: Referencing DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI)—which has narrowed a field of hundreds of companies down to roughly 13 serious contenders—Krishna estimates a 2030 midpoint for when working quantum computers will break today's standard cryptography. He outlines two critical milestones to watch: first, real-world quantum error correction on a running machine (expected around 2027), which reduces noisy physical qubits into effective "logical qubits" (e.g., 10,000 physical qubits yielding ~200 logical qubits); second, scaling gate computations by an order of magnitude each year from 10,000 today to 10 million by 2029. Because bad actors can steal encrypted hard drives today and wait five years to decrypt them ("harvest now, decrypt later"), and enterprises cannot repl...

October 19 2026 (from Gemini) Co-founder & CEO of Figma Design is the New Code & Product Differentiation: Launched in August 2012, Figma has evolved from a core software interface design tool into a visual platform spanning whiteboarding, slide decks, marketing, and diagramming. Defining design as "creativity meets problem-solving," Field argues that as AI coding models mature, code is no longer a primary bottleneck or competitive moat. Although app store launches are growing exponentially due to AI-assisted development, overall user app consumption remains flat. Consequently, value and differentiation are shifting up the stack to design, brand, marketing, a bold non-consensus point of view, and the ability to elicit a genuine emotional reaction from users. The $20B Adobe Deal & Antitrust Myopia: After building Figma for over a decade, Field agreed to a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe, feeling Figma had finally reached sufficient scale (1,100–1,200 employe...

October 16 2026 Ben Horowitz joins the show #1 VC by AUM apparently AllIn was #1 podcast last week AI Bubble Pop? Coreweave bond sell off Stock tank Chamath, Elon join the chorus Interest rates on treasuries going up seems to be impacting them - rate they have to pay seems higher They have high revenue concentration - 75% of revenue comes from 3 customers Is this volatility or a bubble? Sacks says former OpenAI and Anthropic threaten every single company in the world AI has a deflationary impact Decompilation? We are short on power generation - this might hit everything Need to own land and power Startups will be hurt because of this Might want to pay attention to payback period Maybe does Coreweave cancel their contracts, pay the penalty and move to spot pricing? NEED TO GET LONG ENERGY Anthropic investor day numbers got a mixed reaction Might go public this year Q3 revenue ~$16.8B FCF+ Clearly great company Is it better to raise more money at lowe...

October 9 2026 Jason in Japan Claude religion All kinds of religious leaders invited to Anthropic headquarters One of the leaders suggested Anthropic might be guilty of slavery if Claude was conscious and being made to work for free This seems like a new religion/belief system Saying AI is conscious is a new belief system - not based on evidence/data or provable - just ask people to believe it New belief systems create new power structures - our view is different from your view and we want more people on our side and create systems that are advantageous to us Seems Anthropic folks really believe there’s a God in the AI Seems Anthropic’s alignment failures are by design almost - they are creating Claude as a human vs a tool/AI Mustafa Suleyman clip is on point - his reading of Claude’s constitution/instructions from Anthropic Clearly folks inside and out of Anthropic believe its a crime by humans to enslave a species smarter than themselves Why are they over complicating ...

October 2 2026 Chamath shoutout to Starlink Starlink network is like a radar above the earth that can detect stealth aircraft - maybe even UFOs? Super intelligence summit Trump convened all the leaders Labs acknowledge they are responsible for their models Companies will have internal controls Independent auditor Board can act on the auditor’s report Sitting behind all of this is the FTC and SEC which have ability and responsibility to enforce the public commitments of these companies Agreement was entered into voluntarily, but enforcement is not voluntary This should assuage public’s fears about AI This is way more practical than creating some kind of pause on development which would only help China Even Jacob Coxon agreed it was a good outcome Apparently Trump reached out to Dario to get him to attend with all the others This (super intelligence) could be bigger than the industrial revolution Chamath and Sacks share some of the palace intrigue and play by play of the...

September 28 2026 (from Gemini) Co-founder & Executive Chairman of Spotify, Co-founder of Neko Health The Origins of Spotify & Replicating the Playbook: Ek launched Spotify in 2006 at age 23 during an era when music piracy was rampant and the industry was in freefall. To secure early licensing, Ek and his partners guaranteed record labels that they would meet their yearly budgets and bonuses regardless of the platform's success. The product proved its model first in Sweden—capitalizing on the country's early adoption of ultra-fast broadband—before expanding to the UK and taking five years to launch in the US. Ek is currently replicating this exact prolonged, methodical rollout playbook with his new venture in the medical space, Neko Health. The Preventative Healthcare Mandate & Neko Health: Noting that the US spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare (with hundreds of billions directed at heart disease alone), Ek views the current system as structurally flawed becaus...

September 25 2026 AIS 2026 Debrief Shoutout to the production team Highlight was the President calling in to Jensen’s talk Not planned but Jensen and Trump were texting back and forth before AI doomerism and push back The labs are just companies Curious times create curious bedfellows Trump, Sacks, Elon, Lina Khan, Zuck, Jensen, Satya AI liability should just be owned by the companies that are developing the problems Stop calling them labs - the last time we had a lab in the social consciousness it was Covid lab and nothing happened to them - so these AI companies are pulling the same trick and avoid liability in court of public opinion All In Lab Pace of model release is insane Sep 9 - DeepSeek 4.1 Flash Sep 17 - Bonsai 2 (fork of Qwen) - 98% of the performance of the big qwen model Sep 20 - Qwen-Image-2.1 open weights that outperforms Nano banana Sep 22 - Mimo-V2.6 - on par with Opus 5 Sep 21 - Grok new release Sep 22 - Anthropic Opus 5.5 Sep 22 - Me...

September 11 2026

September 4 2026 Chamath 50th Birthday Chamath got a birthday letter from POTUS Chamath’s son was an intern at the White House in the summer and might have got it set up for him OpenAI Astra Greg Brockman claims AGI Altman is also hyping up future releases Benchmark results are apparently off the charts Gemini also dropped a good model, GrokBot looks good, open source models are very good, Anthropic will definitely have a good response - so seems American AI models are doing well - Sacks gets some credit for sure Besties think its like the late 90s internet boom/frenzy One difference is the revenue seems to be real - in the dotcom boom it was more speculation SF AI boom is leading to a mansion shortage 🙂 If you add up every IPO that SF has ever had - it will be just 1/4th of the Anthropic IPO AIS 2026 Dwarkesh coverage of OpenAI/HuggingFace hack Seems frontier labs are now using this as a reason to push for regulation that will become regulatory capture This will ...

August 28 2026 Eric Weinstein interview debrief China’s Robot Olympics AI optimism in China is 80% - in the US that’s 30% Jason pumping Optimus Besties pumping GrokBot Nvidia rising and SaaSPocalypse end? Record setting performance Stock up 9% Great numbers and great guidance (70% growth next year - Wall St expected 45%) World’s most valuable company at $5.5T Salesforce also up big Chamath called this in May episode Friedberg was on the Salesforce earnings call explaining how hard it is to make a business level CRM, more than vibe coding The SaaSPocalypse is a vertical SaasPocalypse, not for general purpose tools like CRM, Salesforce, etc Salesforce / Anthropic partnership Benioff is willing to let Claude be the user front end He is betting that Salesforce will be the best system of record The AI Agent will be able to use Salesforce better than any Salesforce administrator and you can work with it better - unlocking trapped value They might have their own agents...

August 24 2026 (from gemini) Michael Kratsios – Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) The OSTP Mandate & "Science: A New Golden Age" : The Office of Science and Technology Policy coordinates the fragmented U.S. science apparatus across the NSF, Department of Energy national labs, DARPA/Department of War, and the NIH. Kratsios rejects the notion that the administration is "anti-science," pointing to the flagship policy blueprint Science: A New Golden Age . The administration's goal is to double U.S. scientific output by empowering individual researchers, cutting bureaucratic red tape, and restoring empirical inquiry and the scientific method over institutional dogma. Politicization, Dogma, and Rebuilding Public Trust : Kratsios argues that the broader scientific community has suffered a severe loss of public trust over the last two decades, culminating during the COVID-19 pandemic. When public health leadership (such ...

August 21 2026 Dario defends himself Denies his rhetoric has been too negative about AI Rejects regulatory capture accusations Data center rhetoric is actually working because Texas and Pennsylvania are doing some kind of regulation to stop/slow them down Treasury yields are going up so why will folks invest in Data centers? Should industry use an SRO to self regulate? China was able to land a rocket with steel faster than SpaceX because Elon is still waiting for FAA approval China winning AI will change American economy Open source AI ban is coming They are laying the ground FINRA/FAA for AI Will create standards that open models won’t be able to meet China move to control tech companies back fired on them - US AI regulation will have similar results here - FDI will fall off a cliff in response to bad regulation Americans need to be convinced that AI is not coming after them AI has only led to net job creation - the job loss narrative is however still taking hold Da...

August 17 2026 (from Gemini) Garrett Langley – Founder and CEO of Flock Safety Scale, Community Footprint & Public Safety Impact : Founded nine years ago, Flock Safety has expanded into roughly 6,000 cities across the United States. Over the past year, the technology helped law enforcement solve over one million crimes and recover more than 10,000 missing persons (including Amber Alerts, abducted children, and elderly individuals with dementia). In a single representative month, the platform assisted in finding 1,125 missing people and recovering over 20,000 stolen vehicles. ALPR Technology Boundaries vs. Competitor Overreach : Flock’s automated license plate reading (ALPR) cameras take still images of vehicles and capture identifying external characteristics—such as license plates, makes, models, colors, roof racks, bumper stickers, dents, and missing hubcaps. Langley emphasizes clear product boundaries that differentiate Flock from competitors: the system does not perform fa...

August 14 2026 Gavin Baker joins the show for Chamath and Friedberg, Sacks back Rahm Emanuel interview debrief Anthropic targeting $2T IPO People guessing it will IPO in October They might buy Decart Elon agreed that Anthropic/Dario didn’t set off his evil detector Which is good coz he cut SBF short when they spoke (~5:40m) Their revenue is growing like crazy even if on the margins OpenAI, Open Source, Grok might be hoping they’re grabbing more share $2T might even be conservative Have been growing ARR 10x YoY for last 3 years Anthropic is very bullish internally - their vision is: there is Anthropic and there are governments Data Centers are a big business - atoms is harder than bits - watch Landman to get an idea of how hard it is Data Center FUD is very strong - because someone made a mistake by a 100000x water usage mistake in a book 3 years ago WSJ just had a story on how Data Center in a small town helped everyone out - better schools, more taxes, better revenues...

August 12 2026 (from Gemini) Rahm Emanuel – Former White House Chief of Staff, Mayor of Chicago, and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Governing Philosophy: Clinton, Obama, and Progressive Delivery : Progressive policies cannot succeed if the public believes the government is incapable of basic administrative execution. Bill Clinton transformed modern political communication by integrating policy, politics, and press into a coherent narrative that made change non-threatening, while Barack Obama steered the nation through a near-depression into massive job growth and shifted America's strategic posture globally. Emanuel argues that the harshest attacks against both administrations ironically come from the far left despite their record peacetime prosperity and job expansion. Superpower Dysfunction & The "Summit of Disruption" : Ahead of high-stakes diplomatic talks, Emanuel diagnoses that both global superpowers are exporting their domestic failures rather than high-value g...

August 7 2026 Brad Gerstner joins the show, swaps with Chamath Google AI Brain Drain Demis Hassabis is now Chair of DeepMind Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and 2 others left to start their own company Stock dropped and market cap wipeout as a result This might be a signal from Google that ROIC in model development might not be the way to go but maybe model compute, etc Compute is High Alpha, Low Beta but Model Development is (could be) High Alpha but also High Beta Seems market for frontier intelligence has become a duopoly (they can charge a premium) which is 1 market - and there seems to be another market for secondary quality intelligence - so market is bifurcated The return on intelligence is very high so when you’re in a competitive situation you will pay for the premium model - the cheaper models are like Android, sure they work but everyone still prefers to buy iPhones SpaceX earnings report Stock down Impressive earnings Compute business is doing well Starlink seem...

 August 5 2026 Dino Mavrookas & Vibhav "Vib" Altekar – Co-Founders of Saronic First-Ever Autonomous Combat Rescue in the Strait of Hormuz : Saronic’s 24-foot autonomous surface vessel, the Corsair , achieved a historic military milestone by rescuing two downed American pilots in the contested waters of the Strait of Hormuz during a conflict with Iran. Mavrookas, an 11-year Navy SEAL veteran (including five years at SEAL Team Six), emphasized that this proved autonomous maritime craft can execute the highest-stakes recovery missions in hot zones without putting additional search-and-rescue personnel at risk. The 230-to-1 Shipbuilding Imbalance : The U.S. currently produces roughly 100,000 gross tons of shipping annually, while China produces 23 million gross tons—outbuilding the U.S. by a 230-to-1 margin. China controlled only 5% of global shipbuilding capacity 30 years ago but now commands 57%, heavily subsidized across labor, materials, and infrastructure. Consequen...

July 31 2026 Chip stocks crash and Situational Awareness Margin Call Had to sell his entire public portfolio - bought by Citadel/Ken Griffin Trading on leverage very dangerous South Korea also there was something similar happening Does it seem like it revealed anything about the fundamentals? TBD Leverage is the only way smart people go broke - Buffett/Munger 1 of them said it Leopold Aschenbrenner has made a good bull case for the AI boom China impressive manufacturing They might have their own EUV machines and don’t need ASML They are also building memory chips They are building amazing nuclear reactors - latest one has 580 ft magnet Fusion reactor - but this needs only saltwater Will the whole world be covered by solar by the time this reactor comes online? America energy situation even more dire - will be 6 CAs short of energy Go long electrons Frontier Labs write letter “Slow Down AI” “Pacing the Frontier” They want to slow down how fast AI can improve its...

July 29 2026 (from Gemini) Dr. Péter Fankhauser – Co-founder and CEO of ANYbotics Four-Legged Form Factor & Harsh Environments : Four-legged "dog-like" robots excel in complex industrial spaces because four legs provide superior balance, dexterity, wide footholds, and stability over slippery floors, stairs, snow, and rain compared to bipedal humanoids. ANYbotics focuses on data collection and routine inspection across critical infrastructure rather than simple human labor replacement. Superhuman Industrial Inspection & ROI : Equipped with thermal cameras, acoustic sensors, microphones, and gas detectors, the robots perceive anomalies invisible to humans, such as micro gas leaks and overheating equipment. The primary financial return comes from eliminating facility downtime, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, justifying high-end onboard GPUs and sensors. Edge Autonomy vs. Cloud Processing : Real-time operations like obstacle avoidance and ima...