All the crap you never needed

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...

July 24 2026 Chinese AI models catching up to US frontier models Kimi K3 seems awesome Moonshot AI seems really good Michael Kratsios alleges distillation Reports that Trump White House might be divided on banning Chinese (or any) open source models Sacks predicted this in E275 - May 2026 Any threat is used to take a shot at open source models Try to enter predicate facts into the public record to justify a push to ban these later on Sacks thinks it would be a tragic mistake for US government to ban open source If Anthropic was sincere about their distillation concerns, then they would push for a ban on Chinese models distilling American models, not to hurt American developers’ access to models Why aren’t they stopping it if its happening at “industrial scale”? Instead of KYCing their customers like Chamath suggested they are asking to ban their competitors Hilarious hypocrisy of these labs - especially Anthropic - when they have already paid fines ...

July 21 2026 (from NotebookLM) Mark Cuban – Entrepreneur, Investor, and Dallas Mavericks Owner The AI Bubble & Valuation Realities : The current AI wave is fundamentally different from the traditional dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Back then, companies with "no revenue, no traffic, no nothing" went public at astronomical valuations. Today, the hype is heavily driven by private capital, meaning a market correction won't wipe out public retail investors but could destroy VCs, private equity firms, and investment funds that are "going all in". He warns of "pricing to perfection," where tech giants like Google and Meta are borrowing billions on top of dedicating their entire cash flows to capital expenditures for AI. The Data Center "Pickleball" Risk : A significant hazard looms for the aggressive buildout of data centers. Physical power grid capacity, which is expanding only 4–5% globally, serves as a hard limit. Cuban warns that if...

July 17 2026 Demis Hassabis AI article Proposal for regulations/rules Widely acclaimed by industry folks (Elon, Sam Altman, Jack Clark from Anthropic, Satya, Sundar, etc) Form a self regulatory organization (SRO, like FINRA, etc) Higher chance of industry getting regulation right because it can stay more current vs govt regulation which can lag - especially relevant to AI which is moving so fast Sacks spoke to Demis and likes the proposal with some notes The SRO has to have diverse enough group of industry participants to address regulatory capture problem (can’t have just 3 labs, etc) The regulations should apply to the frontier models - if the model is is behind, why regulate it - if there is a step change, only then there might be catastrophic risk It should be for truly catastrophic risk - nuclear, chemical warfare etc not speech Should be a substitute, not in addition to lot of random regulations that are already there Opt in to begin with to prove the agency works ...

July 15 2026 (from NotebookLM) Pat Gelsinger – Former Intel CEO The Downfall and Leadership Transition : Spent 34 years at Intel, which went off the rails and got heavily outperformed by Nvidia, TSMC, and Apple. The shift began when the company moved away from deeply technical founders and leaders (such as Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, and Craig Barrett, where 15 of 20 people in executive meetings held PhDs) and started being run by business leaders and "bean counters". When Gelsinger became CEO (noted as 2001 in the transcript), he was the first technical leader in 15 years. Financial Over-Prioritization : In the five to six years before Gelsinger's return, Intel gave $100 billion to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks instead of building new factories or investing in critical EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machines. The Apple Silicon Miss : Intel passed on making chips for the original iPhone. Under Steve Jobs, Apple moved to Intel's Ce...

July 13 2026 ElevenLabs CEO - Mati Staniszewski Insane revenue ramp $600M ARR 600 employees Fast revenue growth and fast employee count growth - so quite challenging Competing for top talent Lot of initial talent is still there Started pre-ChatGPT moment All teams have engineers embedded in them (talent, marketing, etc) People are preferring to talk to AI customer agents now vs humans Amazing use cases Working with celebrities US congress woman giving speech using this technology Woman who lost her voice before her wedding - use it for wedding vows Gaming (like James Earl Jones voice in Darth Vader getting unlocked as a character that helps you - working with Disney and the family estate) Definitely real threat from frontier models Feel their advantage is their research (architecture) and the data they have Max Junestrand - Legora CEO 50% revenue growth quarter over quarter for 7 quarters Market of legal services in the US is $1T/year Software is $40B/year so o...

July 10 2026 Friedberg out on vacation, Brad Gerstner in IPOs SpaceX - already 7th largest company in the world OpenAI, Anthropic expected IPOs hoped to be quite successful (Brad is an investor of course) Intelligence is the largest TAM we have seen in the history of the world Inspite of the open source buzz, frontier models are getting higher share of enterprise spend Case for open source Some companies won’t have the revenue growth to justify frontier model cost Some countries will be happy with the just good enough open source and will prefer sovereignty Case against Complicated to setup open source (bittensor, openrouter, etc) Meta released Muse for coding Sacks joins the show CTOs are trying to control token cost Jesse Zhang Decagon boss had a good blog post on this - how to think about optimizing model costs (when stuff is new you want the best model, when stuff is mature you want to use the cheap model that you have fine tuned) Nikesh Arora tweets were also ...

July 9 2026 Andrew Feldman is back Cerebras CEO Crazy Data Center buildout here Data centers are getting power of the order of small cities Demand is way outstripping our ability to build data centers Cerebras has a $25B backlog - and others are in similar position AI regulation is tricky AI progress will be amazing Robin Rombach Co-Founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs Based in Freiburg and SF Formerly worked at Stable Diffusion Co-invented latent diffusion Reported partnership with Martin Scorcese Human in the loop is very interesting use case - instead of making long full movies with AI, you can parallelize your brainstorming with AI Same multi modal model could not just do image/video processing but also be deployed in a robot

July 3 2026 Palantir Nvidia partnership announced Karp appearance on CNBC went viral Made the case that companies don’t trust the big labs AI Sovereignty importance highlighted Jason has been making this case for months Sacks made an interesting case on X too Karp’s case in succinct terms (from Palantir X account): Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models: "What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else." Apparently Figma got rug-pulled/blind-sided by Anthropic in this way (their stock has fallen 50% after Claude Design) Claude Design, Claude Code (apparently started after noticing Cursor’s success), etc all seem similar plays This is like the Microsoft play Google also did something similar in the pa...

June 29 2026 Nate Silver interviewed by Jason and Friedberg Knicks chat CA election - specifically LA No evidence of fraud Very partisan state Election system is bad - unacceptable that it takes so long Partisanship is the gravity that dictates every election in the US We can predict 43/50 states with 97% accuracy likely at this time itself for the 2028 election Democrat Party intra politics 3 kinds of Dems according to him Left wingers - Bernie Abundance libs - Ezra Klein Resistance lib faction - Gavin Newsom 2028 prognostications NY is more successful than CA because its more practical Gavin Newsom not doing well 2026 mid terms predictions Democrats are 80-85% chance to take the House and 40-45% chance to take the Senate Only thing Trump can do to help the Republicans is to get gas prices down

June 26 2026 Friedberg out, Travis Kalanick/Gavin Baker in Socialists Sweep NY Democratic primaries 10th district - Brad Lander 13th district - Darializa Avila Chavalier 7th district - Claire Valdez Clear response by voters to their message - its working DSA platform is quite “out there” - mainstream Democrats seem to have lost their party DSA co-chair is quoted as saying they are using the Democratic Party as a ballot access vehicle How related is this to importing mass migrants in the previous administration? Did South American right wing election winners win because USAID got defunded? Truth and Justice are an immune system for society When the immune system is compromised, social ills go on the rise Communism is in all of us have you ever been lazy and wanted something for free If this is the way you want to live your life - you get Communism Voting base of DSA is downwardly mobile wealthy educated white liberals They are losing votes ...

June 23 2026 Friedberg interviews Trying to acquire Ebay Started Chewy First started a jewelry website Then figured out gap in pet industry (neighborhood pet stores, PetCo/PetSmart, Amazon pet offerings weren’t working great till then) Lot of competition ( Pets.com in the background) Sold in 2017 for $3.35B You have to stay on top of everything 24/7 as a founder Will > Skill You have to attract fellow “psychopaths” who are passionate Went public for $20B a few years later Gamestop Started investing post Chewy Was asked to join the board by the CEO to help fend off other activist investor Then covid post crash made him buy more than 5% and had to file D (active) or G (passive) - chose D Then he and some associates joined the board, the stock went vertical, bunch of shorts got wiped out, got rid of all debt, raised $1.7B or so Hired a CEO and more ecommerce people thinking it would be run like Chewy Turned out to be wrong strategy Had to learn about physical ret...

June 19 2026 Great American Politburo This is being formed right now in the US New oligarchs are taking their seats and forming their rule The leaders who elect themselves to dictate the economy Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna They want to seize the means of production, control education and the media They lose to their minds any time someone builds something new They are the rising evil empire This is against the spirit of economic mobility in the US - the government giving you things takes this away - you become an indentured slave of the government Human agency is limitless - any time you make a system where the government gives people stuff, you are taking away that agency We are getting to the point where there is no longer any private property in the US Illinois set to begin taxing Bitcoin, Crypto transactions SpaceX IPO Cursor deal $60B consummated Chamath called it $135/share Raised ~$85B Incredible ride over 2 decades Wealth comes from the m...

 Jun 12 2026 Anthropic releases Fable5 Mythos with guardrails very powerful even Nikesh Arora approves Huge backlash Retaining data for 30 days which is not ZDR (zero data retention) They can nerf the model without telling you They surveil you and they get to decide if you’re worthy Where is the auditability? They are writing blogs to argue for government regulation and setting up an FAA style agency We should be adjudicating the output of AI, not its use, limiting the tools themselves will deny us amazing opportunities Alternative is hard to build because data center costs have gone up 25x Pushing fear will cause China to pull ahead because regulators here will stop you Apocalyptic rhetoric is pushing folks to make their own models or use Chinese open source Meta clearly fumbled that bag here with failing their open source initiatives Liquidity vs Summit LA Mayor Race There is no election? Some reported vote count issues System is operating as designed ...