All the crap you never needed

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...

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...