John Arnold Joins, 4 Tech Arguments (Number 3 Will Shock You)

I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Overnight success. 3,000. Double. Right. That's misinformation. Courtney, clearing order inbound. Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on, get up. Trust the experts. Five. We are experts. Founder mode. Fine. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Yeah. King in the castle. King in the castle. Glaze. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Double glaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Cook is welcome. Team Deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right. Mark, clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retrace. Mark, clearing order inbound. Five put. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Just on Jordan. King in the castle. King in the castle. You're watching. Today is Friday, September 25th, 2026. We are live from the TV Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. You use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Be the king in the castle with Ramp.com.

Uh, we got some debates on the timeline. I identified four debates for you. You don't want to call them debates, though. You want to call them arguments. Fights. I thought arguments. Okay. We're throwing down. We're throwing down. Wouldn't someone rather listen to an argument than a debate? Okay. I don't know. I don't want it to be a healthy, mature conversation. I want to be reaching over a debate fight. Uh, first one, Microsoft. Is Microsoft about to have their Muse moment? They've launched Copilot. Now they're launching a new product today. Is it going to be a breakout success? Is it going to compete directly with Meta and Muse, or will it be a different thing entirely because it lives in the enterprise? It lives in the Microsoft ecosystem. Let's go to Tay Kim. He says, 'Shots fired. Microsoft will go after Meta's Muse.' From Alex Heath's interview of Satya Nadella. He's doing the rounds. He talked to Drabosa, talked to Alex Heath over on sources.news. Still cooking. Quote from Satya Nadella or from Alex Heath. He wants to bring autopilot AI chief of staff to your personal life, too. It's not staying in Excel. It's not staying in Outlook. It's going to be cooking dinner.

Big move going from a copilot to autopilot. Autopilot. Yeah. This says a lot about their intentions with the product. Yeah. Yeah. It is actually sort of like, you know, is this AGI, is this not AGI? Like if you're in the copilot mode, you're sort of signaling we're not really in the AGI era. Autopilot feels more like, although it's a term, it's a vague definition, it is significant in the brand term. So it's a hardened version of OpenClaw. The agent gets its own computer workspace and memory to work continuously. There is a very funny post from somebody in Meta who is like, you know, a lot of these agents, the value prop is that it has its own computer. It has its own virtual machine with some real hardware behind it. So you can have a file system, has I think eight gigs of storage, so you can say, oh, I need you to download some images, some files, like keep them in your cloud so you can access them at all times. It can obviously build a database, save records, your contact information, your calendar. It can mirror that. So it doesn't need to be pinging every service all the time, doing everything in the context window. In the Ben Thompson parlance, it can write things down. This is very good. This is what everyone was doing with OpenClaw on their Mac minis. This is what people are doing with Codex, Claude Code on their computers, and Codex, of course, has like cloud threads that do something similar. The funny thing is that Meta was like, it's a real computer. This is a real computer. And then they're literally using a virtual machine, which is still a real computer. Like you have access to hardware, but it is a virtual machine. Like when you're not using it, it goes dark and someone else uses it. And I think there's still some confusion because people were like, this isn't a computer at all, and it is.

Well, yeah, it sounds a little bit too good to be true that they're not just going to rack for you and just let you, if you sign up once and never use it, that's just inefficient compute resources. But it's just funny that we live in such a virtual time that someone can very seriously and basically correctly be like, it is real. It's a virtual machine. It can't get any more real than that. It's like, yeah, it could, but why would you? So no one cares. Anyway, Microsoft's doing the same thing. Virtual machine for everybody. It'll have its own computer workspace and memory to work continuously. When I ask about Microsoft's consumer strategy, he points to its 100 million plus consumer subscribers. People that subscribe to consumer Microsoft services, Call of Duty, Xbox Live. These are the consumers. Now, Xbox is still like pretty anti-AI. They've been signaling like, hey, yeah, we're not going to lean in. We're not going to stuff Copilot all over Xbox Live. I'm personally, I hate that because I think... Yeah. I want a basically like a company-built aimbot. No, I mean, yes, of course. That's funny. But no, what I want is I want to be able to text my Xbox and say, hey, like Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out. I want you to pre-order it. I want you to get it installed and I want you to open it up and do the little config because every time you open a game now, it's like downloading an update, accept the terms and conditions, accept the privacy policy, adjust the HDR, adjust where the HUD is on the screen. Do you want any accessibility features? Do you want to do the tutorial? It's gonna blow your mind, but if you press forward on the stick, you'll move forward. Lock in. We got to do this tutorial. Here's how to jump. It's going to blow your mind. It's the X button. Push it. Now, push it again. Okay, you ace the tutorial. It's like I want to be able to jump into the game, and I do think an AI agent could help me with that. It can certainly do it on desktop. You can just say, hey, go play the whole game for me. Level me up until I'm ready to really get in the fight because this is my first rodeo. But Xbox has been pushing back on it. Microsoft broadly, they're going all in with autopilot. Autopilot should also go to the consumer side. He sees consumer agents potentially cutting out today's middlemen, making that market more zero-sum. In the enterprise, he thinks agents will make the market bigger than cloud by orders of magnitude. We got room to run. Satya said it himself. He's going to 300T, 300 trillion dollar company. I like it. What do you think?

So, I mean, the first thought is that, again, everyone is building the exact same thing. So we went through this for the last few years where everyone had a chat app. Everyone's building that. Funny thing is, the lore on GPT-4, that was first available in Bing, like GPT-4, the thing that, like GPT-3.5 powered the original ChatGPT, GPT-4 was only available through Bing. And then everyone was like, oh, I guess Microsoft's going to make a play and Bing's going to be doing AI and this is going to be a challenger to Google. And then they sort of pulled back. But... well, and at that time when Microsoft was backing up the Brinks truck for OpenAI, they certainly... I don't think it was... it certainly was non-obvious at that time that they would be creating a company that they would ultimately compete with as much as they are, you know, partners. So... yeah. So Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, chimed in. He said, 'Microsoft shipped a really compelling product on top of OpenClaw today. We worked with them since March to make the codebase ready for large-scale deployments.' And of course, there might be some IP sharing agreement, right? Because didn't... Oh, no. Because OpenAI hired Peter, but they didn't acquire OpenClaw. Open source. Yeah. So anyone can build on top of it. Yeah. But what's odd is that... I think Nat Friedman stated that they didn't fork OpenClaw. They built something from scratch, but there are just conventions. And so you wind up having similar MD files. It's just like, you know, if you build a web page, you're going to have a product. If you build an e-commerce site, you're going to have a product detail page. You might have a similar sitemap and architecture. It doesn't mean that you forked Shopify to do that or whatever. Let me actually tell you about Shopify right now since I mentioned it. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So the debate point is how big will this be? What is the actual impact to Microsoft? There is the cool macro tech story which is just that the models have advanced to a point where there is a new use case, like they're useful in a new way. Not just knowledge retrieval, not just go and write a bunch of code. They are useful, but that requires a new type of harness. Just like when the models got good at code, the harness became very important. We saw Claude Code and Codex and Cursor and a bunch of other companies. Cognition really defined that era. Now the models are pretty good with personal agent stuff, sending text messages, talking to people, integrating with Slack, etc. So the harness and the integrations and the partnerships matter. So we're talking about Microsoft partners with Amazon. Who's going to be Amazon's dance partner? Who's going to be Walmart's dance partner? Who's going to partner with Shopify? How big is the open ecosystem? You need a different harness. You need different integrations and you need a lot of new user education because I think there's a lot of people. I mean, there's people that are still online being like, these things hallucinate, like they have a knowledge cutoff, because they're talking to like the voice model.

Yeah. The main thing with this launch is that I don't think there's anyone on X that's seeing Microsoft launch an OpenClaw-powered agent and thinking, I got to use that. I'm so excited. I really want it. Okay, that's my view and I think it's correct and you're free to steelman it. Okay, that being said, they have such incredible distribution. They can still roll this out to a bunch of people who are going to try it and be like, wow, that's really cool and useful and helpful and be the first way that they experience this new paradigm of agents, right? And so as much as I just think there's basically zero excitement from the core insider agent maximalists, there's going to be just natural excitement from everyday Windows and Microsoft users.

Yeah. Yeah. It is uncommon in tech, and maybe it's uncommon in X, to run your entire organization, your enterprise on Microsoft. The default tech stack for most startups is Google Enterprise, Gmail. You set up the Gmail account for your employees and then you add Slack. So then you're in the Salesforce ecosystem and Microsoft is there, but usually with like one-off Excel licenses here and there for the finance team. Does that resonate with you in terms of how these products fit together?

I mean, Google does have — there is Gemini Spark, which is like a 24/7 always-on agent, but like no one...

Does it have a real virtual machine? I mean, it says even if your phone and laptops are turned off, it'll still work.

They aren't really pushing that because they are pushing Gemini as like the chat interface, but man, that thing falls short sometimes.

Oh, Monopoly guy over here. You're going to advocate for Monopoly.

No, this is the irony of monopoly, is that it's bad for, you know, pricing in some ways. It's great for user experience and it's often great for customers. Like, how many times are you advertising on Facebook and you're like, 'Oh, I wish Ad Manager would just also run Reddit ads and also run X ads and also do my YouTube ads' — like, just do it all. And the same thing is true even when you fire up like a Netflix app. You're like, 'Oh, is the movie I want on Prime or Apple TV or Netflix or Paramount Plus or HBO Max or Peacock?' Like, there's 25 different things. And as a consumer, you're like, 'I'd love just one,' but then they would have pricing power over you. And so you got to look ahead and know that there'll be dragons if you allow the monopoly to flourish, potentially. At the same time, we've been in this odd regime where the monopolies have not actually damaged consumers. Like, this is how Amazon got out of antitrust again — was like they didn't raise prices perniciously against their consumers. And so the current antitrust law is written such that you have to prove customer harm. It's not enough just to have concentration in a market. You also have to be extracting monopoly rents. You also have to be raising prices, increasing profits, and hurting the consumer financially. And so for something like Google has a search monopoly, it's still a free product. So it's very hard to prove consumer harm because you're just like, 'Yeah...'

Okay, but there's viable alternatives. That's much more elastic for the technology suite. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if there's like, you know, a niche community of like, 'Yeah, I'm a Microsoft Copilot guy.' I mean, the COD integration could change things. It just depends on how you're positioning it. Like, if you talk to somebody and they're like, 'Oh, you know, are you a Claude guy? Are you a Codex guy? A Cursor guy?' Like, all those things say certain things about you aesthetically. You're Muse — okay, we get it. You're like the Laboo guy. But if you come out and you're like, 'Yeah, I'm actually a Microsoft Copilot guy,' that could say two things. It could say Excel jockey, king of the financial markets, apex predator of the economy. Or it could say, you know, dropping a nuke on COD.

Prestige Max. What's the...

Diamond camo? No, it's dark matter.

Yeah. So if it helps you grind to dark matter, I think they got a winning product there. Don't you think?

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI — own the data platform that powers it. Okay, we spent way too long on that. We got three more and our first guest is joining at noon. So we're going to still — we got to figure out a way to make the tensions go up and actually get an argument going here, because that was...

That was too friendly. That's too friendly. Okay. Well, you wanted to argue that all the tech insiders couldn't wait to get their hands on Copilot. That was your stance, right?

Anyway, Doge Designer shared a photo from a dinner that happened at the White House featuring important tech people and none other than Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. So Elon Musk, President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, China's first lady, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Apple's Tim Cook got the prime seating right in front of Donald Trump, and they were at the prime table together. No translator that I can see in this image, although there is an empty chair, so it's possible that there was a translator at this. Empty chair would almost certainly be for Donald, right?

Yeah, that's right. Okay. So we're going to put the translator just between Xi and Melania.

Right. That's what you got.

If you're ever seated with Xi Jinping at a dinner at the White House, just throw that down and he'll be like, 'One of us. We know it's time to make a deal.'

Yeah. No John Ternus. I feel like Tim Cook should get the John Ternus plus-one. Elon should be able to bring like Nikita Bier along or something. That would be fun. But it was a pretty tight guest list. Although some people did get plus-ones. Jensen brought his wife, Lisa Su brought her husband. What's interesting is that Dario wasn't there. He's sparred with the administration before. We've seen this. He's also attended plenty of meetings in DC. And Tom Brown, the co-founder of Anthropic, has been on a reset with the administration and even went as far to praise Trump's 'Let Data Reign' post on Truth Social. This was September 1st. He said to Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, quote, 'I really loved President Trump's post from earlier this week.' And so there's clearly olive branches going out, but they haven't been fully received because the dinner invite maybe didn't materialize or maybe he turned it down. We don't actually know. But he was offered 15 plus-ones, maybe 10 plus-ones, maybe five plus-ones. He decided to lock in and grind for the ASI.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. There's Lynn. She's been on our show multiple times. Dear friend and also, you know, an important person to get around the table when the capital markets, when the future of the global economy is at stake. So very, very exciting to see her there, as well as many other guests who made the list. The list is wild. Signal was really having some serious FOMO. This was hilarious:

It's such a good... Wait, also, where are the venture capitalists? VC congratulating themselves. Won't someone please think of the venture capitalists? Yes.

There's levels. It is. This is like...

Is this a copy pasta of the like $15 million or Dinner with Drake meme? Yeah, dinner with Jay-Z. 500K or dinner with Jay-Z.

500K or dinner with Jay-Z. Or the Grant Cardone like, 'Yeah, I slept in my car last night to come here,' and then...

It is very funny because like there truly are levels. And if you as the humble poster, I obviously have a ton of respect for Signal, but if he or I were at this dinner, we would just be seated way in the back and we'd be like, 'Wow, look, it's Jensen. Wow, that's so cool. I wonder what he's talking about. Cool.' And then you get to go up to him for two seconds and be like, 'Dude, I love the GB.'

Dude, that's so cool, John.

That's true. That is different.

Hope there's no flies around here. We got some flies on the wall today.

But yeah, it was a stacked, stacked list. There's a lot of folks. Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Anna Brockman, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Cristiano Amon from Qualcomm, our guest this week, made it to the dinner, came back from Hawaii. David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, tons of other folks. ExxonMobil, it was really a who's who of the global economy. Son of Bernard Arnault, also Bernard Arnault is there.

Yeah, I would have liked to see a Jocko Willink. I would have liked to see a Joe Rogan on this list. Sort of disappointing that they didn't include podcasters except for David Sacks. He did make it. And also, yeah, he's a podcaster and avenger. Secretary Kennedy also has a podcast. There's actually a fair amount of podcasters. Brad Gerstner podcast. Sam Altman ran the Y Combinator podcast years ago, Startup School. So, former podcaster. There's a few other people on here. But lock in, get your... I think if you put your entire net worth into potentially becoming the CEO of a really important company, maybe you do wind up as a fly on the wall. Never doubt yourself, Signal. I think you can make the next cut. I believe in you. I also believe in Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

My take on this is that the question is like, should Dario have been invited? I think even though they're having beef with the administration, like it's such an important company, it's important that he's in the conversation. He also has like a very, very hard line on China, and I would feel better about his positions on China if he's like, 'Yeah, Xi Jinping, I really do hate him,' or something like that. I don't know. You know, it's informed from like a 30,000-foot view.

He worked at BU.

Yeah.

But I want to see the sit-down happen. I want to hear the downstream. I want to be the fly on the wall. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Has the AI slop gone too far this time? That's our third debate. The third debate that will shock you. So, we can pull up this Kalshi ad. It's their latest direct-to-consumer, direct response.

This is going to be on the...

Yeah. Add it to the Spotify playlist. So, Brian Pomper says, 'This Kalshi ad is among the most dystopian ones I've seen from any betting app.' And you can sort of hear the AI song over the Pixar-inspired AI-generated video. The lyrics are also odd. Not to nitpick, but it says like he sends his girlfriend money and then he's handing her money. 'Every month I send her money from groceries.' So, there's a lot of like, it lacks the polish that removes something from slop. Every once in a while you see a video that is AI-generated, but you're like, okay, there was enough attention to detail there. This was, let's just rip it. This is actually a popular format of AI slop that's been going very viral. Starts with a really dramatic hook. In this case, the man thinks his partner is having an affair,

but actually she's just hedging food prices on Kalshi because she has inside knowledge on the market from working at a bakery in the morning.

Yeah. So that even though egg prices are going up, she's able to net out and remain even because she is profiting on trading the egg futures market on Kalshi. I don't know how deep the market is. I don't know how real those markets are. Do they really have egg futures markets on Kalshi now? That's kind of interesting. I don't know if you can actually hedge your groceries. I want to see a version of this ad from the Chicago Board of Trade where she goes a lot further. Gets a Bloomberg terminal, establishes a relationship with JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. She's visiting the Chicago Board of Trade regularly, trading in size. She's talking to counterparties, Millennium, Citadel, you know, she's on the phone constantly moving huge volumes of commodity futures at scale. Kind of elevating herself past just the prediction market small ball and getting into the big leagues. That's the future.

No. So, this is not insider trading. Like, you can actually do this. You can be a baker and realize that prices are going up and trade the commodities markets. In fact, the commodities markets are designed specifically to give that signal, and that is the purpose. The purpose is to understand, okay, the weather is bad, people can trade that. Fundamentally, there's no law against insider trading in commodity markets effectively. But there's a question of like, is this a consumer-ready product? Like, is this something that someone who maybe doesn't have, you know, a desk and a research team and a Bloomberg terminal...

Okay.

Yeah, but if you're only buying $20 of eggs, that's enough depth. So it is a viable use case. It's not fraudulent. I think most people are responding to just like the sloppiness and the clickbaitiness of like the weird hook. But somebody posted one of these that was done by a much less prestigious brand in, I think, like weight loss. It was some sort of weight loss pill, but it starts with like this insane hook about a secret relationship, very soap opera script. And I feel bad, but I actually watched the whole thing because I couldn't look away because it was really the Pandora's box. It was infinite jest for that three minutes. And all the comments were like, 'Why did I watch this?' And someone had put it on the timeline. I was like, 'This is the worst thing I've ever seen.'

Yeah.

What about the... the interesting thing is I think the consensus, and we're going to talk to John Arnold about sports betting and prediction markets at noon today. But there is another interesting side of this, which is people seem to be coalescing, at least the vibes on the timeline are like, this is not good. Like, either you should personally stay away from it. I don't advise you to be sports betting, and I think that's John Arnold's position. There is a second debate point and question, which is, what about the dopamine sites? How do you feel about dopamine sites? Though in South Korea, the thing that I think is consumerism, but continue.

You've never lost a...

You're stuck in your...

Yeah. You start young, you're more likely to stick with it for a long time.

They will probably be served like a million gambling ads by the time they're 18.

It's so normalized. It's so a part of society now. It's instantly accessible.

You're sending this message that like this is your way out, right? Like this is it.

Uh, what do you think about dopamine sites, though? Because dopamine sites, which is where...

Dopamine sites are fake shopping experiences. It's an e-commerce site where you can buy luxury goods, but you don't actually have to pay for them and they don't arrive. So, this is from an article shared by Adonis on X. The final frontier of consumerism has arrived in South Korea. Quote, 'This week, I placed orders for a $44,860 Patek Philippe hand-engraved watch, a $12,500 Hermès bag, a $9,800 Tiffany diamond ring. Cha-ching. Oh, I like—I didn't realize that was the analog one. That's great. Uh, and a $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet in yellow gold. I don't need any of them. I certainly can't afford them. Thankfully, they'll never arrive.' Instead of Amazon, this individual spent the past week browsing a new breed of website known as dopamine sites, a trend that emerged in South Korea. These websites like Dopamine Shop and Food Never Comes recreate the entire ritual of online shopping. You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery. But it's all imaginary.

Is this not as bad as sports betting? Is this not bad at all? What is this?

Yeah.

A dopamine site for TBPN merch.

Well, I was thinking you should make like a dopamine app where you log in. It looks like a Stripe dashboard and then you just see like, you know...

Like Adventure Capitalist.

Yeah, we made a game called Burn the Runway back in the day. I put it in the chat. You can pull it up.

It's crazy.

Do you think this counts as larping? Because it's not—it's actually live action, right? But it's like develop like an encyclopedic knowledge of luxury goods if you spend enough time on here. Um, I don't know. It seems like it's nowhere near as bad as something where real money's at stake because you are wasting time, but you're not wasting any money and there's no risk of downside. So why would you buy bananas? Well, that's the cheapest item like if you need them for... But you can buy the max amount of bananas and then...

Yeah.

Wow.

To put this into perspective, uh, there were no AI companies even on this list back then. It was...

You had Quibi on there.

Well, um, it's not all bad in AI slop. There's a video that, by popular demand, is his magnum opus.

You think this one's bad?

Okay.

Yep. Uh, it is just somebody using basically making videos and then um...

Yeah. He looks very silly and he got 230,000 followers on Instagram.

Million, you know.

Hundreds of millions of views. And so the new meta, I guess, is, you know, making an AI character.