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You're watching TVPN.
Today's Friday, May 8th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Jordy has some new buttons.
I got some new buttons.
And that's why we had to be off for a couple days.
Yes. Deep engineering work. The great lock-in continues.
The great locking. No, we will go into a review of the last few days, but first we'll give you a review of the next three hours because we have Josh Reeves from Gusto coming on, Jonathan Eman from Sweet Green, Z from Reef Factor, and then Brian Chesky from Airbnb coming into the TVPN Ultradome. We're very excited. Lighter schedule. It's Friday.
Friday. We're having fun. We're going to be hanging out here on the stream telling you about the American economic roller coaster. You've heard this story before, just nonstop.
Okay, so the American economic... be back. We miss you guys.
It's good to be back. Yeah, we got a bunch of stuff going on. So a whole bunch of economic news over the last couple days. Stock market is absolutely ripping. We should be in white suits. Intel's up 20% today, almost. And there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that you need to puzzle together to get a picture of what's going on. And then I'm discovering that there are K shapes within the K shapes. Even in the real economy, there's a divide between different companies. And so, I wanted to walk through that. So, let's start with the Intel news. It's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal about this. They've reached a preliminary chip agreement. It's not completely locked in, but there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last 6 months, 12 months as some of this was expected. The revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for. Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks, Leopold Ashen Brener, we're all hoping for something and plans are starting to come together. So, the talks have been described as intensive. Intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing for more than a year. Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting. Of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for what, all the 90s, 2000s up until the Apple Silicon program where they started going direct to TSMC. Can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're going to dig into it. So, they have hammered out a former deal in recent months. And it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for and manufacture them, both its own designs. So, Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a design unit. And in its foundry unit, both businesses have been underperforming for years before Lip-Bu Tan came in as the new CEO and was vowing to revitalize them. And so last summer the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the US 10% at $21 a share. It's now at $125 a share. So, White House has got to be feeling pretty good.
Yeah, huge. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over a billion dollars on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today if it's up 20% and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So, just today probably a one or two billion dollar print. And so the reporting here in the journal says that the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table putting pressure on sort of both sides to say hey let's think about the future of American manufacturing resiliency reducing Taiwanese dependence on a foreign supply chain and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fab that they want to build.
Nvidia got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investments. So up around a 5x.
Not bad. That's not bad at all.
The guy really needed it.
He paid for Grok with that. That's pretty sick.
Oh yeah, he just paid for Grok perfectly.
That's why he wired before they actually... Yeah. He's like, I'm up. I got gains. I need to offset these. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik has met repeatedly over the last year with high-ranking Apple officials including CEO Tim Cook as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should Nvidia dual source the Grace CPUs from Intel. SpaceX and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been discussion there. There was that rumor about GlobalFoundries and Elon's always been in and around the fab world and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term Terra Fab project. So, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people familiar with matter said with the Apple deal, Intel has now signed partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals. This is from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics after a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation, led outside foundry customers to pull or curb their businesses. When Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year ago, I guess a year and two months, to replace ousted chief executive Pat Gelsinger, President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very, very dramatic moment, but Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. And the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after. Following the investment, Intel's shares price rose sharply on Friday morning. It rose 7.5% to an all-time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. Tan has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, including hiring former TSMC executive Jen Low, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So, they're not friends anymore. Intel CEO has also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units as well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A and that is the node that Intel is hoping that all of the potential customers will jump together and say, 'Hey, we're going to buy from this. If you make it, if you build it, we will come.' President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally, but no, he's advocating for Intel to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said, 'I like Intel' in January. He said that the government had made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. 'As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in.' Trump said. Nvidia, the world's largest chip firm, invested five billion in Intel in September and the two companies announced partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems, for Nvidia. And last month, Elon, of course, announced the Terra Fab project. And so Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers. There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source independent of the geopolitical discussion. On Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter, affecting several Mac models. Cook said, quote, 'We think looking forward that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance.' And after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac Mini starting price. And so TSMC's manufacturing capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel. Makers of other kinds of chips for memory and storage, for example, are more competitive with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although of course they are memory constrained. Apple's been long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity from Nvidia and other designers of AI chips means Apple no longer has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel-designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple Silicon. And so there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies. Intel's starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. I saw one report that referred to it as the MAG 10 and they'd added a few other AI names to that group, but there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority of returns in the stock market. There's a couple slides that we can pull up that show the scope of what they're calling the... it is now a bubble. Everyone...
The concentration.
Yeah. The concentration. Yeah. We went through... we had three sort of beautiful weeks where pretty much everyone started saying there's no way it's a bubble. Look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble. But now...
People... Steve over at Bloomberg, we can pull this chart up since you mentioned it.
Which one is this? This is the concentration.
Sure. In the market you can see the AI Big 10. So Mag 7 plus AMD, Broadcom and one other... who is that? Micron. Now make up 40% of the market. Railroads for reference during 1835 to 1910 were 63% of the market. And he comps it to Japan, the Nifty 50, tech and telecom throughout various periods of time. And yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And so I was reading this post by or this piece by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy. Where is the growth coming from? He sort of backed the envelope. He said the AI economy grew 31% while the non-AI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP, grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're spending more on data centers than housing now or office buildings, I guess. I think it eclipsed office buildings and factories and transportation equipment like trucks and aircrafts. Meanwhile, investment soared 43% in tech equipment, obviously that's chips and GPUs. 23% in software, surprising...
Had a pretty meaningful bounce back, certainly on the revenue side.
Datadog, Atlassian. Yeah, there's been some acceleration. It really was extremely widespread where you had... I mean you had like DoorDash and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their moat. They still had to go and answer to the market and some of them got in and out of that in a week or a month and some of them it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten down. But overall, you know, software is still doing very well. And so on the flip side, there's another headline that hit the journal yesterday. US adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors. Retail, transportation, warehousing and healthcare all showed strong growth and led to expectation-beating jobs growth. And so, this is the weird dynamic that, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the AI economy and yet, the overall employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from the Wall Street Journal, but the US job market blew past expectations in April, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation, warehousing, healthcare. Not completely unexpected given that those are not particularly AI-targeted areas whereas you might see, you know, the layoffs in the tech community but that doesn't... it's just not enough because the US employs over 100 million people and so a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking...
Breaking news from Gabe in the chat. Texas Roadhouse is up... what? Why? He says 20%. I'm seeing 15%. Either way.
Why is it up so high?
He says you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been.
Maybe they beat... Yeah, everyone says this is a Kuriyaku filter. It really is.
It's crazy how viral that meme format has gone.
I thought that was just like a thing that I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about.
Yeah. No, no, no. It's quite popular. Broken containment fully. So the American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. This was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March. But it was much better than what expectations were for April. Analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs and the real number came in more than twice that which is like it just breaks the narrative a lot. And it's this... there's this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Sager about this. It's like that in some ways it's like AI is... Nvidia earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the global stock market. It's not actually holding up the economy. If you view the economy as all of the different jobs and activities that happen, even if there isn't incredible growth there, there's actually a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So, the unemployment rate...
I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come in at.
We haven't seen any revisions from March this time. I don't know. Maybe it comes like over six months later.
Yeah. But that's why I wanted to have Josh from Gusto on today because I think that Gusto has data on hiring that is very different from what the labor department... what's going on at the labor department. It's just a completely different dynamic. And you can look at like what's actually going on in small businesses. We've talked to folks at Stripe about this and there are a lot of other data sources, ADP payrolls and stuff. There's plenty of like pretty standardized formats for reporting and while there might be revisions to some government stats, it feels like there's plenty of places to get data and it's all pointing in the same direction, which is not... Oh, yeah. They delivered twice as many jobs as were projected and it was actually down. No one's really suggesting that. So the April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While healthcare is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing and they have weathered the tariffs. So many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. In the first four months of the year, monthly payrolls have averaged 76,000 up from an average of 42,000 during the same period last year. Still the US has shed jobs over the past six months and many companies are reluctant to bring on new workers and mass companies grappling with changes in everything from trade to immigration to tax policy have for the most part held off on large-scale hiring and firing. It does seem like the chaos of the tariffs and all of the early... like that creates a lot of business uncertainty that settles eventually and then you get back to okay there were a bunch of changes but at least we know that there aren't wild changes coming in the future at least that are expected. So Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG says it's still a high anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. And so I was digging into you know where is there strength within the real economy once you go outside of AI what is going on and there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of disconnected but showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making appliances for over 100 years. And they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never suspended their dividend. Even through all the great recession, the dot-com crash, every year they've been able to pay that dividend. They just cut their dividend. Which is a really, really big deal for this company since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news and the stock is down 80% over the past five years. And they're in some financial trouble like they have a lot of debt and they have a lot of competition but you could play that as like okay that like the real economy is like completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had Six Flags, which should be the thing that is the most discretionary. Like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing and they're growing attendance and customer spending. And so, now Six Flags, it's not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth 2.3 billion. And the stock is down over the past two years, about 50%. But the business is growing and you wouldn't expect that during a time of like deep economic weakness and so there's something odd going on there where as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary roller coasters as the ultimate like you don't... you can definitely skip it if you are cash-strapped but the actual dynamics of the market are very different. And so Whirlpool sells big-ticket necessities, these refrigerators. But they are deferrable. So you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight. But your kids are only really roller coaster age for a limited time. And Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition and existing home sales are down 3% month-over-month. And so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades and they are not necessarily a beneficiary of all the international competition that they face from LG and Samsung and other international players and so I've sort of...
Quick correction. Six Flags or new information. Six Flags has been up since around... around November it sort of bottomed. Travis, I remember I was thinking of this because one, they have the ticker FUN, which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun. But Travis Kelce and a group put in 200 million.
That's right.
The stock traded down pretty substantially.
Yeah, I remember that.
After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was and...
Well, it's still down over the past like five years. Like two years ago, it was like a $5 billion company.
Yeah. Down big. But what's interesting is that at this time of like economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about economic resilience, they are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend. And that's what's driving the stock today. And so there's this... I was looking at these two companies and I was like they sort of fit into this barbell thesis of the AI future which I've been seeing pop up more and more. And the two examples that I always give are one the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle. And then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers. And then Josh Kushner is doing a similar thing with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants. Like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. And so you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop because you can't vibe code Space Mountain. But it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy and the American economy and seeing like where the unsuspecting winners are. Ryan Peterson shared a post from the or chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this is in the Financial Times, but they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction, tech singularity, and the end of scarcity tax singularity. In the bull case, real GDP per capita goes north of a million dollars. And in the human extinction scenario, it goes to zero, of course. But the AI-boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for. Potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. But it is fascinating and I think this chart that Ryan shares is sort of why there's anxiety in the market because there's this... like you know the whole like you're not prepared if it's not a bubble concept but there's a dual anxiety where like if AI gets too good there's mass unemployment everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety for both the... not necessarily the true doomers. I mean obviously they face a similar opinion but even if you're just like in the it's overheated camp there's real risk to the stability and I think that's where a lot of the bubble concerns come from. Although we're certainly not seeing very many signs of the bubble. I mean, obviously the valuations are high, but so are the revenue growth charts. So, we can go through some of the folks that are arguing.
Are you more of a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy?
Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from Wonderco from the event I brought in.
Oh, would you look at that little souvenir?
I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin. It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope. You get a big envelope. You can get an envelope that's eight and a half by... it's effectively...
An envelope is sophisticated. An envelope is kind of a core business utility, right? Napkins can be used for anything.
If you're in napkin math, you got to pivot.
I will say I'm much more of a napkin math guy. I can't... I mean just... spiritually and the phrase that I pull but... if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin then I'm never going to get excited about it. Right. There's usually like...
So you think a napkin is definitionally smaller? It's a less amount.
Totally. It's a lesser vehicle than an envelope.
Yeah. Because a big envelope you could do a full spreadsheet on. You could totally write out comps. Totally and have multiple cells.
No. So in practice I'm a napkin math guy, but if something was really serious, I would probably trade...
Pull out the envelope.
Yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. It's time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope.
Speaking of envelopes, so this morning I was telling Tyler... Yeah. I'm incredibly overwhelmed with Slacks, emails, you know, DMs on every platform, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, X DMs, all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking, how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to and then every day they would print out all of the different messages and then bring them to you...
And you could put... like a box.
Yeah. You could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there and then at a specific time, you know, maybe in a roughly like 2-hour window, you could go out and grab all the printed out messages and sort of...
Sort of like leaf through them, decide what you need to respond to. You would potentially because you're only getting messages once a day, you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth, right? And I think that could be...
Sort of the opposite of Earth Class Mail, those virtual mailboxes, because they'll take your physical mail...
But I want everything. I want everything in this box. I want to put a box outside of my house and people put...
And I think there's something there.
Yeah. Trump... I mean, Trump literally does this.
He does that, right?
He gets emails out and then he'll write with a big marker his response and then his assistant will scan it and then email it back.
Yeah. More on... C Fry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true. Often the best business meetings were not scheduled as a business meeting.
So there aren't envelopes around. There's...
There's no envelopes around but there's plenty of napkins. Also I mean you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you want... those can be pretty big. So you're... but I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant like you're not supposed to ruin the napkins or do you carry a pen that has washable ink?
You have the crayons for the kids, right? People are...
The chat is saying they don't ask you. The chat is saying I could call my service the United States Post.
That's a good name.
Thank you, Alex. That's a great name.
That's sort of like the San Francisco Artificial Intelligence company or something like that or the Browser Company of New York. It would be inspired by that. Yeah. I think that even with the crayons... crayon closed-fisted grip right on the table.
On the tablecloth. Okay. I feel like if you're given crayons, you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu, which is typically made out of paper, very disposable. If you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene.
Jackson says digitize this service and call it email.
There we go.
We got to establish the mailbox first.
We got an idea.
But then we can go there. But I like where you're going.
I got an idea. Well, there's some other posts about the markets. Justin Spitler says them. Be careful buying semis here. Obviously, the market's very, very overheated.
Travis, let's play this video.
Oh, this is Travis Pastrana.
Yes. That's amazing. Nitro Circus. We mentioned many times on the show.
Is he drinking a Red Bull? What a great... Yeah. No parachute.
No. Oh, no parachute.
Yeah. So, he jumps out of the plane. No parachute. Drinking a Red Bull.
And then he connects. He's got to do some tricks first.
He's really taking his time here. The tension is building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up. And then do they pull the parachute connect to each other or do they...
They strap him to them?
Oh. Oh, okay. There is a strap because it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and hope for the best.
You're bearing... it's Red Bull. Anything could happen.
I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute that he then dons and... but he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Anyway, how was your last two days, Tyler? What did you get up to?
It was sick. I was at the... I went to the trial.
You went to the trial...
Opening on Elon trial.
Okay. Walk me through it. You left the studio on Tuesday.
Yes. Right before this. The chat is still going. They said if Gary Tan gets a hold of this service, he's going to call it Gmail.
Gmail is good.
Something there.
Gmail. If he vibe codes a full Gmail replacement, anything's possible. So you leave the office at two after we wrap the show on Tuesday.
You went straight to the airport.
I did.
Okay. And then what time did you go to bed because you woke up really early, right?
Yeah. So I got to the trial. So it's in Oakland. I got to the courthouse at I think like something around like 5:30.
5:30.
Yeah. Because you got to get in line. So basically, you know, it's a public... because it's like a federal case. There has to be some room for the public. But there's only like I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30 because I think it's closer to 20 because I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media.
Okay. And when you got there at 5:30, were there already people standing in line?
Yeah. So there were I think there were like three or four people there already.
Okay. Early bird getting the worm. That's...
Yeah. Well, because I didn't want to be late obviously because...
Did you talk to people?
A few of them. So...
Were you there before Mike Isaac?
I was there before Mike Isaac. Wow, but he has a media pass.
So yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that because each like news...
Yeah. New York Times got one pass and he was splitting it with Cade Metz and so they were sort of going back and forth and I guess he had a media pass that day.
Yeah. So that day he had a media pass. He got there pretty late. He got there like 7:30 or 8.
Okay. So you're there from 5:30. He gets there at 8. What time does the trial actually start?
I think around 8:30.
8:30. Okay.
Yeah. So, basically I'm just posting up for like 3 hours.
Okay.
And then this is Wednesday. So, walk me through like what are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge. They sort of welcome everyone in.
Yeah. Jury comes in. Okay.
So there are basically three main segments. So, basically, I'll say it starts 8:30, ends at I think 2:00 p.m. There's two breaks, two 20-minute breaks.
Okay.
So starts off and we watch like the deposition of Mira. So, this is all live streamed, right? The audio is live.
The audio is live. You're seeing a video.
We're watching the video of her deposition.
Okay.
It's mostly covering the ousting, the timeline of the ousting. And this is where all the text came out that day.
Did they show you the actual text? Were they playing a video? Or were they playing the AI reenactment of the text? Because we have this... someone turned Sam Altman's text to Mira Murati into a 2011-style emo teen teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio. Can you indicate directionally good or bad?
You anxious.
Good motion graphics too. Whoever made this talented.
What is this? Can you put in text into the show? Play this for an AI skeptic.
Yeah. And see what their reaction is because how do you see this and not want to build... I've seen these before and I've always really enjoyed them. But with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results. But it does happen.
So the author said his steps to make this. So first he OCR'd the images and turned them into plain text. Images of the actual text messages and then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted into... iterated like 20 to 30 times and then finally thought this one was catchy.
Okay.
Yeah, so I think it's still like this is still... but I think you still have to iterate on... I like this. I like this. Yosh is really having fun with this. Put up a version of this with the Gen Z brain rot slang. 'Yo fam, can you give me a vibe check on am I cooked or not? For real. For real. Satcha and the gang low-key stressing.' Murati. 'Yeah, you're Skiibidi. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio-level generational loss. Little bro, who ratioed me?' Sam Altman says Mira Murati. 'Some rando zesty NPC Twitch looks maxing Sigma.' I'm not even going to go further, but Yosh is having fun. Lots of people having fun. What else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video?
Yes. So the first like hour...
It's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day. Movie day.
The judge actually did get angry because like she was like, 'Oh, the jury's going to get bored.' And like she was like offering them coffee and stuff. So basically, yeah, the first like maybe hour was Mira deposition video and then we go through some of the actual like documents again of the text messages and then Siobhan Zillas is testifying. So she's physically there.
Okay. She was an OpenAI board member 2020 to 2023. Okay.
And she steps down when Elon started xAI.
Yep.
So that was... I have no idea how long that was. That was the majority of the...
During the whole conflict. So perfect person to testify.
Well, no. So she actually left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. The thing is November.
Oh, okay. Interesting. I didn't... the timeline always gets so jumbled up because like there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilya and Elon and then there's the board.
Yeah. Because all throughout this hearing there's like... there's sort of two main moments, right? And we're sort of clicking back and forth between them.
Yeah. Chat wants to know what kind of wombos were being thrown around. Was Lorraine being used? People saying, 'Can you please Lorraine this email?' Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I don't know if I remember anything.
Yeah, it's something like Mike Isaac always talks about like they keep referencing Dota and they keep... everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargony was it? Was it like Dwarish Patel podcast level jargon or like actual like researchers like talking to each other jargon or...
I would say it was not very sophisticated especially among the lawyers, right?
Okay. Yeah, Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo. Yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI about, you know, acceleration and all this.
Okay. Okay.
And then after that we watched another like hour-long video of Helen Toner's deposition that was just about the ousting.
Okay.
Yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed a lot. Like basically, you know, almost everyone like sitting in my section which was basically the public and the media. Like everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just get the media pass.
So everyone surrounding me is on their laptop like typing basically.
Yeah. Just like taking down what's being said and then I'm just sitting there enjoying it because it's like you know...
It's good stuff.
How would you rate Mike Isaac's like snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn?
I believe he did bring the butt pillow.
It seems like he's not making progress on the food front. I would expect by day seven of this he would have a smorgasbord in front of him. Full Thanksgiving.
I mean honestly like Nathan for You where he brings chili into...
He's got the chili, the chili soup.
You should bring chili soup.
I fasted the whole time. I just kind of... I just...
Why didn't you figure... we have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there?
I just wanted to make it more challenging.
Okay.
Yeah. I was like this is going to be too easy.
Yeah. I believe Ilya is early next week. Maybe Monday or Tuesday.
That'll be interesting. And did you go two days in a row or just one?
I just went one day because Wednesday the people testifying I think were like not going to be as interesting. Oh. But maybe that's a diss. So I apologize.
I think everyone's equally deserving of some attention especially if there's a nice warm bowl of chili being served in the courtroom. Anyway, should we play this Altman AI music experiment from Daniel Green? The Hamilton recreation of the texts. Everyone has enumerated their various techniques.
Ryan says, 'John, you should go to the trial dressed as Ilya.'
Yeah, I do have the costume ready to rock.
It only takes 5 hours to set up.
Get up at 2 a.m., then go stand in line. I think I'd get kicked out immediately. Anyway, let's play this. I want to hear this.
How does a startup founder late stage get fired by a board on a Sunday? Oh, so it's actually like...
So it's not the direct quotes from the text... or maybe it is.
He is now saying they need end of day and I said that doesn't work and we need to start...
This is much more uncanny valley for me. This doesn't sound like a real musical in the same way that the pop punk one sounded pretty accurate. I don't know. Anyway, we can move on to some other news. DeepSeek is raising a monster $7 billion round at $50 billion valuation making it China's largest ever AI raise. But what shocks a Jaws here, Crypto Punk the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. Three billion coming from the founder directly. Owns 90% of the company. Unheard of at this valuation. DeepSeek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful...
Funds. What a beast. He's got to acquire as much compute to push out new DeepSeek models. You know, we saw that chart that showed that Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different growth curve in terms of performance, but he's certainly betting on getting back in line, having a frontier model within a couple months. Oh, Tess has an interesting idea. If I was running a frontier lab, I would have the model versions countdown.
Ominous, extremely ominous. Be like, 'Yes, we're excited. Version three now and next year version two.' Somebody would do that.
Well, folks over on Amazon are reviewing The Art of War by one star.
Nothing but common sense. How this became a classic is beyond me. So much of it is common sense to the point where it brought out my snarky no kidding reflex. Like if an enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in. Wow, that was deep. Keep your money if you're thinking of buying it.
That's very funny. Leaving a bad review so my enemies don't read it. Yeah, that's the game theory.
Zach Brock says, 'Congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grok in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy.'
Yeah. Basically, every time we take a day off the show, something big happens.
Yeah, and that on Wednesday was the xAI or SpaceX Anthropic deal. A lot of people have been predicting that. I was not simply because I thought it was the rational decision for the parties, but I thought that the tension between Elon, who had only a couple months ago been hurling insults at the Anthropic team, I didn't think they would be able to uncover those cultural differences.
Totally. But demand for compute finds a way.
Yeah. I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a neocloud selling the compute.
Last year I was talking about that a lot, all the time. I was like, look, they're incredible at building infrastructure really, really fast, bringing power online. This feels like a very strong use for Elon Inc.
Yes. But as things evolved, I just didn't see this coming together.
I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the Cursor deal. I thought the Cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute and then the compute sort of got sold twice maybe. But of course, there were multiple clusters, multiple Colossus data centers, and plenty of work to be done as SpaceX continues to grow their ambitions of artificial intelligence. Well, we have our next guest, our first guest of the show, Josh Reeves from Gusto in the waiting room. Let's come in. How are you doing?
