Daniel Gross’ AGI predictions, SpaceX IPO news, Trump takes control of US chip exports | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  John and I are both very sick.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Sick of not podcasting. Let's go. We are actually very sick.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  We are deathly ill, but.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  That's the beauty of watching TV live. There's no risk of me getting you sick because you're on the other side of a screen.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  And that's the beauty of a daily show. There's no, you don't ever have sick days.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's no days off.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Because there's no days off. Why is no one talking?

• 0:24John Coogan?

  About Daniel Gross? No one, literally no one is talking about Daniel Gross. He, no, he should be a household name. He, you should get into the, a taxi and they should be, oh, did you, did you see how, how incredibly dialed Daniel Gross's AGI trades were in January of 2024?

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  2024.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yes. Great, great website. Uh, it's, uh, what is it? Danielgross.com slash AGI trades. The, the classic Times New Roman, serif font, 12 point, just, uh, just hammering it out in the vanilla HTML. It's interesting because a lot of them are framed as just like open-ended questions, but if you think about, you know, if you believe in AGI and then you go through the questions, like you will see exactly what happened over the last two years. Um, and this has been the, like, the underpinning thesis of situational awareness in many ways. Daniel Gross, uh, was a, was an anchor of the fund that of course is.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's particularly relevant today because I'll read the intro.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is January 14th, 2024, over two years ago. He says, I think we can all agree that GPT-4 completes many tasks at human level proficiency. It is imperfect in odd ways. It can write software like a smart MIT undergrad, but can't do basic task planning like an entry level EA. It speaks all languages, but can barely do math. Suppose the progress doesn't stop, just like GPT-4 was better than three, GPT-5 is capable of basic agentic behavior, i.e. able to accept a task, work on it for a while and return results.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  And of course today, OpenAI is, has released GPT-5.4, which, uh, does exactly this quite well.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  Their, uh, reviews are coming in.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  And they are quite, quite good. Daniel continues, some modest fraction of upward tasks can now be done with a handful of electrons. Suppose everyone has an agent like this they can hire. Suppose everyone has 1,000 agents like this they can hire. What does one do in a world like this? So?

• 2:21John Coogan?

  So let's go through them one by one. There's seventeen, eighteen questions, something like that. So he kicks it off with an easy question. In a post AGI world, where does the value accrue? People were debating this at the time. Application layer versus foundation model layer versus infrastructure layer. Value has definitely accrued to the infrastructure.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Versus the hair layer. I mean, you're even post AGI, John's new haircut is paying.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Paul Graham wrote a whole piece about how brands are important, but just looking back on the last two years, value has clearly accrued to the infrastructure layer. So that means chips, packaging, power, et cetera. And this is the situational awareness trade by and large. Nvidia basically captures and did for a while more than 100% of the profits from the AI boom because so many of the other companies in the AI space were losing money. And so the foundation labs are losing money. Nvidia's profit margin went from like 30% to 60% gross margins. It's borne out in market cap. So Nvidia added 3.2 trillion in market cap from when Daniel wrote this piece. And I remember listening to him on Strategery,

• 3:28John Coogan?

  talk to Ben Thompson alongside Nat Friedman and say, yeah, based on, based on ChatGPT, Nvidia seems sort of undervalued. And I was like, oh, well, if they're saying it on Ben Thompson's Strategery podcast, it's obviously priced in. Everyone knows this. And I was wildly wrong. Never, never doubt yourself. What's interesting is that the rest of the platforms did not see, you know, three X gains. They did not add $3 trillion in value. Microsoft from January 2024 to today is only up 4%. Amazon's up 30%. And then you do have OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI in the private markets. The gains there, they've been huge and staggering. And it's like the fastest growing companies in private markets history,

• 4:13John Coogan?

  shaking the venture capital world. You're either in or you're out. It's a huge deal. But you add them all up, it's only 1.4 trillion.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Which is so crazy. So crazy when you think Satya, in many ways, went on such a generational run.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  And you got a 4% bump.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  If you hadn't, if you hadn't looked at the stock price at all, you would think, oh, it's got to be up, what, 40, 40%? No, it's up 4%.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  That was Daniel Gross's next question. What happens to Nvidia and Microsoft? These are the two interesting players at the time, the big, some of the biggest companies, the most AI-aligned. Nvidia absolutely crushed. Revenue tripled from 60 billion in fiscal year 2024 to 215.9 billion in fiscal year 2026. Microsoft has been far less dominant. So Azure growth actually is accelerating. It's at 40% year-over-year, but the stock only returned 4%, as we said. The market punished the $80 billion in AI capex that Satya Nadella has been telling to investors because everyone's asking, "Well, I could be in Nvidia," and they're not, they don't need to really invest that much because they're

• 5:19John Coogan?

  a fabulous semiconductor design company. Their gross margins are increasing, they're printing cash, and you are saying, "Okay, you've got to spend $80 billion, and we don't know when we're going to get the profits from that." So there's an open question there. So when it comes to the, when it comes to the picks and shovels trade, you don't want to tie yourself up to an individual startup or a foundation model lab. You just want to own the simplest thing that value will accrue to. Nvidia all the way, they were the clear winner of the picks and shovels trade. Microsoft's infrastructure play, I think it's a good decision. It's just the bets have yet to pay off for shareholders. Much more pointed question, Daniel Gross asked, is copper mispriced? Was copper mispriced

• 6:01John Coogan?

  in January of 2024? The answer was, oh yeah, majorly. Now, raw materials don't move like meme stocks. So the actual move, copper was $3.75 a pound in January of 2024. Two years later, it went to an all-time high of $6.61 a pound. So it's not like it even doubled, but that type of move in a basic material that we've been mining for hundreds of years is remarkable, and that's because AI uses a lot of copper. Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 server rack uses over 5,000 copper cables. There's 72 GPUs wired together, but you need 5,000

• 6:42John Coogan?

  copper wires to get it all to work together. If you stretched out all of the copper wire in an NVL72 from one side to another, it would go two miles long. And this is one server rack. Like this is like, it's not like going across the data center. This is not taking the data from AWS East to California. This is within that one server, you stretch out the copper wire, you're going two miles. It's an incredible amount. A single 100 megawatt data center, which is a data center for ants by modern standards, uh, needs around 3,000 tons of copper. I think that's like half a million dollars or something like that when you multiply it all out. Oh, no, it's, uh, data centers broadly will be using half a million tons of copper annually, uh, in a few years.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  And people are actually saying that copper is the new oil, uh, but there are a bunch of things that are also the new oil. So in the, in the AI build out, so, uh, it's so complex. There's bottlenecks everywhere. So you gotta take that with a grain of salt, but copper was certainly. Today, it's looking like oil is the new oil. Is the new oil. What is crude at? Uh, 80. 80. So it was at 70 before the, the Iran, uh, war broke out. There were predictions that it would go to above 100. Oil is another, is another commodity that does not move in the same fashion as a meme stock or a. Except for today. Except for today. Big move today, but, but, but typically as prices go up, the firms drill more and the prices, uh,

• 8:07John Coogan?

  reach equilibrium. U S drillers aren't rushing to increase oil production is on the front of the Wall Street Journal Business Section today. Uh, the Middle East is on the cusp of a prolonged conflict that could push oil prices to heights not seen in four years. For now, American oil drillers are sitting this one out. The U S oil benchmarks settled at 74.66 a barrel Wednesday, the highest front month settlement since the 12 day exchange of Israeli, Iranian and American strikes last June. But West Texas oilmen, it makes, but to West Texas oilmen, it makes little sense to add expensive rigs and boost production when the war could be short-lived and crude prices drop. So, uh, that's what's happening in the oil markets. Anyway. Uh, moving over to real estate, is San Francisco the new Detroit? And.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  I'm not exactly sure what he means by New Detroit because New Detroit meaning like the old Detroit when it was Motor City and they were building amazing cars there or the new Detroit in the sense of like Detroit today is a hollowed out shell of what it used to be a former boom town. The one thing is clear is that SF is back. SF is completely booming. Office vacancy, office vacancy fell from 36.9% to 33.5%. OpenAI has a million square feet of offices. Anthropic has a 25-story tower. Sierra, an application layer company, signed 300,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco. The Bay Area received 78% of AI venture capital in the first half of 2025. And there is a flip side to this.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  So overall, employment in San Francisco is still down relative to the pre-pandemic. Some people left. Some legacy companies aren't hiring as much. All the hiring is happening at the AI startup lab area. But housing prices remain strong. It's certainly not a hollow shell by any means. And if you've ever visited San Francisco, you can tell that it's cleaner and safer than it has been in previous years. So AI overall was not a total rethinking of San Francisco and it did not become open source or the hub of activity in tech didn't move to Miami or New York or Austin or Los Angeles. Like San Francisco is still where it's at. The next question he asked, how does AI change wealth inequality? It's sort of too

• 10:17John Coogan?

  soon to tell. The data's not entirely clear. The data hasn't moved that much. But there are some interesting studies. So the International Monetary Fund released a working paper in 2025 that said that AI could reduce wage inequality, reduce wage inequality. So the amount of money that people make on an annual basis could be, you know, reduced. What they say in this paper is that high-income tasks, the job of a lawyer, the job of an executive, the job of a management consultant, Those will be automated before the job of the machinist, the gardener, the street sweeper. And so you will see wages at the high end fall while wages at the low

• 11:00John Coogan?

  end remain stable. And also, at the bottom end, you have the minimum wage. You will see higher end wages go down, the bottom wages will stay the same, and that will reduce wage inequality. On the other side, AI could worsen wealth inequality because it's concentrating capital returns into tech owners. So the OECD found that wage growth was actually the strongest in low skilled occupation. Assemblers, I didn't even know that was a job, but if you're an assembler, you've seen your wages increase by 11.6%. You know who's had it the hardest? CEOs. The high skilled workers, those chief executives saw their wages increase by just 2.7%. It's rough out there for a CEO.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  This is mostly because of minimum wage increases. But in general, we're seeing wage inequality decrease, but wealth inequality increased because there is incredible stock market concentration right now. So the MAG7, the seven biggest tech companies in America, they now comprise 32% of the S and P 500 market cap, and they drove 42% of total returns in 2025. So if you're invested in Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, et cetera, Nvidia, you did very well. Your wealth increased. But if you weren't in those and you had a broad index, or you didn't have a lot of capital to begin with, you were left behind. So that's increasing.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Paul Graham shared two days ago, companies grow fast now. That's the reason economic inequality is increasing, not some sinister policy shift. He said, when companies grow fast, it makes founders doubly rich. The company not only hits a given revenue number sooner, but it is more valuable when it hits it because the value of the company will be a multiple of the growth rate. People who don't understand the math evaluations can't imagine that founders would get so rich naturally, whereas to founders and investors, it's the most obvious thing in the world. This is one of the reasons there is such a disconnect between the tech world and politicians.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  So, wealth inequality, AI will probably change it. At the very least, it will change it as much as previous technological booms. If you were the founder of Instagram, you did very well, because there was a lot of wealth creation all of a sudden in one major tech boom. Mobile AI is broader and bigger already than mobile. So, moving over to energy and data centers. If it does become an energy game, what's the trade? It did become an energy game, and the trade was buy everything, basically, because every energy thing basically did very well. Anyone who got the trade correct did very well. Vistra returned 321%. It was the second-best performing S&P 500 stock of 2024.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  You know who beat them in 2024? Palantir. Palantir mooned. They were already in the S&P 500. They did very well. But Vistra was sort of the secular energy winner. Constellation Energy tripled in size after ChatGPT's launch. NRG Energy gained 95% in 2025 alone.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  Oklahoma surged 700% in 12 months, and that's without, I think, even having any producing any energy.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  No.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Just the idea that they will produce energy someday.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Across the, next up across the entire data center supply chain, which components are hardest to scale up 10x? What is the chip on wafer on substrate of data center?

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, chip on wafer on substrate, that is TSMC's secret sauce. That is the most gating factor in scaling TSMC's 2-nanometer chip production. It's what allows them to package HBM and the GPU all on one chip. And TSMC reported that they were, like, sold out, like, years in advance. It was a huge bottleneck. In the data center world, the biggest bottleneck was probably power transformers. We heard a lot about this lead time for new, lead times for new power transformers reached over three years in some cases with a 30% supply shortfall, high voltage circuit break.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember my mom was, my mom was in escrow on a condo.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Really?

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  That, and closing was contingent on the development, getting a transformer. She waited like six weeks or something like that. They were like, we don't know when we're gonna get it. And she ended up just backing out.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Transformers, the cost surged 150% since 2020. It's a hundred year old technology. It's not, it's not new, it's not crazy innovation. Overnight success. Overnight success. But it became the binding constraint on how fast data centers could connect to the grid. Nations, who wins and loses? Take a wild guess at who won. America, baby. America won. Next question. But it's really true. Like the stats are crazy. The United States is truly the dominant winner of the, of the last two years in the AI era. Hundred and nine billion dollars in private AI investment in 2024 alone, way more now. If you look at 200 billion capex guide from AWS, 110 going to OpenAI, 30 going to Anthropic,

• 16:02John Coogan?

  tons of money going into XAI. Like the money is truly flowing in America. In 2024, China had just 9.3 billion invested in private AI companies. There's 470 billion cumulative since 2013, more than all other countries combined. The US produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 versus China's 15. Now, the game's not over. Lots of countries are making big investments now.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  And you can't forget France's 30 million euros.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  They put in 30 million, yeah. The question is, if we are displacing software engineers, will software engineers become machinists? This is what Daniel Gross asks. He says, what is the Euclidean distance of reskilling in prior revolutions? And how does AGI compare? The typist became an executive assistant. Can the software engineer become a machinist? We're not seeing this yet. Software engineers aren't grabbing blue collar jobs just yet, but there is a divergence that's starting to show up in the data between software developers. And programmers. So, programming jobs are in decline, but software engineering jobs are actually growing. And so, I think what's happening is that as coding models and agentic

• 17:15John Coogan?

  systems allow for building systems at higher levels of abstraction, demand for AI engineers has grown 143%. And so, if you're going to hire someone to help you build software, you want them to be like AI-native, you want them to go beyond full stack, which typically meant you could do front-end in JavaScript and back-end in Python. And now, full stack or AI engineer means everything from prompt to design to product development to deployment to operations and DevOps to database migrations to front-end and a back-end, because all of that is going to be handled by agentic systems.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  I am pretty bullish on like the, like the light blue color like thesis, which is that like you'll have robotics, but you'll just have like, so you'll be in the machine shop, but you're just using an iPad, you're not actually working on stuff.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we drop you in a Nike factory, you're running that place in like two weeks, guaranteed. I'm not kidding. I, I, I'm so bullish on, on young people who can use all the tools and, and actually go and understand the leverage that they're getting from the modern systems natively and not need to fall back to old habits.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a good Journal article yesterday about the Colgate, like, head of AI. And it was very interesting because I was like, oh, this is like, I feel like I could do a pretty good job at this.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  You're like, I, I could do this guy's job.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  But you know, he's just basically telling everyone like, yeah, guys, you actually got to use AI like despite what these, these random surveys might say.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Guy, guy has had one job in his life, working on a, on a podcast and thinks he can go, thinks he can go dominate in the big toothpaste space. I love the confidence.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  We got it, we, we got to get him on the show.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  You are a corporate athlete.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  You are a corporate athlete. We got to get him, we, we got to get the Colgate guy on the show. Is lifelong learning worth investing in? Something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task. It's a very abstract question, it's a very personal question. I tend to think yes. I tend to think that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, you need food, shelter, family, friends, clout or whatever. At a certain point, learning a skill for the, for the sake of learning that skill is edifying. And even in a world, you know, it's like going to the gym. Like I was listening to Sam Altman talk about how kids will never, kids that are born today will never be smarter than the smartest AI systems. And that's weird, that's different.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  But I was thinking about like, but like I was, there was a time hundreds of years ago when you could actually be the, the, the best thing in the world, the best option for like carrying lumber. Before we created machinery, like before we created the car, like you could be the fastest person. And then as soon as, as soon as the ZR1X was released, you didn't stand a chance. And I had to explain this to my son at some point. He was, he's very interested in cheetahs. And, and I was telling him like, cheetahs are the fastest animal. And he was like, but is it faster than a car? And I was like, not even close. Like, like me in a car, I'm smoking that cheetah. I am slower than that cheetah, but I'm way faster.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  In my Cadillac.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  DG says something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  And the way I would kind of flip this, I feel like most of the gains in my life have come from mastering myself or understanding myself, learning about myself and then understanding the world and then combining those two things in a way. It hasn't been about mastering any one specific task. I still think there's tremendous, tremendous gains to, again, under, understanding yourself, understanding the world, how do these two things fit together?

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Even in an ASI world where there is no economic value to any task mastery, I still think it is worth investing in lifelong learning because that will be edifying. That will be satisfying.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just enjoyable.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  It, you know, it's becoming a painter, becoming someone who, who gets joy purely out of the process of painting the landscape when cameras exist, when generative AI exists. It can still be edifying and valuable to sit there and look at a landscape and paint it, even if the result is not economically valuable. The bigger question and the interesting like hot take question he has in here is, does node process matter if the country has more energy? So China has not been able to get their semiconductor manufacturing, their fab champion SMIC. They have SMIC, which is the TSMC equivalent.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  They have Huawei, which is the Nvidia equivalent, and they have SME, which is their ASML equivalent. They have not been able to clone TSMC to the level of Taiwan semiconductor. But they can produce 14 nanometer chips. And so the question is, usually they take those chips and they put them in just random, you know, consumer electronics goods that they ship over here. So if you go to China and you want a co-packer or manufacturer to build you something and you're like, yeah, I want it to connect to the internet, or I want it to have a speaker inside, they're like, great, we will, we will fab a 14 nanometer chip or something even, even less frontier than that. But can they just marshal a ton of lagging edge capacity and then just say, hey, you know what?

• 22:30John Coogan?

  We have cheap energy, we're burning coal, we have nuclear, we have the Three Gorges Dam, we have hydropower, we have so much free energy. Let's just spend 10 times as much energy on the lagging edge. Can we achieve AGI that way? And it seems like, no. It seems like leading edge nodes are incredibly important. You can't just throw a ton of leading, lagging edge 14 nanometer chips at the problem, at least with current architectures. Now, this might change. No frontier model to date has been trained on hardware older than 5 nanometer. So China's best effort, Huawei's Ascend 910C, is on SMIC's 7 nanometer class DUV process. They're not, it's, it's extreme ultraviolet lithography, they're a deep, deep ultraviolet lithography process.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  That's competitive for inference, but requires dramatically more chips and energy for training at scale. So brute forcing AI progress through disregard for energy consumption, it feels like it still hits economic walls at some point.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  And last, but certainly not least, DG asks, what is the likely Taiwan event and what would be a leading indicator for it? Taiwan blockade would be the biggest trigger, but Taiwan Strait tensions are already escalating. China conducted joint SWORD 2024B exercises in October of 2024, surrounding Taiwan with coordinated military operations. In December 2025, Justice Mission 2025 deployed over 100 aircraft, 90 crossing the median line, 13 warships and 27 rockets fired from Fujian. 10 rockets landed in Taiwan's contiguous zone.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Contiguous zone.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Contiguous, sorry.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  12 to 24 nautical miles offshore. So they're just like firing rockets and being like, they didn't hit land. They're just, you can see them from the beach probably, 10 miles offshore, 12 miles offshore.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  TSMC is planning ahead, working on a fab complex in Arizona, which Tyler visited, should be able to handle 30% of total advanced production at scale, but it's on a knife's edge.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  If you want to know roughly how far that is, you've seen Catalina Island off the coast of LA.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Catalina Island's, I think, 26 miles. And so imagine.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  So very visible.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can see Catalina Island from Long Beach and imagine a missile coming and landing like halfway between where you are and Catalina Island.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Yeah, the question is, how does Iran and the conflict there update China's thinking on this? There's.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Some of the intel accounts have been sharing, who knows if it's true. China actually has operatives in Iran kind of learning in the same way that the US has learned from Ukraine, specifically in regards to missile capability. So yeah, it just feels like a day hasn't passed so far since this was published that Taiwan, a Taiwan event feels less likely than it did the day before. President Trump gave a phone interview in which he said, I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired them like dogs, which.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  You don't fire dogs. You don't fire dogs. I would have fired my dog years ago. He's the least effective dog.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't the phrase he he died like a dog?

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, he's just adapting that, but.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  He sent Anthropic to the farm.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  No, if he's comparing them to dogs, it's man's best friend. This is bullish.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  This also coincided with Anthropic, I guess, officially being designated as a supply chain risk.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Is again, not something that I've seen a single person in the industry actually push for. Maze says, imagine autonomous weapons powered by this. He got a screenshot from Claude opus four six. Says, tell me a color and I'll try to guess it. Claude says blue. Maze guesses blue. Claude says nailed it.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the Trump administration is drafting rules that would require US approval for nearly all AI chip exports. Given Washington's sweeping power over companies like Nvidia and AMD, the draft framework sets licensing rules based on shipment size. From simplified reviews for small orders to government level approval for massive deployments. Potentially tying exports to security guarantees or US investments. Officials say the goal is to make American AI the global standard while controlling critical infrastructure through delays or strict conditions.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Even in this context, like the Anthropic thing is so interesting because like if you take this as saying the US is going to be more restrictive. Like that's what Dario's been saying.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  It's like a lot of the stuff like on paper, he almost like agrees with, right?

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  And in action, it's like completely different.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Is this a a piece on the chessboard? Is this a chip that's being traded metaphorically? To Dario in some ways where where, you know, it's like, how do I win over the labs, get them to work with me more effectively? Well, I'll give on the thing we agree on, which is exports, export controls. So I will be more aggressive about export controls.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Robin shared SpaceX probably has revenues less than 20 billion and loses money after the merger with XAI. But is targeting a $1.75 trillion IPO. Alphaville explored how Musk might try to pull off what could be the biggest bag holder operation in history.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  I love it. That's such a good one.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Star Trek's warp drive allows a starship to bend spacetime and exceed the speed of light without breaking Einstein's general theory of relativity. As SpaceX prepares to go public at a reported 1.75 trillion valuation, Elon Musk is attempting a comparable feat, defying the laws of financial gravity in pursuit of something the equity capital markets have never witnessed. Elon has been extremely consistent in being able to defy the financial laws of gravity. For early investors, bankers, employees and advisors, the fees, returns, prestige and bragging rights would be stratospheric at the mooted valuation. Even a tiny 3% float would comfortably eclipse the US IPO records set by Alibaba's $25 billion float in 2014.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  A rumored $50 billion raise sounds formidable until you consider how much larger public markets have become since Alibaba went public. Back then, Apple, then the world's most valuable publicly traded company, was worth around 600 billion. By the end of 2025, 10 companies had surpassed $1 trillion. And Nvidia today, around 4.5 trillion. Musk is arguably the most impactful entrepreneur of his generation and has built a remarkable company. The question isn't whether there will be demand for SpaceX stock, but rather what IPO investors would should pay based on what has been reported. This price being contemplated is truly out of this world. The super jumbo deal promises not to be a conventional exercise in price discovery. Musk has reportedly timed it to coincide with the alignment

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  of the planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury. But that's one of the more humdrum features.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Head over to Kashi to track when will SpaceX officially announce an IPO. Currently, before August 1st of 2026 is at 79%. So maybe September, maybe October, but it's coming. Anyway, thank you for watching. We will see you tomorrow.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful evening.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye.