Mailbag, incl: Aren’t Baristas in the manufacturing industry? April 19, 2026

Key Takeaways

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  Strategic domain acquisition yields high returns

  “One thing I did well, and it was entirely luck, was I bought the domain strawman.com 10 years ago. I would say I paid a thousand bucks for it or something. I regularly get offers for it through GoDaddy or CrazyDom. I forget who it is even now. Yeah, but it was like the dumbest thing in the world. Like I just, I'm half, not even because I'm too lazy to sort of change everything, but it's sort of like to 10X return or something like that.”

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  Web technology abstraction remains incomplete

  “I've got to have a domain registry. I've got to point that to a website host, and I've got to have my own email kind of set up through Gmail. I've got to point that to the domain. And it's not hard. It just kind of strikes me that this day and age, kind of like, you would have thought it would be all the one thing. I know it's not a naive thing to say at one level, because I know it's difficult, and you do have different options, and the choices are good and all that kind of stuff.”

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  Direct AI experimentation reveals investment value

  “I would highly, highly, highly encourage listeners to roll their sleeves up and just start playing around with this. I mean, it'll be overwhelming at first, and it'll be frustrating, and you'll take a lot of backward steps, and you'll hit the wall, and all these kinds of things. But I think it is beholden to us to do a lot as investors, rather than reading what some muppet on Twitter thinks and how it all works.”

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  Most AI startups face future extinction

  “Therein lies the opportunity. Therein absolutely lies the opportunity. I can imagine, like with the internet, like the smartphones, like TV, radio, electricity, all of these things, you will find when we look back in 20 years' time, that 99.9% of companies that were quote unquote AI don't exist anymore. But the 0.1% that do are probably the biggest companies.”

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  AI integrates horizontally across all industries

  “And he was making the point, essentially, that this is a technology that's very horizontal in the sense that it will be, unlike the iPhone was obviously this great invention with the smartphone, but it sort of was more of a vertical thing. It allowed us to do a bunch of stuff, but through that one apparatus. This is something that will be integrated into every layer of everything. We see it with the internet, with the internet of things, where your fridge is online now, you know?”

Episode Description

– Bezos on AI – Are share purchase plans red flags? – Does low liquidity make small caps less efficiently priced? – Are we getting manufacturing and services confused? – What about small-cap ETFs? – You called your dog… Diesel??? –  What about using fuel excise in place of interest rates? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.