MONITOR TIC

“Roblox has primarily grown virally. Viral means word of mouth, sharing links. I was just at GDC last night and I was talking to some representatives from one of the big four short form video platforms. They said a third of the gaming content on their platform is Roblox content. By having users and influencers share interesting things, that does create a lot of viral pull on the platform.”

“The most underrated aspect of Roblox is how much deep tech and theories around economics and theories around systems sit underneath it. Behind that very spontaneous 'let's just go play something together' there's a lot of deep tech. There's a lot of also systems theory, like we've had to design an economy. We've had to design thoughtful search and discovery. We've had to design thoughtful systems.”

“And it's very clear to me that Trump wants to announce a win. He's desperate to announce a win. He wants to get past this. So what does that look like? He needs an agreement on the nuclear side, which means, a the removal of the enriched uranium stockpiles, which both sides seem to be close to agreeing on, and an agreement on no enrichment for a period of time, which both sides are pretty far from as of today. There's a three page document, an MOU, if you will, that is presently being circulated.”

“The new market is agents accessing something because it's reliable when it works and it's secure. And I think that market is just getting started, and I think that's a massive opportunity right now for both Morform and Aave and human trust brands as well as new entrants that are popping up.”

“Meta has just sent a memo to all of their employees, announcing that they're cutting about 10% of their workforce. This represents about 8,000 people. Zuckerberg basically told everyone this at the start of the year, when he said 2026 would be quote, the year AI starts to dramatically change the way we work. I think this is a story about how AI is starting to really reshape payroll at the biggest companies on the planet.”

“I think for a while, the last few years, the industry has optimized for scalability and speed and whereas in the early days of blockchain, we really optimized for security. And I think that pendulum is swinging back. Now we know that we can have fast chains. I think we now need to work out how we have secure chains.”

“The federal government has started to pour billions of dollars into companies developing mines and refining facilities. There have been grants and loans. The US has even bought into a handful of American rare earths companies. The US is even trying to get Mexico and Europe and Japan to agree to a rare earths price floor, so China cannot crater the price again.”

“Andy Jassy shared in an internal all hands meeting that he expects AI will help fuel AWS to become a $600 billion business in 2036, which is double the previous estimate of how large they expected that business to become. That would imply that he essentially expects AWS to grow at a 15% CAGR over the next decade. It's also worth highlighting that AWS growth has been accelerating. As in the recent quarter, revenue grew 24% year over year.”

“They said, find us some bugs, and it found this bug. A guy named Niels Provos had written some code in 1998 and he made a mistake. Nobody noticed that mistake for over 27 years until Mythos took a shot at it. The bug Mythos found could have caused a serious problem, and it had sat there undetected by humans for nearly 30 years.”

“One of the big problems for academe and one of the big problems for people with analytic temperaments is a lot of them have overdeveloped their baseline research and underdeveloped their management skills, their people skills, their organizational skills. And yet when you have AI that is really good at researching and analyzing, it's the other skill sets that you really need more of. For us, AI is not displacing workers. AI is allowing us to actually have more effective labor. It's allowing us to essentially hire staff that we can't afford.”

“I literally try more and more to treat being CEO as a craft. It’s a craft that requires fitness and mental health and a whole structure around it. We work on metabolic health and research around how diet affects all kinds of things like bipolar, schizophrenia, and how clearly we think. I have a phlebotomist come to my house once a month to watch metabolic markers.”

“There's a cloud aspect to it. We run on our own cloud. It's super efficient, super cost effective. We have 40 plus data centers all around the world. We have hundreds of thousands of servers, you know, at peak times when Roblox is hitting 20 or 30 or even more million people. That's a lot of compute complexity.”

“What they're doing is long term, no regret, no risk moves to take advantage of The United States undermining its own reliability with allies globally. China still has problems... but in terms of Xi Jinping's ability to have more influence globally and invest in the big long term technologies at scale. They don't have a problem with American based architecture. They just wanna control it. This whole responsible stakeholder stuff was, oh, they're going to align with the Americans. Turns out the Chinese see that this is perfectly good architecture as long as the Americans aren't running it.”

“So I know I think people would be very uncomfortable with that. I think that in the case of Sweden, they actually have offline capability for their payment system. But they are very concerned about the inclusion effects of older people or people in remote locations, and, you know, the bank doesn't have cash anymore. And I think that's a problem we wanna avoid. And I I think there is a a fundamental privacy consideration too.”

“The President is expected to provide a definitive update on the status of the Iranian regime's military capabilities and the potential for a ceasefire. This prime-time address will be the first major update the public has received since the operations began several weeks ago.”

“The tough part there is they're not, you know, RIAs or whatever else. They don't have the extra level of accreditation, you know, that you maybe might want as a user in future. Like, when you have companies like Bitwise come into the bulk curation space.”

“Microsoft is actually integrating that, but it's just a preview. It's directly inside of their secure coding framework, and the idea is that Clawed gets used for threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and incident response inside of Microsoft's DevTooling. And at the same time, OpenAI has been briefing US federal agencies, state governments, and also the Five Eyes intelligence partners on a version of their model called GPT 5.5 Cyber.”

“We only want to release it to a select group of entities. So they picked about 50 corporations and organizations and said, take a look at this, see what you can do with it. The idea is that access to mythos could give those companies a head start against bugmageddon, allowing them to find the holes in their systems and patch them before hackers get their hands on mythos.”

“The pricing, I think, is also where this gets a lot, gets very interesting. The standard GPT-55 is $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. That doubles GPT-54 on paper, but OpenAI is claiming that the model uses tokens more efficiently, so the real world cost per task should be roughly flat or better. GPT 5.5 Pro is $30 in and $180 out, which is very expensive.”

“I add Laird. Laird is Laird Hamilton. And I literally just tell Laird at the beginning, like, here's where our boat's at. Here's what we like to do. We got to be out before sunset. Make sure you look at sunset. Make sure you look at the weather. I don't want a boat in the rain. I only have six seats, and we always need people to bring waters and food or whatever. So that's like, it's just simple. And you just talk to it, and it goes and builds that agent for you, just from texting it.”

“On the secondaries, OpenAI's valuation, what people are buying the shares for right now, it's kind of interesting because it's like an indicator of kind of where the stock will go sometimes. What OpenAI's shares are selling for right now is $850 billion. Anthropic's shares, $1 trillion. So Anthropic is being priced and valued at higher possible, you know, possible part of that is maybe not even where they are today, but where people can see them going in the future.”

“Google just had their big cloud event in Las Vegas this week. They rolled out the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. I think this is basically their attempt to take a swing at OpenAI and Anthropic in the enterprise for the AI agent race. I think first, access to over 200 models through Model Garden is something that they're going to be rolling out. So enterprises aren't going to be locked into just Gemini.”

“We got to talk about what is going on. We have Iran firing on new ships, but the markets do not care. They are shrugging off these worries, and Bitcoin now going to the very top of the range that we gave you weeks ago. The markets are looking freakish right now, it's getting crazy.”

“Tonight at 9:00 PM ET, President Donald J. Trump delivers a critical prime-time address from the White House. Following weeks of intense combat operations under Operation Epic Fury, the President is expected to provide a definitive update on the status of the Iranian regime's military capabilities and the potential for a ceasefire.”

“So the interesting thing about the COVID episode was that in the very short run, so, like, say, the first three months, about a third of the demand was foreign. About a third was domestic, and about a third was just banks loading up their vaults to the ceiling. And to me, that was entirely understandable. Right? I mean, we really had no idea. And certainly, if you were trying to fill ATMs, you had no idea whether if you were a bank, you didn't want your ATMs to run dry.”

“Hermès is really targeting the top 1%. You could probably argue it's the top 0.1% of the population. And that's the fastest growing segment of luxury buyers, growing at a CAGR of almost 10% per year, compared to only 1% for the aspirational buyers. And it's barely dependent on macroeconomics. It's almost impossible to replace a brand in this segment. I think the biggest risk is that a brand of Hermès' caliber is kind of losing its exclusivity by trying to sell more volume and then invite these aspirational buyers into the ecosystem.”

“They focus on so-called carve-outs, so often parts of larger companies. One of the advantages of carve-outs is that you don't have a lot of competition for those deals and the parent company is also often happy to get rid of that part of the business. The price that you have to pay is relatively lower compared to other parts of M&A that you could do. Another advantage is that there's lots of potential for improvements at the acquired companies because they have been neglected for a long time, which means there's a lot of potential to increase margins.”

“Very quickly, China released a bunch of Rare Earth product on the global market and the price for Rare Earth products, the exact kind that Mark was going to refine, the price for those dropped. They sent a very strong message. You were not going to produce that much Rare Earths in today's market. It's nothing more than an allegation, but I don't think there's anybody in the Rare Earth world that would suggest something other than what I just suggested.”

“Digital Assets are highly volatile and carry a considerable amount of risk. Only use exchanges for trading digital assets; we never keep our entire portfolio on an exchange, which is why we recommend tools like Arculus for your cold storage needs.”

“The interesting part is, it takes about six weeks for the tankers to get to where they're going. This week or next is when the oil shock really actually hits. We're still going to have six weeks of this. For a lot of countries, and a lot of countries have actually struggled, they've all taken different tacks as to how to handle the fuel crisis. Some are doing subsidies, some are rationing.”

“Part of resilience will be more money on critical infrastructure and hardening targets that weren't thought to be as vulnerable, desalination plants. Part of it will be building infrastructure for other land based alternatives. The Chinese feel pretty good right now. They have Turkmenistan. They have power of Siberia. I mean, they're just this is a different environment to think about those investments. I do think The Gulf is gonna look also not just geopolitically, but sovereign wealth funds in The Gulf are gonna completely change what their long term priorities are.”

“I took all my messaging logs of Kai from iMessage, put it, I just dropped it in there. I copied and pasted it in the chat. And then I said the mybodytutor.com blog has all their philosophy. And I love that company for what it's worth. I dropped the link in and said, go read everything about MyBodyTutor. Here's all my chat logs from Kai. And what he did is he's a psychology coach about how you feel about food. So I just built Kai.”

“They have been slowly transitioning away from this agency model to more of a higher margin merchant payments model via its connected trip strategy. The growth strategy is certainly bearing itself out with merchant model revenue growing about 27.4% year over year.”

“Google just had their big cloud event in Las Vegas this week. They rolled out the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. I think this is basically their attempt to take a swing at OpenAI and Anthropic in the enterprise for the AI agent race. I think first, access to over 200 models through Model Garden is something that they're going to be rolling out. So enterprises aren't going to be locked into just Gemini.”

“Those agents can protect us, protect our attention while coordinating, and they can negotiate, they can find times together, they can do briefings. It has access to your calendar, mine has access to my calendar, but we don't want to share, I don't want to give you my whole calendar, I don't want to give you my whole workspace. Those agents can protect us, protect our attention while coordinating, and they can negotiate, they can find times together, they can do briefings.”

“So Tether seems to be and stablecoins in general seem to be, yeah, a way to execute payments across borders. So people working as translators for somebody in another country, they get paid in stablecoins or the stablecoins of the vehicle. So they do seem to be sort of like cash, but more mobile.”

“They focus on so-called carve-outs, so often parts of larger companies. One of the advantages of carve-outs is that you don't have a lot of competition for those deals and the parent company is also often happy to get rid of that part of the business. The price that you have to pay is relatively lower compared to other parts of M&A that you could do. Another advantage is that there's lots of potential for improvements at the acquired companies because they have been neglected for a long time, which means there's a lot of potential to increase margins.”

“Animal spirits feel like they're back. And then I start looking for what's the animal crypto project. And the Pudgy Penguin, remember the penguin that just walked off into the mountainscape too? The penguin meme has not stopped. So this is kind of on my radar now, especially with this last move, and Luca Nets knows how to make revenue.”

“On the secondaries, OpenAI's valuation, what people are buying the shares for right now, it's kind of interesting because it's like an indicator of kind of where the stock will go sometimes. What OpenAI's shares are selling for right now is $850 billion. Anthropic's shares, $1 trillion. So Anthropic is being priced and valued at higher possible, you know, possible part of that is maybe not even where they are today, but where people can see them going in the future.”

“I expect the same thing here at d five. I think it's reached probably a bottom, and it's gonna take maybe a year or two plus. Then it'll come back in a massive way, and I think there's gonna be some great innovation learning from these problems and then, yeah, new protocols and primitives being built.”

“AI agents, the fear that these large language model companies could displace both tax prep and small business bookkeeping simultaneously has led to a lot of fear. This is a sell-off driven by convergence of regulatory and AI disruption fears, not really deteriorating fundamentals.”

“The idea here is mixing these different asset classes that have different correlations to each other, and it lowers your overall risk profile of your portfolio. Because nobody knows what the future is gonna look like, and you can never be certain.”

“Constellation has said previously that it's just difficult to go way beyond 100 acquisitions, which is currently what they average per year, without diluting the quality and still hitting the target returns of about 20 to 25%. So I do think it was a matter of time before we would see this strategic expansion. It's only natural for CSI to look for opportunities in the public market where valuations are much lower due to these AI-related fears. This comes with some risks that you didn't have in the private market where you buy a business outright.”

“All of our videos are strictly personal opinions. Please make sure to do your own research. Never take one person's opinion for financial guidance. There are multiple strategies and not all strategies fit all people. Our videos ARE NOT financial advice.”

“It's been a month for DeFi. 500,000,000 some 500,000,000 mostly between Drift and Kelp, but it's not great. Not great. You know what this reminds me of is do you guys remember it it just feels very reminiscent of the post FTX c five blow up.”

“We're rolling out all kinds of AI-created software and AI systems and agentic systems and things like that, and people are going to start hacking all of that. So that actually might be a bigger worry than all these bugs in existing software that AI is finding. That's really the thing that I would kind of worry about is like, what is the unexpected consequence of all of these systems rolling out?”

“I think these are the most compelling NVIDIA alternative in AI accelerators. They have record data center revenue, they have that 41% server CPU share, and they have a credible roadmap towards GPU growth by these committed hyperscaler orders.”

“It's bittersweet for me to also share that this is actually my last episode as a host here at The Investor's Podcast Network. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has tuned in over the years and supported me in this journey. Without people like you listening, this incredible journey would not have been possible for me. It's somewhat surreal to have been a host for the past four and a half years as I was a huge fan of the show for many years prior to joining TIP, and I'll certainly continue to be a listener for many years to come.”

“The external goal is 10 percent of global gaming. Global gaming is about 200 billion dollar market. We did 6.8 billion in bookings last year, 10 percent would be like 20 billion. That'd be a reasonable first step at where we would like to go. But really, I would say the global gaming market is emblematic of really a new way of people to communicate.”

“The CFTC, which was once a legal adversary of these markets, has done a complete about-face under the Trump administration. In January, the CFTC and SEC held a joint summit on modernizing the regulatory framework for these types of contracts.”

“Apparently, the war is over, which for all intents and purposes, I'm not sure if it is, but the Strait of Hormuz is open, as far as we know, which means that global traffic will be coming in and out of the Strait of Hormuz now, we think. However, given the fact that the propaganda and the news coming out of the Middle East has been sketchy at best, I'm gonna reserve my thoughts till we're a little bit further down the line.”

“Hermès is really targeting the top 1%. You could probably argue it's the top 0.1% of the population. And that's the fastest growing segment of luxury buyers, growing at a CAGR of almost 10% per year, compared to only 1% for the aspirational buyers. And it's barely dependent on macroeconomics. It's almost impossible to replace a brand in this segment. I think the biggest risk is that a brand of Hermès' caliber is kind of losing its exclusivity by trying to sell more volume and then invite these aspirational buyers into the ecosystem.”

“And you have, like, the Cominos and the Morphos of the world who maybe started with a more, isolated markets or, modular approach to lending as opposed to, the more, you know, structured product of of a core. And there are trade offs to both. Right?”

“It's essentially the Amazon playbook that Mellie is using here. Amazon looked unprofitable for decades before it finally decided to show its true earnings power. It seems to me like Mellie actually is doing the same thing. Nick Sleep, who most of our listeners will be familiar with, he talks a lot about this model of scaled economy shared. The firm has been investing in these items today to grow the business in the future so that free cash flow in the years to come will be meaningfully greater than it would be otherwise.”

“The leading edge of tech is simply irrelevant in vertical market software. The assumption of tech guys and investors is that everyone would adopt new technology as soon as it is there, but everyone who has worked in the corporate world knows that's not the reality. If employees are used to a certain software or system, it can be way more efficient to stick with what works even though you might save a couple of bucks on implementing the new software. A rule of thumb is that something has to be 10 times better than what you use right now to actually change it.”

“The new generation of robots will actually be able to do the entire process—we're talking picking and packaging as well. If you consider that Amazon employs over a million people in its warehouses globally, you can imagine how much they would save if they could automate most of that work. It's not only about the money you would save, it's also about the efficiency gains. Robots don't need breaks and they can work 24-7. They already store incoming inventory about 75% faster and reduce order processing time by up to 25%.”

“SpaceX is telling its investors it wants to start building its own GPUs. This is a massive deal, because I think this is really just showing us how tight the compute market has gotten. You have like a rocket company that is looking at building its own silicone. I think this is what is, what this is telling us right now is that we've basically reached the point where the biggest tech companies in the world no longer trust the GPU supply chain enough to just be customers.”

“Hacking is very asymmetrical. If you are the hacker, you just have to find one way in to your target. You do something and it doesn't work, like no big deal, you know, you can try again. If you're a defender and you try to defend something and it doesn't work, you're hacked.”

“I took Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, has a list on his website of his 89 favorite people that has links to all their sites. And I said, build me a reminder, if any of his favorite people write any articles about tech, AI, or the future of technology. And so now it just goes and builds that, and it's now monitoring all of his site. Then it's monitoring my favorite writers. And then I said, every morning, send me a summary, and I want you to tell me if a website's updated.”

“Rare earths are used to reduce distortion in tiny glass camera lenses, to improve sound from tiny speakers, or to make bright colors on a screen. And so Japan, famous for its high-tech manufacturing, losing its rare earth supplier, very bad. The world had become incredibly reliant on this weird class of metals, and China had a lot of power over the global economy as a result.”

“Eight years ago, the average time between a bug being found and a hacker using that bug in a cyber attack was 847 days. So a bug would be disclosed, two years would go by, and then it would start getting exploited on average. Now it's like within a day. It's not rocket science, but it takes time for a human to do it. You have to have a certain level of expertise. AI has absorbed all of that.”

“So we had part of the legislation required that we produce estimates of counterfeits, and and so I did. And those estimates were in the reports, and the Secret Service cited them for years. And when I was on my rotation in cash, I said, you know, you've been citing these numbers that are from 2005. Maybe we should update them because they will be lower. I promise you. And sure enough, they were lower by, like, a factor of 10.”

“The Europium is what caused the red color in the colored televisions. And so for a period of time, every single colored television that was made in the world had Europium from the Mountain Pass deposit used to make that red color. If you're looking for a moment where rare earths burst onto the scene, you could do worse than choosing this one.”

“China still represents 30% of the revenue. So any additional export controls or Chinese retaliation, restricting tool service access, that could remove revenue to the tune of $2,000,000,000. It is a best in class franchise, but you are paying full price.”

“Bitcoin shows incredible potential as a computer science tool that through the proof-of-work protocols is actually imposes more cost than just the algorithmic securing of networks and our ability to operate. And Bitcoin is a reality. It is a valuable computer science tool as a power projection. And outside of the economic formulation of it, it has got really important computer science applications for cyber security.”

“I think one of the long term implications of the Iran war is that the GCC is increasingly not fit for purpose. I think that The Emirates and the Saudis will have a much more structural fight. The Emirates will tell you that, you know, in a time of war, this is when you really know who your friends are. Number one for them in this environment has been Israel... Saudis, that's a very different story. It's Pakistan. It's Egypt. It's Turkey. I think that becomes bigger, not smaller.”

“Agentic loops running overnight, iteration and all the stories we hear about... we see that same thing is going to happen to the much more complex thing of building a video game. Building a game is super complicated because it's got art, it's got what is interesting for people, what is fun, and it’s hard to define. It’s a big mix of 3D assets and code and 3D experiences.”

“During the Iran crisis, poly market ceasefire probability contracts moved before and alongside traditional markets. These markets aggregate real-time information with participants who have skin in the game which often produces more accurate forecast than polls or even option implied probabilities.”

“In cybersecurity, we always talk about the awful things, the ransomware outbreaks and hacks and things like that. But occasionally, we do something right collectively. And Y2K was an example of when the world knew about a problem and worked really hard and averted disaster. The Y2K lesson is to take threats seriously as early as possible.”

“So the way the TIC data collection system works, we only or we, as with the authority delegated to us from the treasury, can only collect from US entities. So we will collect data from US custodians, and they will say, yes. You know, we have we're holding securities in custody for entity x in Belgium or whatever. But they can't go any further than that. So the classic example we use here is that Euroclear is a huge securities depository in Belgium, and they hold all types of securities, but in particular, treasuries on behalf of many customers from many countries. But all we see in the TIC data is Belgium.”

“It usually takes a couple of seconds. It goes and builds everything in the background. So it's provisioning an email address for this, a phone number, a web browsing capabilities, everything. And then it just joins like a member in a chat. All right. I just opened Convos. I hit start a Convo. I can choose whether or not I want to share my name with the agent. So I'll throw it out. I need to swipe up and then it joins.”

“If we pump up to 85K and then have a drawdown of 30%, that'll make a lot of bears really excited, and they'll be very serious about that 30K, 20K mark, but that would literally only bring us to about $59,000 on Bitcoin price. That would re-prove that bottom of the candle that we just went through when we cascaded to the downside and that Max Fear moment happened. A 30% drawdown from that generalized slight overshot only brings you back down to the flat line of this range.”

“Andy Jassy shared in an internal all hands meeting that he expects AI will help fuel AWS to become a $600 billion business in 2036, which is double the previous estimate of how large they expected that business to become. That would imply that he essentially expects AWS to grow at a 15% CAGR over the next decade. It's also worth highlighting that AWS growth has been accelerating. As in the recent quarter, revenue grew 24% year over year.”

“This is a 79-day-old CME gap. This daily chart on the Bitcoin CME... if you want to find this for yourself, you type in BTC1! and then don't look under crypto, look under stocks. You'll see this is Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They closed trading on Friday, and they open it on Monday. When there's a gap, typically those gaps get filled, and just now, we are starting to fill the CME gap all the way up to about 81k.”

“It gets sold to a company called MP Materials, and then a Chinese, one of the Chinese state companies buys a stake in MP Materials. And up until last year, MP Materials would send their rare earth ore to China to get refined and processed. But then last year at the Department of Defense took out a 15% stake in MP Materials as well. And it's looking to refine everything in the US now.”

“This is exciting, but the markets are really overstretched. So when the market bottomed recently, a few weeks ago, it was overstretched to the downside. Now it's overstretched to the upside. And it doesn't mean it can't keep going up, but it does mean you should use caution. Don't just necessarily jump in willy-nilly and put it all in black and say, let it ride.”

“The new generation of robots will actually be able to do the entire process—we're talking picking and packaging as well. If you consider that Amazon employs over a million people in its warehouses globally, you can imagine how much they would save if they could automate most of that work. It's not only about the money you would save, it's also about the efficiency gains. Robots don't need breaks and they can work 24-7. They already store incoming inventory about 75% faster and reduce order processing time by up to 25%.”

“Yeah, basically no commercial use. Of course, today, rare earths are critical to making like everything from iPhones to fighter jets to microwaves. And now it is China that is processing about 90% of the world's rare earths. But none of that industry existed when those prospectors first heard their little Geiger counters click, click, clicking in that mountainous spot in the California desert.”

“AI models are getting very good at finding security vulnerabilities. The amount of bugs that are being found right now is skyrocketing, and people are freaking out because of that. Mythos has become the poster child for a phenomenon that people in the cybersecurity industry have been talking about for months... the geeks call it the vulnerability Armageddon, but here at The Journal, we call it the bugmageddon.”

“The model itself, basically OpenAI's positioning on this is that it is quote unquote a fully agentic model, meaning that it's designed to complete all these multi-step computer tasks with minimal human direction. They specifically highlighted five different categories, analyzing data, writing and debugging code, operating software directly, researching online, creating documents and spreadsheets autonomously.”

“Following weeks of intense combat operations under Operation Epic Fury, the President is expected to provide a definitive update on the status of the Iranian regime's military capabilities. This address will outline exactly how the military has performed and what the next steps are for our forces in the region.”

“We think of that as a functional thing, or like in the real world, we're used to things that we can interact with. From the very first day we started building Roblox, for some reason we were really into having all of the objects in the world be functional. When the car would fall, like a wheel would fall off the car, it would do what you would expect it to do.”

“It is not sovereign AI LLM models in my view. I think that one of two things will happen. Either it'll continue to be winner take most, and so a relatively small number of companies in The US and China will just continue to blaze past anyone that tries, or it's gonna become commoditized. Those models will be too expensive, but good enough will be good enough. Then you will spend a lot of money to catch up in something that becomes essentially free. If you're talking about the entire stack, that seems completely—it's a myth.”

“Our developer creator earned about a billion and a half on the platform, and it goes pretty deep. Like top thousand devs are averaging 1.3 million, like real people making a living. So it goes way beyond the walls of this building. When we launched Robux and the ability for creators to make a living, we knew within six or eight hours that this was going to take off.”

“Lueck's concern is that when you deploy these black box models at scale managing billions of dollars and you can't explain why the model is taking a position, you've introduced a risk that is very difficult to manage. You still want researchers to be thinking.”

“And I was introduced to cash at that point because, true story, they had just started this project, and they needed somebody. They needed an economist to go to Belarus in December. And I was not yet at the Fed. And one of my colleagues and MIT classmates said, well, how about that woman who's coming soon? She said she likes to travel, and she speaks Russian. She can go to Minsk in December. And there you have it.”

“Lazarus Group obtained about $2,000,000,000, in hack proceeds last year from DeFi and crypto. That is a non trivial amount, and the exploits here are getting far, far more sophisticated. So a part of this story is we could be doing better in terms of multisigs.”

“It's essentially the Amazon playbook that Mellie is using here. Amazon looked unprofitable for decades before it finally decided to show its true earnings power. It seems to me like Mellie actually is doing the same thing. Nick Sleep, who most of our listeners will be familiar with, he talks a lot about this model of scaled economy shared. The firm has been investing in these items today to grow the business in the future so that free cash flow in the years to come will be meaningfully greater than it would be otherwise.”

“SpaceX is telling its investors it wants to start building its own GPUs. This is a massive deal, because I think this is really just showing us how tight the compute market has gotten. You have like a rocket company that is looking at building its own silicone. I think this is what is, what this is telling us right now is that we've basically reached the point where the biggest tech companies in the world no longer trust the GPU supply chain enough to just be customers.”

“Effectively, what we saw this week is that, a week ago when we were talking, the markets were still pricing fear. Today, they're pricing relief. What was interesting is that when we first went into this conflict, we saw the markets pull back, but the way the market is treating it now, it seems like everything is fine, all clear.”

“So I think one thing that is surprising to me is the extent to which dollar denominated stablecoins so completely dominate the market. I mean, it's like 90%, 95%, 99%. It's incredibly high. And I don't understand why that would necessarily be the case, but here we are. So, I mean, anytime there's a dollar denominated asset that's being popularized, it's going to, I would say, increase the standing of the dollar.”

“Microsoft is actually integrating that, but it's just a preview. It's directly inside of their secure coding framework, and the idea is that Clawed gets used for threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and incident response inside of Microsoft's DevTooling. And at the same time, OpenAI has been briefing US federal agencies, state governments, and also the Five Eyes intelligence partners on a version of their model called GPT 5.5 Cyber.”

“Citadel Securities is reportedly exploring prediction markets as trading scales up, a development that could fundamentally change how financial markets incorporate real-world event probabilities into prices. The price of this contract at any given moment essentially represents the crowd's real-time probability estimate.”

“What I call a g zero world... is that when The United States rejects being the, the the the guarantor of collective security for its allies, when it rejects promoting free trade, when it rejects rule of law, and no one else is prepared or capable of responding. It turns out that in that environment, the a 100 plus trillion dollar global economy is extremely vulnerable to political actors that wish to disrupt it. And that might be the single biggest implication of g zero.”

“There is a political decision made in China that they're going to make a stand on this, punish Japan over arresting their guy. And most notably, China informally, quietly, just stopped selling all rare earth products to Japan. Japan suddenly realizes that their car industry and their electronics industry is totally dependent on rare earth products.”

“Constellation has said previously that it's just difficult to go way beyond 100 acquisitions, which is currently what they average per year, without diluting the quality and still hitting the target returns of about 20 to 25%. So I do think it was a matter of time before we would see this strategic expansion. It's only natural for CSI to look for opportunities in the public market where valuations are much lower due to these AI-related fears. This comes with some risks that you didn't have in the private market where you buy a business outright.”

“The pricing, I think, is also where this gets a lot, gets very interesting. The standard GPT-55 is $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. That doubles GPT-54 on paper, but OpenAI is claiming that the model uses tokens more efficiently, so the real world cost per task should be roughly flat or better. GPT 5.5 Pro is $30 in and $180 out, which is very expensive.”

“The model itself, basically OpenAI's positioning on this is that it is quote unquote a fully agentic model, meaning that it's designed to complete all these multi-step computer tasks with minimal human direction. They specifically highlighted five different categories, analyzing data, writing and debugging code, operating software directly, researching online, creating documents and spreadsheets autonomously.”

“What Mark found out was, before his time, like in the 1960s, the CEO of Molly Corp had invited a whole bunch of people to come and see how the world's rare earth monopoly does its thing, how they mine the stuff at Mountain Pass, the elaborate processes of refining and turning it into useful stuff, and that group of visitors? All from China.”

“Yeah. And so part of the enabling legislation was that we had to write a report. So there are actually three reports from the treasury called the use and counterfeiting of of United States currency abroad. I mean, what I like to say is as much as two thirds or between half and two thirds. Yeah. Because we really don't know. It's exceptionally hard to measure.”

“64% of respondents think unemployment will be higher a year from now, up from 61% in March. Never before has that share been this high without the economy experiencing recession. People aren't just complaining about prices anymore; they are scared about their jobs.”

“I think it's pretty clear that the driver of the let the next cycle or at least a big part of the story is gonna be different types of actual real world assets and people using it, like, RWA looping, this broader, trend. Shout out three f, small but proud bag holder there.”

“The leading edge of tech is simply irrelevant in vertical market software. The assumption of tech guys and investors is that everyone would adopt new technology as soon as it is there, but everyone who has worked in the corporate world knows that's not the reality. If employees are used to a certain software or system, it can be way more efficient to stick with what works even though you might save a couple of bucks on implementing the new software. A rule of thumb is that something has to be 10 times better than what you use right now to actually change it.”

“I just screenshot the app in the app store and throw it in a thing and go code the app, and then it just builds a personalized version of the app that I want. And I was like, that's interesting. I wonder if I can make that so anyone in the world could do it. And so we made it where you can literally just take a photo and I was looking at this app. I have my phone. I pay $29.99 a year for Cal AI. It's so simple. I drop photos. It analyzes the photos. It tells you the calories in it. And I was like, can you build this app into an agent?”

“And, I mean, I have a little bit of a side hobby because an empirical regularity is that if I'm talking to somebody about, oh, you work at the Fed. What do you do? I almost always tell them I work on cash because nobody wants to hear about the other stuff. Let's face it. Nearly every time I start talking about cash, they will tell me a story about their mother, their brother, their whoever who's got a shoebox full of cash.”

“Meta has just sent a memo to all of their employees, announcing that they're cutting about 10% of their workforce. This represents about 8,000 people. Zuckerberg basically told everyone this at the start of the year, when he said 2026 would be quote, the year AI starts to dramatically change the way we work. I think this is a story about how AI is starting to really reshape payroll at the biggest companies on the planet.”

“The thing to watch for earnings season, it's not the earnings themselves, it's how the market reacts to the earnings. What we've seen, if you're looking at the markets, let's say a company comes out with really bad results, and the market goes up. That's actually a good sign. That means most of the bad results are already priced in and it was better than people expected.”

“It's bittersweet for me to also share that this is actually my last episode as a host here at The Investor's Podcast Network. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has tuned in over the years and supported me in this journey. Without people like you listening, this incredible journey would not have been possible for me. It's somewhat surreal to have been a host for the past four and a half years as I was a huge fan of the show for many years prior to joining TIP, and I'll certainly continue to be a listener for many years to come.”