STUDY ECONOMICS

“So, speaking of formative life experiences and growing up in hidden economic forces, one of the things I learned from this book is that when I was performing as a California Raisin at the age of six, I was actually participating in a government like psyop. Basically explain that.”

“We are investing so much into the capex we're investing so much into building these data centers we're you know it's a five layer cake as Jensen calls it, energy, chips, power, interconnects, memory, all that to give you a data center that you can either rent by the hour or by the token that you can go train models on and serve those models. And then the question is, hey, these models that you've built, are they creating economic value?”

“Right, we all became supply chain experts during COVID, we became trade experts during twenty twenty five, and now we're all going to become commodity experts given the Iran situation as well. Without further ado, we do have the perfect guest.”

“AWS started in the year 2004 AWS had its first customer in Netflix in 2010 again and ultimately Amazon shifted fully to AWS in 2012. 8 years from breaking ground, 8 years from the first capex investment cycle. I don't know if any of you were around reading earnest earnings reports 20 years ago, but the big debate was, hey, is Amazon going to go bankrupt?”

“They feel all the vibration and energy that comes into their area, which is one of the reasons we're not open to the public, because I can't control people's energy. They're recovering from the trauma that they experienced living in captivity. And for them to open up and trust you while you are there with them, helping them work through it, it's indescribable.”

“2023 also saw the roots of a global banking crisis arise out of four American regional banks, the two largest being Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank. The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models dominated not only the economy but has also been at the root of a Hollywood double strike conducted by Writers Guild of America and a SAG APTRA strike.”

“Software ate the world because, you know, I could build software or Khloe could build software and I could distribute it to millions of people and the marginal cost of running that software was close to zero. That is not the case with this new economic model of AI because... the incremental user of an AI application is not free. It's not marginally free. It's actually quite a bit more expensive to have AI users because turns out you've got to burn those GPUs.”

“Well, this one's easy for me because I did almost no work. Alex did all of the book work, and so that's what I would recommend in terms of division of labors, to not do the work. It's good advice, I think, so just have a friend who's a long time contributor.”

“And so one of the early ideas we had was to think of this book as a field guide. You can imagine like leaving your house in the morning and tucking it under your arm to help you as you experience the economic forces outside your door.”

“2021's inflation surge moderated in 2023, while the Federal Reserve continued to raise its interest rates in the first half of the year. The Federal Reserve raises interest rates by 0.25% from 4.5% to 4.75%... [in February 2023].”

“And then for the folks in the middle, which is the inference layer, you know, this is the most competitive part of the whole ecosystem. There's a lot of startups that are doing really well. They're winning so far. But you've also got the hyperscalers who want to have a dominant say in that layer.”

“One of the through lines that I think we share between all thoughts and Planet Money is this idea that like, there are all these hidden economic forces that basically dictate the way we live totally. I mean there's been especially the you know, the less I mean, it's always the case, right, but especially in the last several years, which is just the sort of the invisible becoming divisible.”

“The dominant political story of the year has been the 270-day-long speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy, whose slim majority in the House of Representatives has enabled a far-right rebellion to exert more weight over the lower chamber. The battle between the rebellious Freedom Caucus and McCarthy has been at the heart of an averted debt ceiling crisis and the annual budget debate nearly devolving into a government shutdown.”

“Additionally, the latter half of the year saw many large mergers and acquisitions, some of the largest announcements being in oil and gas with ExxonMobil's purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources for nearly $60 billion and Chevron's acquisition of Hess Corporation for $50 billion, both in October and pending regulatory approval prior to closure.”

“The cloud ecosystem looks dramatically different than the u AI ecosystem. Anyone have guesses as to why that's the case or your theory on why it's so different or reasons why this might look like we're not going to call it a pyramid. We're going to call it a triangle. Inverted triangle.”