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“The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S1 doesn't go stale. So I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't want to slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S1, have to redo the disclosures, have to redo the risks. So I think what you're going to see is that this will get done. In fact, the deal is effectively done. But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say two trillion. So when the deal gets done on a stock for stock basis, it's going to be, again, if it's $60 billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a 50% discount.”

“The SPLC allegedly did fund $270,000 to help plan Charlottesville. In addition to that, they secretly funneled more than $3 million to a bunch of violent racist extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, United Clans of America, and it goes on from there. So I think, don't forget about the $3 million bucks. So this group that was supposed to be fighting racism, in fact, was fomenting racism by paying these groups to basically organize protests that SPLC could then point to and say that America has a huge racism problem. And that's basically what happened after Charlottesville. They increased the amount of money that they were able to fundraise by $81 million.”

“Yeah, first talk about the cyber, right? Taiwan experienced like basically the warlike situation by China on Taiwan about the cyber attack. In year 2004, the average daily attack by China on Taiwan, daily, we have about 2.4 million attacks every day by China in the cybers. And then last year, it had been slowly upgraded to 2.63 million attacks a day.”

“There was like, one of my projects before already did something where I could bring my terminals onto the web. My search drivers literally just hooking up WhatsApp to cloud code, one shot, the CLI. Message comes in. I call the CLI with minus p. It does its magic. I get the string back, and I send it back to WhatsApp. And I I built this in one hour. And I felt I already felt really cool. It's like, oh, I could I can, like, talk to my computer.”

“I think people see what they want in the part. And, it's really based a lot off of my friend Eric Byers, who's an executive at Universal, except for he doesn't do drugs and is very responsible. Right. But, they love the, some of them love they they they the work isn't exciting, making the movie's exciting, but they wanna where are we going to dinner afterwards? And that's, like, my cornerstone of, like, where are we gonna go to dinner?”

“Ken Martin has really one job, which is to raise money for the DNC. And so the fact that they have negative $4.4 million means that he's not raising money for the DNC. You know, you have more of an ideological problem with him. I don't think his job is ideological. I think his job is cash-raisey.”

“The Iran war which Donald Trump caused for no reason. He caused it. Why did he cause it? He caused it because Netanyahu told him to, tricked him into it basically. There is no other reason for this war. The idea was that the Iranians might someday make nukes. There are a lot of people who might someday make nukes. That is not the reason to go to war with them.”

“I think what's gonna happen now is that content will start to matter more than it ever has, and it may be a new way where because it's now being scanned by AI, not just humans. So Gmail or whoever isn't just saying, like, is this a good sender? Is the email passing authentication? Do people generally engage positively with their emails? Okay. Let's put it in the inbox. There's now this new curator in town who is AI, and they are looking at the content of the message and doing things with it.”

“As a token holder, you have no legal rights usually. The interesting thing about tokens is most of the time, the most rights you ever have is when you have the piece of paper that says that you will get tokens in the future. When you invest in any token, if you are clear eyed about it, you know that there's no rights, so they can do anything to you. At any moment, at any time, anyone who is a token issuer can completely fuck you over and just go, ah, like, we just changed the tokens, bro.”

“This is kind of a stark reminder of the fragility of a big two in men's tennis, because you lose one of them and suddenly the whole feel of that tournament feels different, for example, to when we used to lose one of the big three, for example, because you still had two of them.”

“Literally three hours later, there is a Spanish player beating top 10 Alex Dimonor, like, in in an hour. Rafael Jodar is a teenager, mind you. A 19 year old from Madrid. I'll I'll I'll tell you this. Like, you look for certain score lines against certain types of players. The demon win was his first career top 10 win, and then currently, he has 17 wins in his first 25 career ATP matches. That's that's silly. That's a better start than Nadal, Federer, Novak, Alcaraz, Sinner, and Fonseca.”

“Not a lot of people ever considered the way the agent sees the world. So empathy. Being empathetic towards the agent. You bitch at your stupid clinker, but you don't realize that they start from nothing. And you have, like, a bad agents in default that doesn't help them at all. And then they explore your code base, which is like a pure mess with like weird naming. And then people complain that the agent's not good.”

“Corey Goff got into the Good. Got into the replies, which I think it's since been deleted. But he wrote, I got time today. I guess you didn't see throwing up in the garbage with your egg head. It's so stupid. Like I love that he's defending his daughter. Go feed the trolls, man. Great dad. Like, what but also but also, like, online idiocy is sometimes Yeah. Undefeated. Like, there's a lot of great like, memes are great. There's there's a lot of value. Right? But, also, what has Coco done to ever make us think that she's gonna, like, grandstand on, like, an injury?”

“But we follow every rule that casino has. In fact, if you call up a casino and you ask them, is it a is it against the law to account cards? Is it against your rules to account cards? They'll be like, well, no. Not really. But it is kind of frowned upon. How could that be? We all know that casinos spend tons of money on overhead cameras and security guys to detect card counters. Maybe because most of them are so bad at it, they lose money anyway.”

“The talk here is already, this is going to be the next player, the next French player to win at Roland Garros. He beat Jean-Munar, five sets, drama, agita. And the way he has come back and recovered in one on service, beating Rubelv on Clay, he hits a huge ball, but he also gives himself some margin. If you were going to pick someone other than Sidor Alcaraz were going to win Roland Garros, I'd put him in my top five right now.”

“The majority ruled that Bachman couldn't bring her counterclaim because there is no common law duty obliging a casino operator to refrain from attempting to entice or contact gamblers that it knows or should know are compulsive gamblers, unquote. In other words, it's perfectly legal for Caesars to target an addicted gambler like Angie Bachman. It might be wrong, but it's legal.”

“I think if you have a services company, they are one of the best opportunities out there right now. There are obviously people who are crushing it at local, like, strictly local media selling ads and stuff like that. I think it's harder, for a lot of reasons that we could get into, but the simple one is just like your market is capped, obviously. But if you have a services business, and this is the main way that the Austin Business Review has always monetized. I'll help founders with their newsletter.”

“We are the hardest sport in the world. And do you know when we look soft as baby shit? Is when we complain about getting hit in doubles and when we complain about someone hitting an underhand served, as if they've done something to personally offend us. Get out of here. There is nothing wrong with it. If you get caught not paying attention, that's on you.”

“She's in this number one conversation for the year, folks. I'm just telling you, she is firmly... She's not having a lot of off weeks. This consistency over a four or five month period is not something we've seen from Rybakina before. This feels different than what it's been before with her in as far as I can tell.”

“I've got a beer on the go, because I was supposed to be at the pub right now, but instead I'm here forming a healing circle with my favorite people, David Law and Matt Roberts, following the news that Carlos Alcaraz, the defending champion, has withdrawn not only from Rome, but also from Roland Garros.”

“at first, it was just, like, like, five or six of them in the back of a bar. I believe Miriam, Flynn was one of the or Tolan was one of the first ones, rather. Yep. Later Miriam Stack. Miriam later Miriam Stack. And, by the time I got there, it was like a big theater.”

“In that world, we need a different infrastructure for the financial intermediation layers. Why? Well, we don't have an infrastructure that can support that. We don't have an infrastructure that can, work globally, interoperably, instantly, that can be, programmed, through software layers by arbitrary pieces of software that doesn't exist. We need an infrastructure where the agents themselves can, dynamically create and spin up, different kind of financial endpoints themselves. We need transactions that can scale potentially into the, you know, billions or trillions of transactions.”

“Blockchains are operating systems, and they have compute engines. They have virtual machines, and you can write Turing complete code. You can write software that runs on these, but there's some really key attributes that make them different. So the the first is that the code is is sort of tamper resistant. The second is it's perfectly auditable. You can audit every single input and output of that machine, of that code in real time.”

“I don't think the word viral in podcast should really sit in the same sentence, like, most times. Obviously, there's clips that pop off and things of that nature. But, in my experience, that doesn't lead to, like, you know, you just being a continued success thereafter. You get that pop, you see it in the data, and then it kind of flatlines back to a a new baseline. Chris has been podcasting for, like, seven or eight years now, and it wasn't until year, like, five that things really started, like, you know, chugging along for him.”

“When that person speaks up and says, I think like, with Overwatch, for example, I think we should do this, you know, we should do x instead of y. Instead of saying, well, I'm a believer in y. Why are you against my idea x? You should take a moment, have a deep breath, and say, man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something. Why don't I listen to it?”

“Titan kind of was like that was the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height of, you know, we were over being hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft. And we were now in the era of, like, we made World of Warcraft. We can do no wrong. This next thing is gonna be the best ever. The right way to incubate a video game is give the smallest group possible. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team.”

“The SPLC allegedly did fund $270,000 to help plan Charlottesville. In addition to that, they secretly funneled more than $3 million to a bunch of violent racist extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, United Clans of America, and it goes on from there. So I think, don't forget about the $3 million bucks. So this group that was supposed to be fighting racism, in fact, was fomenting racism by paying these groups to basically organize protests that SPLC could then point to and say that America has a huge racism problem. And that's basically what happened after Charlottesville. They increased the amount of money that they were able to fundraise by $81 million.”

“So Phil Daian is like, there was a guy that wrote the code. There was a guy that wrote the white paper and had control of some of the accounts. And then there was, like, the genius philosopher person that pulled this all together. Hal Finney is that guy. Hal Finney was the, like, genius, visionary person that connected all the dots. Adam Back is the guy who was talking and writing things in the public face of the thing. Then he somehow goes on, like, an autistic dumpster dive with all of this material and finds an email in the Epstein files. The guy's name is Dave Kleinman. And Phil is like, this is it. That's the third guy.”

“My criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted, which just looking at the incentive of how the whole thing was used, It's obvious to me, at least, that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it on x in order to go viral.”

“Have you been following the scroll etherfi thing? EtherFi is leaving scroll, and then it appears that scroll has, like, cranked up the fees on the chain to, like, make it really expensive. For EtherFi things, the fees, like, originally were $2.50 a day, and then it cranked up to 16 k a day. However, there's other activity. These are, like, network fees. So there's other activity on the network that also now have to pay higher fees. You think you're going to, like, an immutable ledger, and these z k moon math guys are gonna, like, be your good friends. And then they're like, actually, we own the platform, and you can't leave.”

“In the 1930s, there was a really big debate about, like, what's the right construct for the banking system and the financial system. And, there was a a proposal from a group of economists, called the Chicago Plan, and, the kind of ringleader was a Chicago economist. Actually, it might have been a Yale economist or Princeton at the time, but, Irving Fisher, who wrote a book called A Hundred Percent Money. And that idea was that full reserve money was essentially, you know, government obligation money. So you have kind of a full reserve, and you can only lend full reserve money.”

“it should start as the show wants to do x, y, and z. So let's go out and buy the necessary supplies, curiosities, whatever it is so that we can make that happen, so we can execute on it.”

“President Trump just wants the country to win and be successful. And he doesn't have these like doomer neuroses about it. That's not to say we don't support any regulation at all, but we should have specific solutions for specific problems as opposed to being cowering in fear over this and just trying to halt all progress. And I think a really good example of that was his idea around data centers where he said over a year ago, before data centers even became a hot political topic, that we should let our AI companies stand up their own power generation behind the meter. And that's a much better approach than the Bernie Sanders approach of just shutting everything down.”

“The single biggest test I ran that converted the best, and this might be unique to My First Million, is we ran a cross promotion with another show. The show that we did it with was just like this guy was a my first million die hard, and he happened to have, like, a really strong audience. He's in the personal finance space. And that single test that we ran was the most successful campaign we ran probably across the entire show. The reason was is, like, if you listen to the ad read, it was literally this guy saying, like, this is my favorite show in the world.”

“Having lunch, Rob introduced me. This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa. I'm like, oh, Barfa. And we you know, he has you saved me in the hole that time. Well, it turns out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the head he was sort of the head of everything at that time. And what I didn't realize with these lunches were, like, I just loved them because I felt like as myself. And one day, Rob logs in to Evercrest. He said, I want you to tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site.”

“I wanted to figure out a fun podcast, and I I just couldn't think of, like, a fun hook. And then I was like, oh my god. What if I just wrote trivia questions for my friends? I write the trivia. Oh, I write the trivia. Not because not for me. I have a producer who writes the questions for me, so I don't see the questions on our system.”

“A photo of him on Instagram at a restaurant circulated him taking a photo with the restaurant owner, we assume, also showing his right wrist in a removable cast of some kind. That's not an image you necessarily want to see a month before Roland Garros, is it? Feliciano Lopez actually has been sort of talking about the extent of the injury.”

“It's not a complicated thing. You don't need a great memory. You don't need to know how many queens are left in the deck. You just need to know that one number. And when that one number when your running tally gets up to seven or eight or nine, it means that there are lots of aces and tens left in the deck. So it's good for you. Right? It's really, really good for you. And that is the time that you wanna start to bet big.”

“I really believe in match count and I really believe in getting confidence and getting better. I feel like I get so much better when I'm playing matches. If it's at a 35K or if it's at a Grand Slam, you're improving so much when you play matches. I'd rather take a semis or final at a lower level event than a second round at a higher event.”

“Jeff Goodman just kind of off the cuff said in this meeting, he said, I wish instead of making, like, six classes, I wish we can make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having, like, you know, a 100 abilities on the classes, the the 50 classes all just had, like, one or two things that was really interesting about them. And then the meeting ended. And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the the jumper, and the jumper could, like, teleport forward and rewind time and come back. And I went, you know, to Arnold, and I'm like, what if this wasn't, like, a class? Who is this as a person, not a class? And aren't oh, what if she's British and her name's Tracer and, like, that was the origin of Overwatch.”

“Look at Benioff, he's the founder of the company. He's run this thing since its founding decades ago. He is willing to bet it all, he's willing to make the change. It may be that the index you buy in this era of AI transformation is the index of founders, that the founders who are still running their businesses are going to be the ones who are most likely to see the future. They'll burn the boats. And all of the guys who have hired managers to run the business are going to do the things that Chamath is talking about, which is try and charge fees and try and maintain the old way of doing things as opposed to reinvent for the new future.”

“The first question I got was, yeah, but what about the insane water use on data centers? But then you actually sit down and do the math. And then for most people, if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the the CO2 output or, like, the water use in the equivalent of tokens. So so there well, like, golf is still using way more water than all data centers together. So are you also hating people that play golf?”

“MCPs, that has to be added in training. That's not a very natural thing for the model. It requires a very specific syntax. And the biggest thing, it's not composable. So imagine if I have a service that gives me better data and it gives me the temperature, the average temperature, rain, wind, and all the other stuff. As a model, I always have to get the huge blob back. But if I would build the same as a CLI and it would give me this huge blob, it could just add a j q command and filter itself.”

“We also noticed that the Russians' activity along with China on Taiwan increases dramatically in the last years. So that if the Russians prevail in its plan on Ukraine, at that time when China decided to attack Taiwan, we are going to face not just one country, like China, but the probably the Russians' involvement, whether directly or indirectly, that's going to be there. So that's double worry for us.”

“He's not going to have to beat Carlos Alcaraz to win this French Open. But the way Carlos Alcaraz has forced him to develop his game might end up also helping him win the French Open. And I think that's kind of interesting in the way that these rivals are just always impacting each other, even when they're not actually facing each other.”

“After Bachman lost a quarter of $1,000,000 in one night at the casino in Council Bluffs, the phone calls began. It probably went from a couple of times a week to five times a week from various casino hosts, throughout the country, really. I have been assigned to be your casino host here in Kansas City, and I was just calling. I noticed that you haven't been in for a while. And that you had a birthday coming up. So I was calling to invite you to come to Kansas City to celebrate your birthday.”

“In general, it's almost like Opus was is a little bit too American and I should maybe it is a bad analogy. Some other comparison is like, Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around. And Codex is like the the weirdo in the corner that you don't wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done.”

“In time, their trust in each other began to fray, and suspicions that some of the members were stealing grew. One player lost big one night and phoned a lot of the other players. He was hysterical that he had cost the team so much. But their reaction? That he'd probably hadn't lost, but was stealing. Ben, the founder of the group, told me about one time when a team member claimed that he'd never even contemplated stealing. That struck Ben as unusual, and he immediately began suspecting that player of stealing.”

“Here's how diabolical blackjack is. Unlike most casino games, if you play blackjack correctly, the casino barely has an edge. The odds are very close to fifty fifty. You win almost half the time. So the dream of winning is right there in front of you just out of reach. And if you did have a system that could beat blackjack, imagine what that would mean. It's like the money is just sitting there in casinos everywhere all over the world, huge stacks of chips and $100 bills waiting for you to take them home.”

“The main difference in their approach is how quickly they want to move. Anthony is very okay with risk. He gets one of these cars and he's driving it back, and he lives in Berkeley, works in Palauto. He's just using this car like the Bay Bridge every day, probably outside the bounds of what the team actually wanted, and he's not necessarily logging data. He's just enjoying his self driving car and taking it all over the place.”

“Sebastian, I think you should build a self diving car that can drive anywhere in the world. And my immediate reaction was, no, taking the technology we build for this empty desert and put it in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco is going to kill somebody. And Larry would come back the next day with the same idea, and I would give them the same answer, and both of us got increasingly more frustrated. God damn it, it can't be done, and eventually came and said, look, Sebastian, OK, care, I get it. You can't do it. I want to explain to Erk Schmidt the CEO at the time and Sergey Britt my cofounder, why it can't be done?”

“I just have this increasing anxiety about the strain on these athletes' bodies and this feeling of the canister, you know, and the canister not covering a full tennis season. You've got to be making difficult choices. And I know that Artifeez's David had eight months of saving up canister. But I don't know, like I'm suddenly like everybody just wrap yourselves in cotton wool.”

“Ben Shelton coming through. First American man since 2002 to win a 500 level event or better. Ben won on slow clay in Munich. I was really impressed. I like what I saw. On tour, this is a different win. This is like, oh, OK. This is a nice win. Like, we say statement too much, but this is at least kind of, may I have your attention for 12 seconds while you're eating lunch?”

“I had experiences of losing people in my life to traffic accidents, and I felt we lost over the million people in the world to traffic accidents. Wouldn't it be amazing if Dabok invented something that would save a million lives a year.”

“I had this, I had a shoulder operation a few months ago. And the model rarely used heartbeat, but then I was in the hospital. And it knew that I had the operation, and it checked up on me. It's like, are you okay? And I just it's like, again, apparently, like, if something significant in the context, that triggered the heartbeat when it rarely used the heartbeat. And it does that sometimes for people, and that just makes it a lot more relatable.”

“Look at Benioff, he's the founder of the company. He's run this thing since its founding decades ago. He is willing to bet it all, he's willing to make the change. It may be that the index you buy in this era of AI transformation is the index of founders, that the founders who are still running their businesses are going to be the ones who are most likely to see the future. They'll burn the boats. And all of the guys who have hired managers to run the business are going to do the things that Chamath is talking about, which is try and charge fees and try and maintain the old way of doing things as opposed to reinvent for the new future.”

“So Kintsugi is a Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery. Basically, like, you take a broken piece of pottery and then they would use golden joinery. Like golden lacquer to put the piece back together. And the thought was rather than hiding the scars, you make them more beautiful. There's also a philosophy in Kintsugi that nothing's ever perfect, and the pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake, and that there's beauty in imperfection.”

“If Satoshi has just quietly been sitting there not saying shit for fifteen years, and all of a sudden, it's like, well, actually, I want the optionality of selling my coins. I don't wanna get locked forever. And this is the problem. If they do, in eight years' time, of this process, there will be a day where the coins will be locked forever. And at that point, if Bitcoin's a million dollars or something, it becomes, like, hundreds of billions of dollars of Bitcoin that's now just off the market. You have to imagine on that day, there's gonna be a God candle the likes of which we have not seen before.”

“In the last moments of Alane Herzburg's life, the robot spent an indefensible five point six seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road there was a human body pushing a bike. Over those five point six seconds, the robot kept reclassifying our whishing an unknown object a vehicle a bicycle. During that time, spent wondering the car did not slow down. Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.”

“The way that the Saudi Investment Fund has gone about putting money into tennis is the opposite of what they did with live. I feel like this is a correction on strategy based on what they did with live. They are not going against the tours. Everyone's swimming the same direction and they're trying to provide resources to that direction. They are not overpaying for assets like a Masters 1000, it's not by a multiple of 47 like they were for live golfers.”

“I'm very proud because, there there are tokenized, stocks that are out there, and the most, active tokenized stock today is not Tesla. It's it's not the S and P index. It's actually Circle. So that was cool to see. We also, you know, have seen this growth in, like, tokenized money markets. So basically, like, on chain treasury bills, we actually operate the largest tokenized treasury, product called USYC.”

“It does feel like, we have the potential for double digit GDP numbers in the 2030s. Like, that's that seems not unrealistic to me. Not that that's gonna be uniform all around the world, but certainly, in large large parts of the world, that seems very, achievable, based on what I see. The risk here is that GDP, effectively, like, the GDP growth is a sort of capital capturing more capital at the at the expense of of humans. Like, that's the real risk.”

“We actually see it used, you know, from at the very smallest end, like someone who's paying, you know, 25¢ for a digital object in a digital game that's built on a blockchain. Or even now, we're starting to see, AI agents that are paying for, the output of essentially the AI tokens of another AI agent, and they're, you know, spending, again, just, you know, a dollar 50¢, 20¢, etcetera. So super tiny transactions at one end all the way to the largest electronic trading firms in the world that do huge amounts of of capital markets activity who are, you know, settling multi $100,000,000 transactions. And the powerful thing is it's all the same.”

“Calswap's DNS gets hijacked, which is a thing that happens to, like, a bunch of people all the time. It happened to my family office. They were able to, like, get into my domain hosting place for my family office URL and social engineer. I went and social engineered another one of the agents and was like, hey. I had this problem. You seem like a really nice guy. Like, we went through a whole thing, and the guy was like, oh, yeah. We can totally do that. I just admitted that they I was like, well, okay. That's good. At least I have some closure here.”

“So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like, this sounds really trite, but, focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The the pressure that society kinda puts on us is, you know, oh, you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker? And I think we get lost in the trappings of, like, a vision of what that role is and how to perform as a fake actor in that role.”

“The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, you threw years of your life away. Like, you can't win a game like that. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.”

“You are a Jeopardy Celebrity Jeopardy champ. Yes. You won a million dollars for charity Yes. Of which I'm told you took $600,000.”

“The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S1 doesn't go stale. So I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't want to slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S1, have to redo the disclosures, have to redo the risks. So I think what you're going to see is that this will get done. In fact, the deal is effectively done. But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say two trillion. So when the deal gets done on a stock for stock basis, it's going to be, again, if it's $60 billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a 50% discount.”

“Because they all take themselves too serious. Like, it's hard to compete against someone who's just there to have fun. I wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to be weird. And if you see, like, all the all the lobster stuff online, I think I I managed weird.”

“We're looking at the evolution of Chinese policy towards Taiwan. Although China always said that their policy has been very consistent on Taiwan, like they are for the unification. But during the Hu Jintao era, basically China, the focus is on preventing Taiwan from declaring independence. But in the Xi Jinping era, the whole focus is bring Taiwan in, whether Taiwan like it or not, even though time does not declare independence. So Xi Jinping is more for unification and at my own speed.”

“I would love Arkansas to tell us why other sports are losing more money and tennis gets cut. That's a very, very, very, like... we've made it a free market. We've made made it basically, we've made it acting inside of the bounds of of capitalism where if you have someone generating money and your sport's not... It's simply if we vote for this thing where people get paid, you can't act shocked when capitalism happens. Like, that's not we're not like, oh my god. How do how could we ever have figured this out? Well, when something's profitable, and I call these universities companies now because that's basically what they are.”

“But then before the Zhang Youxia's downfall several weeks ago, what we do see, what we thought that is that Zhang Youxia seems to be the person that will be immune from those. But it seems that Xi Jinping just cannot stand with a person that could be powerful or could be potentially challenging his role about the PLA. So I think that about the Zhang Youxia, it's more about how Xi Ming feel that whether Zhang Youxia is threatening his positions or Zhang Youxia overstepped the authority of the PLA.”

“My big worry is that there are creators. Like, now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you know, make online videos, whatever creator means to you, make games. Now part of the skill set is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen. And I make up these scenarios in my head of, like, would Van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on, like, how many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime or in a week?”

“I noticed that on Discord, people just said how they like, what they build and what they use it for. Why do you need my fitness pal when the agent already knows where I am? It can modify my my gym workout based on how well I slept or if I'm if I stress or not. Why do I still need an app to do that? Why do I have to why should I pay another subscription for something that the agent can just do now?”

“Anytime somebody starts to do relatively well in local, they always think about taking it to another city. And I think this is the challenge that a lot of the big companies have had, which is finding the talent to pull it off in the other city. Because the heart of a local newsletter is a connection to the local community. And so I don't believe that you can really write these from afar. And the challenge is if you can find somebody who can really write it locally, they could just do it themselves.”

“I'm concerned for him that it's serious. I'd be more concerned about one Martin Del Potro, probably, because he had a wrist injury that changed his entire career and he still managed to get something out of it. There has to be a chance as well that it's something that they've got to be very, very careful with.”

“On Tim Cook's retirement, he had an incredible run as CEO of Apple. He ran it very effectively for 15 years. The market cap of the company went up by over 10x. The revenue grew from roughly 100 billion a year to over 400 billion a year. He also improved the quality of revenue by moving the mix into services. People say that, well, they never did any innovation under Tim Cook. But I've seen people tweet lists of products that were released under him. And there were a lot of them. Now, it's true, nothing as big as the iPhone. But they did release a lot of products under Tim Cook. And then just finally, I mean, you look back over the last 15 years and there really weren't any public snafus or scandals or imbroglios with Apple.”

“But when we look at the invasion capability of the PLA, we do not think that before year 2027, they could have that capability because they just do not have the kind of projection capability as well as the air and the sea lift capacity that's necessary for the amphibious operation against Taiwan. However, about the PLA capability, we do think that should they want to launch the blockade, they probably will be able to do that. And as well as the quarantine operation.”

“Everyone is going to want to be in that bottom half of the men's draw, because it will feel so open, you know, even if Zverev and Djokovic are both down there. I still think that people like a Fees or a Muzetti or, you know, even you can branch out further... everyone basically is going to fancy their chances.”

“But going there and having to perform for people who don't speak English necessarily, or don't understand your reference base at all Yeah. That taught me how to, I think, like, be bigger and kind of perform for for the masses.”

“I had two browser windows open. One was like an empty account ready to be renamed renamed to Cloudbot. And the other one, I renamed to Modbot. So I pressed rename there. I pressed rename there. And in those five seconds, they stole the account name. Literally, the five seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing rename there was too long. Because there's no those systems I mean, you would expect that they have some protection or like an automatic forwarding, but there's nothing like that.”

“The only reason I started my local newsletters because the vision was I wanted to or I want to open a deli. And I was like, how does it how do you, on day one, get a line out the door? You have an audience. I think, so far, my plan is we're gonna do a pop up soon. I do think it's a real opportunity, and it is a real pathway. If you wanna start a restaurant or if you wanna start a brick and mortar, I think you can derisk it by building an audience first, and a local events newsletter is very easy to execute.”

“Yeah, I think the second Trump administration, what we learned so far is that it's very different from the first Trump administration, that all the assumption that we have about the first Trump administration probably will no longer apply for the second Trump administration. And when we look at the National Security Strategy, we do find that there's a reordering about the priority, especially on the foreign affairs, and it is more focused on the domestic as well as the Western Hemisphere.”

“The other piece is that it's sort of designed with real money, as the foundation. So there's not like a volatile gas token. USDC is actually the default native token, which is now, under the law, essentially, like a legal form of electronic money. So you have real dollars as the way that people understand. And so to a company that's, like, doing this, it's like, I pay AWS credits. I understand how to budget for that, my treasury, my operations, my compliance, etcetera.”

“President Trump just wants the country to win and be successful. And he doesn't have these like doomer neuroses about it. That's not to say we don't support any regulation at all, but we should have specific solutions for specific problems as opposed to being cowering in fear over this and just trying to halt all progress. And I think a really good example of that was his idea around data centers where he said over a year ago, before data centers even became a hot political topic, that we should let our AI companies stand up their own power generation behind the meter. And that's a much better approach than the Bernie Sanders approach of just shutting everything down.”

“So there's one that's the best. It's Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. Every aspect is so thoughtful, so well designed. The art matches the design and the tech and even integrating with the switch in the way it does. The way you can chop down a tree and float in a river and, like, the world is a toy and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work. There's so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right.”

“The underlying problem is that these businesses in the SaaS space where you're driven by net new sales every year, how many new customers are you signing up and then you're trying to manage retention and you're trying to increase sell-through and retain customers, they're just having a really hard time sourcing new customers and there's probably higher than model attrition. When you have a very kind of typically historically predictable business, where you can say, hey, I've got a net revenue retention of 118% or what have you, meaning I'm selling into my install base by 18% over what I'm making last year and then I'm signing up new customers, you can lever that business, right? You can borrow money against those cash flows because it becomes predictable. And what's happened in the last year in particular is agents have become so good and so fast and so cheap that many enterprises can simply spin up an alternative to a vertical SaaS solution.”

“Tony Tether, who had been a door to door salesman in his use definitely has that flare in that way of thinking, says, let's have a contest. Let's see who can put all of these ingredients that we've developed together into a proper self driving car. His original idea is we'll drive him down the Las Vegas Strip that's almost immediately next because it's insane.”

“This is Colorado's 8th Congressional District. It is the only purple district in the state of Colorado. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by two points in the 2024 election. This is a new district that was drawn for Colorado after the last census. So it remains very much in play.”

“We have, like, 12 core partners that we work with. Those core partners get a guaranteed number of impressions across the podcast and YouTube. And then with that, we basically include one to two newsletter features and then one to two Instagram story sequences. We could charge an extra 100,000 just for those things throughout the campaign, but we don't want it to come at the expense of okay. Now this brand's been an extra $250,000 with us and they're not seeing the ROI they want. We'd rather over perform for them.”

“Basically, I mean, it sounds like, I don't want to diagnose this, you know, it's not like someone knocked on her door, she had a panic attack, she didn't realize that it was an anti-doping official, she missed the test. The ITIA essentially confirmed in broad strokes what had happened. Now we'll have to see. She's facing potentially a four-year ban, which is a lot for a missed test.”

“And there's a similarity in between Larry Sanders and the studio. They're both about the business, and there are specific ways if you're in show business that you can pick apart certain things and say, well, that's not really how it is.”

“And the plan is that should the blockade and the energy that really happens, Taiwan probably will reopen its nuclear power plant as the power for our energy supply. And also, we probably will also limit our usage of the natural gas and increase the composition of the coal for Taiwan's energy usage. And the possibility of reducing the production for the semiconductor as well as other energy-consuming industries in order for Taiwan to sustain our defense, that will be an important part of the measure that we have to adopt.”

“They then took that piclorum exposure, and then they looked at all the counties across the United States. They were able to gather data where there's enough data in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and they were able to look at piclorum use estimates from the Pesticide National Synthesis Project and try and deduce in places where piclorum was highly used and not highly used, and once again, it elucidated signal, which is that when piclorum was used in the environment in the counties more frequently, there was a much higher frequency of colon cancer in those counties. The odds ratio is like 3X. It's very strong.”

“I had my left wrist one time, injury. I dove on a match point against Illinois in a long match there, and I landed on my wrist. And so I played the semifinal there against Schutler with basically a chip backhand, and I couldn't I I didn't really do much. It it came back. It wasn't anything that cost me any amount of time, but I think I had to pull out of maybe one event, missed three or four weeks, but it certainly wasn't on the right wrist, and it wasn't because of there there's a difference between, like, if you land on a wrist and you bruise it versus, like, your stroke production is grinding your wrist in a certain way that you can't get away from, which is which is very different. Mine was I landed. There was an injury. It wasn't based on the way I was hitting the ball like a team or maybe a one more team where, you know, your body just couldn't take that extreme stroke production.”

“I have an obsession lately that I wanna talk about. Yeah. Which is, rappers that, have agreed to do a soundtrack for a major motion picture, and then they have to rap about the movie and kind of get bogged down on the plot of the movie.”

“And a good example, I was just meeting with a small business owner. They own a small restaurant in the district. And they had said, because of immigration enforcement in the area, and of course, around the state more generally, they're seeing not only employees who are afraid to come to work, but about a 40% decrease in their customer traffic. People are afraid to even go out to eat.”

“Weimos says, and I think this is correct, that it's roughly eighty brass safer in terms of crashes are severe enough to turn down an airbag. Crashes severe enough to cause an injury, and also crashes involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicyclists. So far it's been better than human drivers, and so far, I think the case for allowing them they continue. The experiment is very strong.”

“In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses. And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem, which are involved in reward and and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers are are seeing, or their brains at least are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.”

“The underlying problem is that these businesses in the SaaS space where you're driven by net new sales every year, how many new customers are you signing up and then you're trying to manage retention and you're trying to increase sell-through and retain customers, they're just having a really hard time sourcing new customers and there's probably higher than model attrition. When you have a very kind of typically historically predictable business, where you can say, hey, I've got a net revenue retention of 118% or what have you, meaning I'm selling into my install base by 18% over what I'm making last year and then I'm signing up new customers, you can lever that business, right? You can borrow money against those cash flows because it becomes predictable. And what's happened in the last year in particular is agents have become so good and so fast and so cheap that many enterprises can simply spin up an alternative to a vertical SaaS solution.”

“There's a guy named Grant Owen. He's got a show that is relatively new. If you go to his Instagram, his first post is like a pinned post, and he lists out, my goals with the show. One of the bullets says, keep your head down for five years and then look up. So it's like, if you love this medium and you want to do it long term, you kinda have to have that insane mindset of, like, just fucking grind on it for five years, really go hard, and then assess, is this working?”

“I think he's thinking, here's the off-ramp, but here's a way to do it. And he's making this all about Christianity in a way, being like, oh my gosh, I can't believe he put these truth social posts out on Easter of all days. Can you believe it? This is the thing that's going to really make me question my faith in Donald Trump, not my faith in Christianity, but my faith in Donald Trump were these truths that he put out.”

“I just send it a message. And and then a typing indicator appeared, and and I'm like, wait. I didn't build that. It's only it only has image support. He sent me a message, but it only only was a file and no file ending. So it I checked out the header of the file, and it found that it was, like, Opus. So I used FFmpeg to convert it. And then I wanted to use this, but you didn't had it installed. But then I found the OpenAI key and just used curl to send a file to to OpenAI to translate, and here I am.”

“I do think there is a not unlikely scenario where Jannik Sinner cruises to this title, and that will feel... I wouldn't consider it an asterisk at all, but it certainly would be, you know, people would remember Carlos Alcaraz wasn't there. And that would be a shame for Jannik Sinner.”

“I saw that all the teams treated this like a hardware problem. They looked at this and say, we have to build a bigger wheels and bigger chassis and so on. And I looked at this and said, about wait a minute. The challenge really is to build a self driving car. They can drive for the desert. I can get a rental car. They can do it just fine, provided as a person insight and the challenges we need to take the person out of the driver's seat and replace it by computer. That is not a problem with bigger tires. That's actually be a software problem.”

“Make sure what you're asking them to reply is quick and easy. So I've probably even suggested, hey. Ask someone to reply to your email. What's your biggest challenge right now? Which isn't a bad question, and you would probably get some interesting responses. But she had the good point that that's gonna take someone some time. They're gonna have to sit and think about that. A lot of people are not going to reply. But if you just say, reply hi, or, I'm curious. What email provider do you use? Reply one, if you use kit reply two, if you use Mailchimp, whatever people will just really quickly do that.”

“And, like, I don't wanna be discouraging to anybody because I really do believe, like, you hear it so much. Like, you have to work for your dreams, Never give up. Like, we're trained this way. Like, never give up. The universe actually, maybe not the universe. A group of editors at literary magazines across The United States was telling me it was time to give up as a writer. Like, I wasn't cut out for it. And, I stopped.”

“There are those now in this current administration who would be happy enough to sell off those lands to the highest bidder and make some other kind of use of them. But in Colorado, we love our outdoors. We love our beautiful natural environment. It's what drives millions of visitors to our state every year and helps maintain a wonderful quality of life for Coloradans.”

“If you think that, oh, yeah, work really hard and then I retire, I don't recommend that because the idea of, oh, yeah. I just enjoy life now. It maybe is appealing, but right now, I enjoy life the most I've enjoyed life. Because if you wake up in the morning and you have nothing to look forward to, you have no real challenge, that gets very boring very fast. And then when when you're bored, you're gonna look for other places how to stimulate yourself. And then maybe maybe that's drugs.”

“On Tim Cook's retirement, he had an incredible run as CEO of Apple. He ran it very effectively for 15 years. The market cap of the company went up by over 10x. The revenue grew from roughly 100 billion a year to over 400 billion a year. He also improved the quality of revenue by moving the mix into services. People say that, well, they never did any innovation under Tim Cook. But I've seen people tweet lists of products that were released under him. And there were a lot of them. Now, it's true, nothing as big as the iPhone. But they did release a lot of products under Tim Cook. And then just finally, I mean, you look back over the last 15 years and there really weren't any public snafus or scandals or imbroglios with Apple.”

“Google, Gmail, they have a tool called Google Postmaster Tools. It's free to use. You just enter your domain. You have to verify that you own the domain by adding a TXT record to your DNS. Once you've done that, it will start to populate with the data Gmail has about your domain reputation, your email sending. I'm helping thousands of email senders a day, sending billions of emails. It is the go to tool for me and my team to diagnose what's going on with someone's deliverability.”

“I remember this is, like, the the shady shit that my mom Mhmm. She's like, if you ever have to vomit if you ever like, it's junior tennis. It's like, you know, you you're playing in, like, San Antonio where it's a thousand degrees and you happen to play 17 matches in a day as a junior. So if you ever have to vomit, go go in the middle of court. It's gonna take at least twenty minutes to clean it up. Your mom your mom said that? Yeah. My mom said that. That's next level. Yep. 100%. That's our upset of the day.”

“From, like, the 2018 bear market, post four or post all of this stuff, Bitcoin just ossified so hard. I'd love to see a graph of, like, how many bips. Like, the BIP rate slowed down a lot. There were, like, a lot less bips. And then you had a lot of people come in that turn Bitcoin it was already somewhat there was a religiosity at that point. But they turned it into, like, hardcore religion of, like, no changes, no anything.”

“What sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called in the CFO's office, and he sits me down and he says he gives me a date, which at the time was 2020. And he said, Overwatch has to make in 2020. And then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue. And then he says to me, if it doesn't do dollars, we're gonna lay off a thousand people, and that's gonna be on you. And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career.”

“If I use as a reference point, like, you know, I spent a long time building on the early Internet and the early nineties and the early web and, like, all this stuff all the way up until, like, 2001 for, like, you know, for me, it was, like, ten years. And it was still it was, like, awful still. Like, it just like kept grinding and it was like, how do we make this useful? And then you had, you know, a whole bunch of things happen that were in the background, like, you know, Wi Fi, broadband, you know, you finally got like usable, other Internet connected devices, and you could actually really start to do stuff. But it was, like, ten years in the desert or longer before you could even get there. And I kinda feel that way about the blockchain space.”

“Four point eight million Americans drive for a living. It's one of the most common jobs we have, and these workers do not plan to surrender to the California tech companies. They're doing this because they stand to make an unfathomable amount of money if they eliminate driving jobs for working class of people. These drivers are represented by unions backed by politicians and in cities across America blue cities. They're organizing. So far they're winning.”

“And then Jameson, I wake up and I look at my feet and Jameson's like, so I have a bit to propose that we freeze the coins. And I'm just like, I'm so excited for this timeline. Because it is the antithesis of Bitcoin, not even, like, just the hard line Bitcoiners. Like, if you're in Bitcoin, you are against freezing. The word freezing, blocking is like blasting. And it's not, again, it's not just a hard line Bitcoiners. Like, this is a this is a core tenant of Bitcoin.”

“And recently, new development is actually in Korea. Not about Korea country itself, but the US presence in Korea. And then the probably China started to realize that the nearest base from the United States toward Beijing is actually a US air base in Korea. That's a new realizations. And I hope that the China will take that into heart.”

“Proof of work, obviously, it was itself an innovation and and sort of, essentially, like, the exhaust of the proof of work of Bitcoin is is just, like, the exhaust of energy consumption. And so it doesn't actually in some ways, it's waste in in a sense. The the energy is is waste. And and so I think the idea of, essentially, like, inference compute, as GPU, inference compute as proof of work. And so the work itself is the inference, and, that as the underlying basis for proof of work, cryptocurrency is pretty interesting, and would would be, you know, potentially something that could align with the kind of monetary principles of something like Bitcoin but actually, be productive, productive proof of work.”

“So there's a woman here in town. Her name is Kirtana Reddy, and she writes a newsletter called Selling Austin, which is awesome. It's like a great weekly newsletter, pretty brief. There's, like, a handful of kinda market updates about what's going on in Austin, and then she'll feature a house or something like that. We haven't connected in a while, but at year one, I believe, she did something like $300,000 in what do you call it? Real estate fees? With clients who came to her via the newsletter. So the and that was with less than a thousand readers.”

“There's still a lawsuit where a bunch of us invested in Curve. We gave Michael and Curve a bunch of money. At the time, Michael didn't really need the money. So I sent him $80,000 in USDT. Then two months later, DeFi summer starts, and he's like, yeah. I don't need your money anymore. The investors who are involved sue him in Switzerland. They sue him in America. They sue him in every jurisdiction they can find. And they keep losing because I have to imagine the judge was like, you sent someone some magic beans five years ago and never got them back. What did you expect?”

“Green Hills Of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst Wow players back in the day, it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests. The quest giver, Hemet Nessingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of of Hemingway. The pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale. And it was kinda like that McDonald's monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not gonna win. The pages didn't stack. There wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in. So players had very limited bag space.”

“When Andrew asked him about large companies such as Apple and Amazon that have haven't sought tariff reimbursement because they were worried about offending the president, Andrew very smartly asked, would you find it offensive for them to try and collect a refund? And Trump said, I think it's brilliant if they don't do that. Actually, I think if they don't do it, they got to know me very well. I'm very honored by what you said. If they don't do it, I'll remember them.”

“I can safely say that we have the most intense testing in all of sports. Mhmm. I love being able to say that. Like, I like it. Is that worth an hour of my day when I was on tour? Yes. Do I do I think, and I don't know this, do I think that most of players want that peace of mind even if it's a complete and total invasion of privacy, pain in the ass? I was fine being inconvenienced to have the feeling of a cleaner sport. So we got a new poll question this week coming off the news of Alcaraz.”

“One thing that we've actually we're starting to do a lot more is just having a pre call with the guests themselves and trying to unearth what those moments would be. I learned this from Tim Ferris years ago. He had an interview with Edward Norton. And he started that interview with a question about, like, surfing. Tim Ferris describes this as basically, like, the bottom little footer of Wikipedia is where he found that. So try to find those, like, you know, nestled in Wikipedia moments that are very deep, but have potential for that person to get really animated and excited about.”

“I hate to say we can predict the future, but if you go back to last week's episode, what did I say the stadium looked like? Oh. What did I say it looked like? You said it looked like a Chipotle. It the stadium, Kahamajika looks like the inside of a Chipotle restaurant. People getting sick from tacos. I don't know. Get your get your hats. Get your tinfoil hats out. Just saying.”

“They then took that piclorum exposure, and then they looked at all the counties across the United States. They were able to gather data where there's enough data in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and they were able to look at piclorum use estimates from the Pesticide National Synthesis Project and try and deduce in places where piclorum was highly used and not highly used, and once again, it elucidated signal, which is that when piclorum was used in the environment in the counties more frequently, there was a much higher frequency of colon cancer in those counties. The odds ratio is like 3X. It's very strong.”

“Harrah's knew how to track each gambler's habits through total rewards cards that each gambler, including Bachman, would use throughout the casino. And that told the company exactly how much money each player spent, on which games, and at what frequency. The company would then use that information to tell them exactly what kinds of perks and rewards would keep certain gamblers coming back, and at exactly what juncture to offer those perks and rewards.”