Diet TBPN: November 7, 2025

Summary

TBPN – "Diet TBPN: November 7, 2025"

Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays (TBPN), with guests Lex Fridman, Ben Thompson, Tyler Cowen
Date: November 8, 2025
Episode Focus:
A fast-paced, wide-ranging discussion on the state of AI, industrial policy, tech company incentives, the surge and correction in markets, the evolving positions of major players (and their personalities), and the ongoing drama involving OpenAI, Tesla, and tech subsidies. Includes talk of AGI “pilled” leaders, government backstops, the economics of compute, and notable deals.

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Overview

This episode unpacks the turbulence in the AI and tech world, focusing on government incentives for AI infrastructure, CEO mega-compensation packages, the fluctuating fortunes of tech stocks, and the current "AGI arms race." Major topics include Sam Altman/OpenAI's lobbying for government support, Elon Musk’s massive Tesla pay package, and how the world’s largest tech companies are positioning themselves for (or against) artificial general intelligence. There’s also an engaging, meme-heavy comparison of tech leaders’ AGI worldviews and needs, and some thoughts on the realities behind high-flying startups. The episode closes with a breakdown of major recent tech deals, particularly Snap’s partnership with Perplexity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. OpenAI’s Government Backstop Drama

Timestamps: [00:00] – [04:53]

• Backstop Controversy: Sam Altman and OpenAI are in hot water for advocating, then seemingly denying, government support for AI data centers.

  • OpenAI lobbied to have AI data centers and server production included in America’s manufacturing investment incentives (the “American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit”).
  • The letter suggests federal grants, cost-sharing, loans, or guarantees for these projects – directly at odds with Altman’s public statement:

    “We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.” – (Ben Thompson quoting Altman, [02:18])

• Debate Over Incentives: The hosts dissect this contradiction. Lex remarks:

  “I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout… it’s actually in your shareholder's responsibility. …You want to get those [taxpayer dollars] into industries that are aligned with you.” ([01:45])

• Contextualizing Subsidies:

  • There’s a pragmatic view among the hosts: lobbying and seeking subsidies are rational moves in America’s not-so “free market” game.
  • Ben draws parallels to past energy/company bailouts, and expresses concern over the risks of government-backed investments in fast-depreciating assets like chips.

• The Energy Subsidy Shift:

  “I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing energy, bringing new energy. …It theoretically would benefit the average American too.” – Ben Thompson ([03:19])

2. Market Exuberance and Tech Company Dealings

Timestamps: [04:53] – [05:41], [19:19] – [20:43]

• Fed programs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) eyeing stakes in tech firms, signaling Wall Street’s intensifying involvement (and risks) with tech innovation.

• Commentary on startup workers discovering real company revenues are lower than claimed, exposing the recent “Spring” of inflated, sometimes misleading ARR figures.

  “Every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like a 1 to 10 million ramp. That was just insane.” – Ben Thompson ([20:19])

• Incentives to fudge metrics as funding becomes ultra-competitive, leading to “community adjusted ARR and contracts that don’t actually stick.” – Lex Fridman ([20:30])

3. Elon Musk’s Trillion Dollar Tesla Compensation

Timestamps: [06:53] – [08:57]

• Elon Musk’s pay package is unprecedented: potentially worth $1 trillion if ambitious operational/financial milestones are met (including 50B in EBITDA, 20M cars delivered, and 1M robots/robo taxis sold/deployed).

  • Lex:

    "Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. …He could get 1 trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches.” ([06:53])

  • The hosts question how future definitions (e.g., “robot”) may be creatively interpreted to help Musk cross thresholds.

• Cultural Impact:

  • Discussion on how the rise of trillionaires may reshape social and political critiques of wealth:

    “Billionaires are the heat shield.” – Ben Thompson ([08:57])
    “Like what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in?...trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policy failure. And millionaires we’re like kind of okay with, but it’s not great.” – Lex Fridman ([09:10])

4. AGI “Pill” Mapping: Ranking Tech Leaders

Timestamps: [10:36] – [16:50]

• Tyler Cowen introduces a grid ranking the “Mag 7” + others by:
  a) How AGI “pilled” they are (do they believe AGI is imminent/transformational),
  b) How much their business depends on AGI.

  • Examples:
    • Sam Altman: Believer and dependent on AGI’s success
    • Dario Amodei (Anthropic): Very AGI-pilled, sees it as a national security race with China
    • Larry Ellison (Oracle): Not a hardcore AGI believer, but business is positioned to benefit if it works
    • Jensen Huang (Nvidia): Not AGI-pilled, but provides the hardware foundation
    • Sundar Pichai (Google) & Satya Nadella (Microsoft): More practical approaches, with Google's DeepMind investment signaling stronger belief than Microsoft
    • Elon Musk: “Super AGI-pilled,” but his companies’ core businesses don’t require AGI
    • Zuck (Meta): Shifted rightward, now more interested in open-source commodification than “cosmic battle”

• Notable Quotes:

  “It’s fascinating. It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh, yeah, I like…this cool thing. I’m going to check the box. …But we’re not like competing in the big cosmic battle.” – Lex Fridman ([15:06])
  “I think Sundar is also definitely below this line…If AI doesn’t work, then Google’s just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well.” – Tyler Cowen ([14:38])

• Meta-Commentary on the AGI Race:

  “So Elon, I mean, he's been AGI pilled, I think, for a very long super AGI.” – Tyler Cowen ([15:36])
  “He talked yesterday about. About humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch.” – Ben Thompson ([15:54])

5. AI Compute Demand, Chip Shortages, and Tesla’s Fab

Timestamps: [17:19] – [19:19]

• Buying & Selling Compute:

  • Discussion about AI labs buying large amounts of compute capacity – sometimes more than they need – to guarantee access.
  • Ben:

    "It's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need." ([17:41])

• Tesla’s Semiconductor Ambitions:

  • Elon Musk announces Tesla may build its own ‘Terrafab’ to address chip shortages.

    “It’s still not enough. So I think we may have to do a Tesla Terrafab.” – Elon Musk ([18:28]) “I can’t see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we’re looking for.” ([18:48])

  • Joking awe at the scale and ambition, comparing “Giga” to “Terra.”

6. Tech Stock Volatility and Macro Market Sentiment

Timestamps: [21:03] – [22:23]

• Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and DoorDash all experience sharp declines, resulting in a sobering mood:

  “Nvidia's losses accelerated to negative 5% on the day. …My inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this.” – Ben Thompson ([21:03]) “It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding.” – Lex Fridman ([21:57])

• Reflection that the market correction may offer a “reset” period for further tech growth.

7. Notable Tech Deal: Snap & Perplexity

Timestamps: [22:23] – [23:29]

• Snap (Snapchat) to integrate Perplexity’s AI chat and receives a $400 million investment (mostly in equity).

  “Snap gets $400 million, which is greater than Perplexity's total revenue. Snap gives nothing except access.” – Ben Thompson ([22:23])
  “Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over a year in a mix of cash and stock as part of the deal and gets access to Snap's 900 million monthly active users.” – Lex Fridman ([23:13])

  • Observations that Snap is finally leveraging its large user base to monetize AI partnerships.

8. Miscellaneous Memorable Moments & Culture

Timestamps: Throughout

• Fun soundboard additions and a brief digression about Tom Petty, Malibu, and music festivals
• Jokes about the Optimus robot replacing exotic dancers ([19:30])
• Meme Math:

  “Elon Musk now has $1 trillion in his bank account. That's a thousand times $1 billion. He could give every single human on Earth $1 billion and still be left with $992 billion.” – Lex Fridman ([19:34]) (Note: This is humorous exaggeration.)

• Kazakhstan’s $2B advanced chip purchase and Borat 3 jokes ([20:43])
• Lex and Ben’s lighthearted banter about the market’s mood swings

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps & Attribution)

• On Government Incentives and Rationality:

  "You have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible." – Lex Fridman ([01:45])

• On Bubbles and Wealth:

  "Billionaires are the heat shield." – Ben Thompson ([08:57]) “When billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire.” – Lex Fridman ([08:57])

• On Defining AGI:

  "My definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers and that will be. It's a very practical definition." – Lex Fridman ([13:17])

• On Compute Reselling Tactics:

  "It's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need." – Ben Thompson ([17:41])

• On Perverse Startup Incentives:

  "As that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it with community adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick." – Lex Fridman ([20:30])

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Important Segment Timestamps (for Further Listening)

• [00:00] – OpenAI “Backstopgate”/AI industrial policy drama
• [06:53] – Tesla/Elon Musk trillion-dollar pay package breakdown
• [10:36] – "AGI Pill" chart and mapping of tech leaders (Tyler Cowen segment)
• [17:19] – Compute shortages, Tesla Terrafab, chipmaking escalation
• [21:03] – Tech stock selloff and market “bubble pop”
• [22:23] – Snap-Perplexity deal deep-dive

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Summary Takeaways

• The tech ecosystem is at a crossroads, grappling with the risks of public subsidies, the race for compute, and eye-watering valuations/compensation.
• The world’s largest companies are staking bets of varying seriousness on AGI, but most have fallback positions if true AGI doesn’t materialize soon.
• The market is both sobering up (with selloffs) and setting the stage for the next era of aggressive investment and competition.
• Partnership deals (like Snap with Perplexity) signal that major platforms are finally moving to capitalize on AI’s consumer promise.
• Ultimately, rational self-interest, regulatory gamesmanship, and meme-inflected ambition continue to shape the fortunes—and follies—of the tech elite.

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This summary provides a comprehensive look at the substance and style of the discussion, capturing both the serious insights and the offbeat character of the show. Listeners will get a clear sense of the stakes, the mood, and the shifting dynamics in today’s tech world—even if they missed the episode.

Transcript

[Lex Fridman]

The timeline is in turmoil. Over again Sam Altman. Again, backstop gate continues unabated. The main point of debate is over Sarah Fryer's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment and said, I wasn't asking for a backstop of OpenAI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Here's an OpenAI document submitted one week ago with a they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella. They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees and Semper. Satoshi says Sam lied to everyone.

[Ben Thompson]

Let's read the specifics.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes, the specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the amic, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital, de risk early investment and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the United States. Counter the PRC BY DE Risking U.S. manufacturing expansion to provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly. The federal government should also deploy grants, cost sharing agreements, loans or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience.

[Ben Thompson]

So what's happening here is OpenAI a week ago, and everyone can go and read this letter which is publicly available on their website, was making the recommendation that the government should effectively treat data centers or AI or token factories, put them in the manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing, defense tech, etc.

[Lex Fridman]

And I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually like best practice. It's actually in your shareholder's responsibility. Like you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. You have every incentive to ask your person in Congress and your senator, the people in Washington, to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla. It didn't work out in the case of Solyndra. The game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you want to get those into industries that are aligned with you.

[Ben Thompson]

And so the thing that people are taking issue with is that in the opening of his message yesterday, he said, we do not want, we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes.

[Ben Thompson]

And that seems to conflict with the message, the letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website.

[Lex Fridman]

You can always advocate for, like, we should change the game, like, we shouldn't be doing this. Like, I would prefer a more of a free market economy. But in the world where we're not in a free market economy, you want to have your company win, Right? That's just rational. Now, it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field. And that's very odd when you say, oh yeah, this is a one hand washes the other situation, or oh yeah, this is, this is a situation where, you know, a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker saying, oh yeah, I knew that the government was going to bail us out in 08, so I was intentionally underwriting loans where it was somebody's fifth house and I knew that they couldn't pay it. I wasn't asking about their job, I wasn't asking about their income, I wasn't asking about their assets.

[Ben Thompson]

Which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing energy, bringing new energy.

[Lex Fridman]

You were talking about that yesterday.

[Ben Thompson]

Which directly benefits the labs and anybody building a data center, but it also feels very much in America's interests broadly. It theoretically would benefit the average American too.

[Lex Fridman]

OpenAI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is unlimited demand for their shares. They could be a public company, they could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like, no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS, right? AI for SaaS.

[Ben Thompson]

People's concern for government backed data center lending is that you're lending against chips which have a really fast depreciation schedule.

[Lex Fridman]

Yep.

[Ben Thompson]

We don't know. And if you look at right now core weaves, corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points jumped up dramatically. This is one of the leading NEO clouds. They are only in the platinum NEO cloud in the platinum platinum tier. And people are worried about them, right?

[Lex Fridman]

Yep.

[Ben Thompson]

Potentially, you know, having some bankruptcy risk. And so if you start doing government guaranteed data center lending, you could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to roi.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Ben Thompson]

And it just incentivizes the entire stack to just really exuberant. Going back to Sarah Fryer's interview on Wednesday, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. There's been a Lot of insanity this year. Silliness. Maybe we don't need more. The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Polt, says Fannie and Freddie eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Polt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity stakes in technology companies. We have some of the biggest technology and public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them. In our business, we're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie have over the whole ecosystem.

[Lex Fridman]

So, yeah, this, this Wall Street Journal event is just. So many articles came out of this. Did you get a whole new soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard?

[Ben Thompson]

I did. I still got all the classics, got all the classic. Working with some new material. Let's give it up for global businessmen.

[Lex Fridman]

Let's give it up. That's good. You have a new neighbor. So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California. He was living in Malibu in a $11.2 million house. 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms as a music studio. The buyer is Steven Slade Tien, a psychoanalyst and author. Tian didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if he. If you'd want to, you know, get beer sometime, hang out. We should reach out to him for coming.

[Ben Thompson]

I was at the first ever outside lands.

[Lex Fridman]

Really? How old are you?

[Ben Thompson]

Tom Petty headlined on Saturday. This was in August of 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis. And I kept asking, like, his friend's parents, what is that stinky, stinky smell? We can't get away from it.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. It's signed, it's approved. I'm sure it will be contested in the courts. It's always contested in the courts. Elon could get 1 trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches. He's worth half a trillion now, but he also owns 414 million Tesla shares outright. Got another award in 2018 of 300 million shares. And this next award is 424 million across 12 tranches. Tranches, basically what he already had. They're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high. And then there's also these, like, qualitative operational goals, or I guess they're quantitative. 50 billion in EBITDA 20 million cars delivered. 1 million robots sold. 1 million robo taxis in operation. 10 million full self driving subscription. Now some of those are obviously more gamble than others. What's the definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? What's the definition of a robotech?

[Ben Thompson]

Qualifies if it's like Tesla that is enabled.

[Lex Fridman]

Yep. And I turn on FSD and my friend rides in it.

[Ben Thompson]

Is there anything for actual rides?

[Lex Fridman]

But some of these are more gamble than others. But the market really isn't.

[Ben Thompson]

How many self driving subscriptions are there today?

[Lex Fridman]

I saw, I looked that up. It's somewhere between like 1 and 3 million right now. So he has to, he definitely has to like triple the size. At least he hasn't sold any robots. So a million would be entirely new robots. He's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on The EBITDA front, 50 billion in EBITDA company did like 13 last year. So that's, that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean 50 billion in EBITDA is a lot of money. He's, he only has to take the market cap to 8.5 trillion and Tesla's already worth a trillion. So it's going to be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire. Like but we are getting close. Like that's going to happen not just within our lifetime, like definitely within the next decade. I wonder how that's going to reshape our culture, like the world in America. Because when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire.

[Ben Thompson]

Billionaires are the heat shield.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. So the millionaire became more accessible and the billionaire became the thing that the society scapegoats for all the problems.

[Ben Thompson]

Approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. Like what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Like what happens when you have to say like well like trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policy failure. And millionaires were like kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like it becomes much more complicated. What does this mean for other companies? What does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? Could he go to the OpenAI for profit board and say hey if OpenAI IPOs at 2 trillion, I want 20%. We know that Sam runs a bit of an Elon Playbook. They were in business together, they co founded OpenAI together. And then I also wonder what will happen at the garden variety unicorn. If you're just the CEO of a $5 billion company and you're just kind of hanging out there and you say like, Yeah, I had 30% of the company when I started. I've been diluted down to 5 or 10, but I like this company and I want to get it up. Could I go to the board and say, okay, we're at 5 billion now if I get us to 50, will you double my equity position? How would the growth stage venture companies feel about that?

[Ben Thompson]

I think the right way for founders to think about that is like no one's taking your shares unless you decide to sell them. Your job is just to make the share price go up and there's going to be more shares issued over time. But if you just make the share price go up forever, it doesn't really matter. But then there's also. You can also buy back. Almost no other CEOs would take a deal like, because it's so ambitious.

[Lex Fridman]

Yep.

[Ben Thompson]

And so I think it's. I think it's healthy.

[Lex Fridman]

Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us that tries to help map the Mag 7. Really? I call it the TVPN Top 10. TPPN Top 10. The 10 most important companies in AI. Loosely, the Mag 7, plus a few bonus ones. And we're going to try and watch your head through and look, you're a horse. We're going to try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is that right?

[Tyler Cowen]

So basically on the horizontal we have how AGI pilled they are.

[Lex Fridman]

Sure.

[Tyler Cowen]

So I feel like that's fairly self explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like it can produce the median economic output of a person. So then on the vertical axis we have how much they need AGI.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Tyler Cowen]

So I think this is maybe a little harder. So I want to qualify this.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

So I mean this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient, you know, AI that's as good as a person.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

But I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to become more and more economically valuable. Let's start with Sam Altman. He believes in AGI. Right. He runs kind of the biggest AI company.

[Ben Thompson]

I think that more and more, at least in the short term, OpenAI looks like a hyperscaler. They're kind of a junior hyperscaler. And I think their actions are more, you know, I think that open AI, A lot of people, you know, want to say that they're, they're bearish on, on open air current levels. But ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving, they seem to me like they'd be fine if the models plateaued.

[Tyler Cowen]

Next we have Dario.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Tyler Cowen]

He's extremely AGI pilled. This is kind of the reasoning why he's. He's so anti China. Yeah, Right. Because he sees it as an actual race. This is going to clear weapons. It is a national, you know, security.

[Lex Fridman]

Totally.

[Tyler Cowen]

It's a. If China gets there first, UAV online. You need a lot of continued growth for anthropic to keep kind of making sense economically, I think. Yeah, yeah. Next is Larry. Larry Ellis. Larry's in kind of an interesting spot.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

So this is kind of a weird place to be where you don't believe in AGI, but you need it.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay. How did he wind up there?

[Tyler Cowen]

He doesn't seem the type that is. Believes in some kind of super intelligent God that is going to come. That's going to, you know, birth this new thing. Humanity will rise. Okay.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Tyler Cowen]

I think this is a fairly reasonable spot.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

Obviously there's, you know, there's some sense where he is slightly AGI pilled, or maybe more than slightly believes in the.

[Lex Fridman]

Power of the technology.

[Tyler Cowen]

I mean, he's very early on. Open AI.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah.

[Tyler Cowen]

He thinks that AI in general will become very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent. Maybe it's not gonna replace every person. It's just a useful tool. It's.

[Lex Fridman]

The next quote I always go back to is him saying, like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers and that will be. It's like. It's a very practical definition.

[Tyler Cowen]

I think people see him as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. I like him. I like him in the center of the grid somewhere. That seems like a real.

[Tyler Cowen]

He's also. If OpenAI works out, he'll do very well. If they don't work out, I think he's also. He's doing quite well. If Jensen was very IGI pilled.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes.

[Tyler Cowen]

I mean, he is the kind of. He's the rock on which this all is built on. Yes, he has the chips.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes, he has.

[Tyler Cowen]

If he was a GI pilled, he would not be giving out those chips. He would keep all to himself and he would be training his own model.

[Lex Fridman]

Okay.

[Tyler Cowen]

So that's why I think he's. He's more on the. Doesn't believe in AGI. There was a new blog post yesterday. It was basically AI 2027. There was a new one. It was AI 2032. So it's basically the same team, different team, but the team of AI 2027 was promoting it.

[Lex Fridman]

Sundar believes in AGI more than Satya. You think?

[Tyler Cowen]

Yeah, Well, I think you can see this in kind of. They were even earlier in some sense than Satya. Right. With. With DeepMind.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah. There is a little bit of like, if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you like squirming and being. I got to get in. It doesn't matter if I'm 1% behind or 10% behind or 80% behind. I got to get in.

[Tyler Cowen]

I think Sundar is also definitely below this line because, you know, Google has been doing very well. AI was at first. I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is going to. This is going to destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't work, then Google's just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, I mean, Gemini is one of the best models. They'll do very well. So Zuck is also kind of in an interesting spot. Yes, I think. I think Zuck is actually someone who has shifted rightward.

[Lex Fridman]

It's fascinating. It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh, yeah, I like. It's this cool thing. I'm going to check the box. I got my team. We did this fun little side project. It's this open source model. We kind of found our own little lane. But we're not like competing in the big cosmic battle.

[Ben Thompson]

Do you think that was just a counter position to way to try to win the AI war? Go say, hey, we're just going to try to commodity commodify this market and like Chinese approach.

[Tyler Cowen]

So Elon, I mean, he's been AGI pilled, I think, for a very long super AGI.

[Lex Fridman]

I agree with that.

[Tyler Cowen]

Open AI co founder. Even before that, he. I think he was fairly big in the. In the safety space.

[Lex Fridman]

Totally.

[Tyler Cowen]

You see him even on. On Joe Rogan, he was talking about AI safety.

[Lex Fridman]

He still believes he has backed off.

[Tyler Cowen]

And AI safety is important because it's going to become super intelligent. It's going to take over the world to be safe.

[Lex Fridman]

Totally.

[Ben Thompson]

So he talked yesterday about. About Humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of need AGI in order to kind of unlock the infinite money glitch.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes. But at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI, the rockets don't need AGI, Starlink doesn't need AGI. So. Yeah, so he's. So he's not entirely indexed on it in the way the foundation labs are.

[Ben Thompson]

Chad says, where's Tyler on the chart? Feels like Tyler is an AGI pelt anymore.

[Tyler Cowen]

Let's figure out I actually am on the chart here.

[Lex Fridman]

Let's go to Tyler.

[Tyler Cowen]

I am over here. So I. Yeah, I think I'm very AGI killed, right? Seems to be. I'm ready for the Dyson sphere.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes.

[Tyler Cowen]

I think it's only a matter of years handful. Only a matter of years if AI does not work. The macro economy is looking not good. So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook without AGI.

[Lex Fridman]

Sure, sure, sure. Even though you're already employed.

[Ben Thompson]

Breaking news through the timeline.

[Lex Fridman]

What's the breaking news?

[Ben Thompson]

TJ Parker has finally found a new car that he likes. Guess what it is. Guess it is the R. Look at this, look at this. Finally found a new vehicle I quite like and great gas mileage to boot.

[Lex Fridman]

This was the problem with your Ford Raptor.

[Ben Thompson]

It wasn't the R.0 to 60 and.

[Lex Fridman]

3.9, 720 horsepower, 5.2 liter supercharged V8.

[Ben Thompson]

Altman, today we're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible. Zach, last week we could sell computer. Are we in a shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it.

[Lex Fridman]

I like that story about Jensen where he understands the dynamic here, but still you get kind of crushed if there's a sell off in terms of demand.

[Ben Thompson]

It's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need.

[Lex Fridman]

I mean, we just talked to David Baszucki from Roblox and he was saying that look, we had our own on premises, but then we had spikes of demand and so we went to the hyperscalers for that because they can load balance across. Well, people are playing Roblox here and then maybe they watch some Netflix over there and they are storing, you know, all sorts of different data and there's different workloads that happen at different times. Jumping straight to selling compute. I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It Seems odd. It seems rushed. It seems rushed. Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab.

[Elon Musk]

It's still not enough. So I think we may have to do a Tesla Terrafab.

[Ben Thompson]

Wow, great name.

[Lex Fridman]

So that is a bombshell.

[Elon Musk]

It's like Giga, but way bigger.

[Lex Fridman]

Terabyte.

[Ben Thompson]

He's feeling good right now.

[Elon Musk]

I can't see any other way to get to the volume of of chips that we're looking for. So I think we're probably going to have to build a gigantic chip app.

[Lex Fridman]

Morris changing TSS and C is like, no, actually I'm fine. I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do it.

[Ben Thompson]

Pull up this other video of Optimus.

[Lex Fridman]

There's so much.

[Ben Thompson]

This thing has motion.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, it's not bad.

[Ben Thompson]

Imagine you're working late at the office one night and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves.

[Lex Fridman]

Yeah, most people that bought Teslas already had cars, right? And so it's just like a one for one slot swap. Who are you replacing with this?

[Tyler Cowen]

Well, with this you can replace like an exotic dancer.

[Lex Fridman]

Yes, that's true. Elon Musk now has $1 trillion in his bank account. That's a thousand times $1 billion. He could give every single human on Earth 1 billion and still be left with 992 billion. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops. China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. In spooky, spooky territory. This is pretty crazy. In the last 10 months, three very talented friends have joined separate hot early stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing that the company's actual revenue was significantly less than what the founder had told during the interview process and shared online.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, again, this going back to spring, right? It just felt like there was this. Every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like 1 to 10 million of like a 1 to 10 million ramp. That was just insane.

[Lex Fridman]

And the weird dynamic is that like as that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it with community adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick.

[Ben Thompson]

And Kazakhstan has signed an MoU years ago to buy up to 2 billion of advanced chips from advanced video. Let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan. Warm it up, warm it up, warm it up.

[Lex Fridman]

Boom.

[Ben Thompson]

Great hit. Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game.

[Lex Fridman]

Maybe they should do Borat 3. About data centers breaking. Nvidia's losses accelerated to negative 5% on the day. Now down 16% since Monday's high. That marks a drop of 8,800 billion since Monday. Wow, that is a wild sell off. Didn't Tyler quote this? And this bullish or something like that?

[Tyler Cowen]

No, that was on the door dash. They went down 20%.

[Lex Fridman]

Everyone's down 10 or 20%.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. Whether you beat or miss, you're going down. Heisenberg sharing. Yeah, sharing. A little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days. What the hell is he doing? He's shopping.

[Lex Fridman]

Microsoft went down three points. That's real good.

[Ben Thompson]

Meta down 18%. Losses have accelerated. My inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this. And it is a one year look at spy.

[Lex Fridman]

It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding.

[Ben Thompson]

It was a good run.

[Lex Fridman]

We can go up from here.

[Ben Thompson]

Oh, the stocks have already stopped trading. So we're safe now.

[Lex Fridman]

We're safe. It can't hurt us anymore.

[Ben Thompson]

The economy can't hurt you. On the weekend. Bank of America, yes, as of yesterday. Just fully recovered from the global financial Crisis.

[Lex Fridman]

Wow.

[Ben Thompson]

Took 19 to the day and then.

[Lex Fridman]

It'S like back in another crisis. Can you imagine? Famously backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett.

[Ben Thompson]

Or some more information on the Snap Snapchat deal. Deal. Snap gets 400 million, which is greater than Perplexity's total revenue. Snap gives nothing except access to.

[Lex Fridman]

It's more what they're. They're paying more than their revenue. The deal looks incredibly in Snap's favor. Snap gets $400 million greater than perplex total revenue. Now Signal is saying this is most likely 399 million of perplexity equity to Snap, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash. But it is possible that they're just giving $400 million of equity like a stock grant.

[Ben Thompson]

Surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these consumer AI companies have given their massive, massive user base.

[Lex Fridman]

Snap will be integrating Perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface. Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over a year in a mix of cash and stock as part of the deal and gets access to Snap's 900 million monthly active users.

[Ben Thompson]

Snapchat's going to accidentally build AGI. Just trying to make the dog filter blink.

[Lex Fridman]

Realistically, I love it.

[Ben Thompson]

Deutsche bank is exploring ways to hedge his exposure to AI to data centers. It's looking at options, including shorting a basket of AI related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers.

[Lex Fridman]

So, like, everyone is getting in on the action. Like, a few years ago, like the, like, it was like, if you have anything that's related to AI, like, go, go, go, raise money. Grow it, spin it, flip it, turn it around, pivot it, whatever you want to do.

[Ben Thompson]

Have a great weekend, everyone. We love you.

[Lex Fridman]

Goodbye.

[Ben Thompson]

See you Monday.