SPEAKER_01 0:00

These are those the tech minds of Silicon Valley who control uh trillion dollars in capital flows who are listening to this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Is Vandy or Hello everyone and welcome to another semi-doped podcast. I'm Austin Lines with Chipstrat, and with me is Vic Shaker from Vic's newsletter. All right, hot off the press, Vic. I saw a tweet this morning, 8 a.m. Central Time, and it's a picture of Lip Butan shaking Elon Musk's hand. And Intel said, Intel is proud to join the Terrafab project with SpaceX, XAI, and Tesla to help refactor silicon fab technology. Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra high performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terrafab's aim to produce one terawatt per year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics. It was fun hosting Elon Musk at Intel this past weekend. Did you see this? This is hot off the press. Did not see this coming myself.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

No, I did not.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Actually, this is the first time you're reading out the news to me. Okay, perfect. Well, let me keep going. So then um Lip Butan retweeted it, quote tweeted it, and said, Elon has a proven track record of reimagining entire industries. This is exactly what is needed in semiconductor manufacturing today. Terrafab represents a step change in how silicon logic, memory, and packaging will get built in the future. Intel is proud to be a partner and work closely with Elon on this highly strategic project. Rocket emoji, rocket emoji. Yeah, yeah. And which of course then I thought, I wonder if Lip Blue actually wrote this or if he has someone write it for him. But okay, so so let's uh let's unpack this quick because it's hot up the press and it's sort of going to be top of mind for people. So, as a reminder of the Terrafab vision, I think the first question, if people haven't been tracking this closely, because I think the Terrafab announcement was only like two weeks ago or something, but Elon um had a little live video presentation that he made from a power plant in downtown Austin, Texas. And he basically laid out a problem that there's not enough chip capacity for his ambitions, going to space, going to Mars, all these things. He laid he laid it out nicely, actually, working from first principles of like what his vision is, and then working backward through all the bottlenecks, and it and it boiled down to where he wants to get long term is going to require like one million wafer starts per month, but the industry is not there. And therefore, they wanted to build their own fab to try to increase the amount of chips, the wafers produced per year, essentially. And in this Terra Fab concept that he put forth um is sort of touted as like a for fully vertically integrated fab. So design, lithography, fabrication, memory, advanced packaging, everything under one roof. And I think the idea is to by putting it all essentially located, which is probably a conversation from our time, if it how true this is, but that you could iterate really quickly and just like cut out a ton of inefficiency if you can build and design and build everything soup to nuts under one roof. And so Elon's vision was initial target, let's do something. We'll um start at the Tesla Gigasite in Austin as like a prototype, and we'll try to ramp up to a production facility, but we'll try to hit 100K wafer starts per month. Um, and that was about it. So it's a lot of just vision casting. So that so Terrafab alone has a lot of questions of like is this possible? How are they gonna do this? Does it actually solve the problem? So on and so forth. We won't get into that. But what I found interesting is then this announcement just a couple weeks later, and there's very little details in those tweets, but Intel Foundry really saying we're gonna come along and help accelerate the Terrafab vision.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Okay. Nice. I mean, I guess this is a second American fab if it comes to fruition. But uh I heard this whole thing about Terafab, and I was like, aren't we going backwards? Like there were companies who used to make uh their own chips and then sell their own products, aka Intel. And then, you know, now you're like, okay, no, we'll just make the chips separate and we'll make the product division separate, and then uh AMD, you know, the the the what who's an earlier CEO of AMD? He's like, he's like, oh, he said something like, Oh, we won't have a fab over my dead body, or something like that. He's like he was a real fab guy.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Jerry Sanders, he said yes, yes, he said, real men have fabs.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Real men have fabs, and yeah, so so we're going back now. So not only will we have fabs, we'll have memory, we'll have packaging, we'll have everything, we'll even put them on rockets, ship them to space, all in one roof. This is like going back but with in time but with steroids on. Like it's just like I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Yeah, no, let's unpack that. So this is actually really interesting. So back in the day, in the when when the semiconductor manufacturing industry first started, it was actually beneficial if you could design your own chips and manufacture your own chips in one house because you could do extreme co-design from design through manufacturing. So the question is, well, why don't we still do that? And and obviously the economics of producing chips has gotten so expensive that you couldn't support uh the cost of a new fab with just your own chips alone. So people ended up needing to decouple and say, okay, well, we're we're gonna manufacture for hundreds of chip designers, you know, and to support the like huge fixed costs. So then the interesting question is like, okay, well, actually, if it's best to do everything under one roof, the question is, how can it economically be possible? Like, what's going to be different? Is it gonna actually have that volume of chips from one customer, or is there some sort of like manufacturing unlock that makes this possible? Now, the the next natural question is like, what about lithography? Because that's where the cost is. Like, you're gonna have to buy a ton of ASML EUV machines, and unless you can really get rid of that huge expense, like it just doesn't seem to add up as we're talking about it out loud. But but that would that's where my head goes, is like, well, maybe there's something economically where they think it actually could make sense to bring this all all back and be an integrated device manufacturer.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Uh the other thing I don't understand is like bring it all in, like, but at what level? Like, are you going to um do the chip manufacturing and packaging? Okay, I get it. Then what are you gonna do? Are you gonna do the assembly, like component assembly? Like I let's say you're making an optical transceiver now, you're gonna start assembling components. Okay, then what about uh, you know, uh are you going to source things like resistors and capacitors to build your PCBs? Oh, by the way, are you going to make your own PCBs?

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah, well, okay, so let's okay. I'm I I need to go deeper on this topic. I'm just speculating, but I have a feeling that Elon would say, yeah, manufacture stuff, no problem. We do that. That's what Optimus is for in the long run. So we will try to set it up and automate it in the long run. I'm pretty sure SpaceX actually has some sort of like PCB manufacturing plant. Have you heard this before?

SPEAKER_01 7:32

No. Oh, so they already have that. Okay, I can't.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yeah, they have a Texas facility for Starlink. So they actually so they have some experience here. But so in theory, maybe they know enough and have a vision for trying to automate a lot of it that they think that it's possible. But then it raises the question: what's Intel have to do with it? What does Intel Foundry do? If you're gonna do it all, what does Intel Foundry have to do with it? So I have a also a hunch that there's a long-term vision for doing it all, but a realization that in the near term, somehow they need to partner with an existing foundry that's American-made, that has fabrication, that has advanced packaging. For example, maybe in Arizona and New Mexico, like Intel does, Intel Foundry does. But it will be fascinating to understand what's Intel's play here. Because best case scenario for Intel, this is actually Foundry's potential first public customer proclamation of a whale customer, not just like a little government project or a little customer that's kicking the tires. But this could literally be the first like big customer. If, if, if it if it ends up as like these are chips for Optimus, or these are chips for, you know, even for Elon's like space ideas, like that could be, you know, hundreds of thousands of chips. And and then I think what I wrote, I tweeted about this this morning, which is like, wow, this was not on my bingo card that Intel Foundry's first flagship customer publicly is Elon Musk. You know, you thought eventually that it would be like Google or Amazon or someone. Nvidia, I don't know. Nvidia, right, right. Apple, who knows, right? But not not Elon. But then then I thought about it and I was like, wait a minute, all of those companies don't really want to ever say anything publicly that they're working with Intel Foundry because like they don't want to lose their place in line with TSMC and they don't want to maybe like give it away to their competitors. And so like they have like zero reasons to come out and say they're working with Intel Foundry, which is a very tough thing for if you're Intel Foundry and you're trying to like get people to believe that you're legitimate. But then Elon like does his own thing, says his own thing, he is his own thing.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

But Elon is XAI. So, you know, in all this conversation about open AI and all the crazy stuff they do, which we'll get to, then there's anthropic killing it on the enterprise side. Sometimes we forget that there's this thing called Grok, and there's this thing called XAI, which is like occupying so many data centers. And he needs a lot of chips too, uh, to handle that thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Totally, totally. Which that we should have a conversation on that sometime because the question is, what is XAI's long-term vision and are they going to continue to fill data centers? Yeah, yeah. It's I don't know. I feel like it's not been much in the news these days. Right. Agreed, agreed. I know that I'm pretty sure a lot of people left after the merger, and so there's a lot of questions about what they're going to do. And then I know that they're saying, like, hey, we need to make sure that the next grok is good at coding, just like OpenAI is saying, because everyone's realizing that the stable outsized revenue today is enterprise, as anthropics is showing with Claude.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

But okay, let's move on. I guess very last thought from the tweet with um Lit Boo and Elon shaking hands. I thought, wow, Litbu and Elon see eye to eye. Quite literally, because Elon's 6'2, I think, and and Litbu must be like 6'1. I know he played basketball in college.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

And he's like, I thought you were saying something like, wait, did they have a beef, like a like an argument in the past that they're looking eye to? No, you mean literally eye to eye. Literally, yes, exactly. That's funny. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Okay, what's next? What should we talk about next?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Uh yeah, so as a you know, people who run podcasts, I'm sure you've seen that uh OpenAI bought TBPN, which is uh a podcast, for an estimated hundred million dollars, probably three hundred million.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yes, low, low single hundreds of millions or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Low hundreds of millions. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know, hundred to three hundred. That's still a lot of zeros, you know. Totally. Has Sam called you or to buy our podcast or anything?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Just check in because not not not yet. Not yet, Sam. If you're listening, uh you know, I'm sure you can figure out how to find me. I use Chat GPT all the time. Just have it message me.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

You have all his info. So speaking of listeners, TBPN stands for you know technology business programming network, which uh this podcast does a three-hour live stream every day covering tech, AI, and you know, the business of all of this stuff. They do a really good job. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes are like amazing hosts, you know. They they're dressed like, you know, it reminds me of like Lex Friedman. They're dressed in like suits and stuff. And it's it's a great show. I mean, they've had some really good guests on, name it, you know, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, all these people have been on there. Great podcast. It's an 11-person team, so you can kind of divide it up and see like 10 million. Better than the drop deal, I think, per person. Think about it.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Is it? I don't know. Anyway, but yeah, so it looks so this is very interesting because the question that comes up is why would OpenAI buy a podcast? Like, why? I mean, it's like is it literally required for what they do? Aren't they planning to go IPO? Don't you want to be a little responsible about what kind of stuff you buy? Didn't they just kill Sora too, by the way?

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Right, right, right. Yes. So, yes, they're trying to kill side quests, they're trying to double down on codecs, they're trying to increase revenue ahead of an IPO. And so then to your point, it's a very interesting question to say how does acquiring TBPN help those goals? Increasing revenue, preparing for an IPO, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

And it looks like the show will continue to go on as is, which is great. And you know, the hosts now, uh John and Jordy, will report to their chief global officer, I guess, to assist with their like uh open AI's communications or something. It's uh seems like a rather expensive acquaintre for to get a comms team. No, there are plenty of people who know how to do comms.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Well, okay, let's no, that that's actually really interesting. There is this new media, as you and I are know, through writing Substacks, having a podcast. Obviously, these guys are probably like the foremost experts in sort of new media meets Silicon Valley, meets AI meets technology. So it's not a bad idea from an aquahire perspective to say we should get closer to these guys and basically try to get them to help us rethink all of our communications. I hadn't thought about that. I thought about it more of just like, what is the benefit of open AI to owning TBPN? But maybe it's more like, what is the benefit of like John and Jordy essentially being open AI employees?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Yeah, I think they have their autonomy as to what they're going to do and say on the podcast, so that doesn't change. But yeah, this uh creator-led tech media is what we are also a part of, I guess, now.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Seems to be gaining strategic value in the sense that people are more prone to listen to a few voices who sort out the complexity in this scene because of their past experience or history or the ability to do it. Dylan and semi-analysis has done really well as well. So this is like the rise of a bunch of specialists or experts in this particular field, which is really hot in the world right now. But the general mainstream media finds it hard to navigate because of the technical complexity involved and the many orders of implications involved with every piece of news or you know, collaboration, a partnership that comes out. Like, look at how long we spoke about one tweet that Elon and Liv Bu are like shaking hands and we we analyze it for like 10 minutes. So I think you know that is the value that this kind of media brings to the table. I don't know if it's 300 million, but it's some value.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

No, totally. No, you're spot on. Like when you compare and contrast like John and Jordi versus traditional media, like traditional media, for better or for worse, I subscribe to Wall Street Journal, I get the print edition, I read it every morning. Me and my son sit down, eat breakfast, read it. It's journalists first writing about technology, writing about AI. They're trained as journalists generally. And what you're saying is like for John and Jordy, they are they were entrepreneurs, they were operators, they were builders first, and now they're becoming essentially like media creators, influencers, you know, second. And so they have like the best insights because they've lived and worked in that world. And by the way, why can they have a three-hour podcast? Not only can they talk about things ad nauseum like we can, but also they have a ton of connections so they can interview really interesting people. Traditional media doesn't have those connections. And then also the incentives aren't necessarily aligned with traditional media, but obviously John and Jordy just like they love entrepreneurship, AI, startups, technology. Like they love it. And last thing I'll say is to the circling back to the point you made, is like, well, we are trying to take the same approach, which is like we have been engineers, I've been in a product management role, I've been an entrepreneurship role. And so, like, we are first and foremost like the technical experts, and then can also write and communicate these things to everyone else. So I do think that there is a premium now being put on personable technical experts or startup experts or operators who can in real time like see and navigate what's happening and talk about it, as opposed to going to traditional media and hoping that you can convince someone that lives on the East Coast that, you know, went to an Ivy League school, studied journalism, and then convinced them to understand your story and have enough passion about it that it will come through in their traditional route.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yes. It's an easier sell for companies doing AI hardware or software or all these LLMs to talk to people like Jordi and John who have the background in Silicon Valley, in tech, so that the communication medium is like much simpler. They speak the same language. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Exactly. Yes. So then the question is back to open AI. Why does OpenAI want to own that? Like I get if you're open AI, you're like, great, these are people who get us talking about AI. Like this is good for us for like awareness, adoption, that kind of thing. Of course, open AI already has like a ton of awareness, and especially within the audience that John and Jordy have, those people already know OpenAI really well. The first place, the like less gratuitous place that my mind went to first was like, oh, I don't think OpenAI would say, like, let's buy these so that we can tr can control them and have them talk about us. That's very obvious that that would be not genuine and people would just stop listening. But I did think, oh, maybe they're trying to say indirectly, don't talk about anthropic. That's where my head went at first. It was like, okay, keep talking about AI. Don't talk about anthropic.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Speaking of, I'm very happy for TBPN. It this is a great uh outcome, to be honest. Uh love it. Congrats to John and Geordie and everybody on the team. The problem that I have is what with open AI is spending money on. Because it is not, if anthropic did the same thing, I would have lesser of a problem with what they do, because they are reporting a lot of revenue right now, exponential growth of revenue. They have nailed the enterprise aspect. Everybody's top of mind LLM model for enterprise is clawed. The coding agents is like cloud code being widely used in enterprises. You know, OpenAI strategy is like a bit all over the place. They tried this like advertising thing. I'm not sure where that's going. They're bleeding money, they're making$2 billion a month in revenue, but they're signing compute deals out the wazoo because they have no conservatism in like compute spending. Whereas Dario, you know, from Anthropic is like very, very conscious about how much compute he's building out to make sure that he's just building the right amount of compute for the demand he's seeing. So like there's fiscal responsibility on the Anthropic side. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Yes. So Anthropic has product market fit with the enterprise consumer or customer. OpenAI always was going after consumers first, and that seemed very exciting and got them a ton of users. But ultimately, obviously, it's hard to pull revenue out of seven to eight billion people around the world. Like you're gonna mostly make$20 a month. Except for some people, you might make$200 a month or$1,000 a month. Now, obviously, Anthropic said, oh, well, for enterprise use cases where it's tied closer to creating value or reducing costs, like we can charge people$200 a month, but we can also charge them like thousands of dollars a month in tokens, right? So Anthropic has has figured out they're a very good clientele and they've got the right business model and they just have product market fit and they're taking off. So if you said to me, Anthropic is buying TBPN, I'd go, oh, interesting. Okay. They are trying to speed up adoption and awareness amongst enterprises. And maybe they want someone like John and Jordy to help take that like very forward-thinking mindset. But maybe they're gonna say, we're buying you and we're gonna put you in front of enterprises. You focus on Silicon Valley people, but we're gonna like help you talk to the rest of the United States, for example, talk to people in Europe, like talk to Miller or John Deere or whoever. That would actually make a ton of sense. Now, if you lift that strategy and then you plop it down to open AI, you could say, oh, okay, maybe open AI realizes consumer was wrong and they should go after enterprise. So maybe the Like Galaxy brain thinking here is we're going to try to get in front of enterprises and we don't know how to talk to them. And we're hoping John and Jordy can help us because they're so personable that they could help us talk to more enterprisey type people, maybe 30s and 40s year olds that are still kind of like forward thinking in enterprises. But even that's a bit that's like the most gratuitous thing I can come up with for the strategy. Even that feels a little bit of a stretch because that's not who they talk to today necessarily. So it's still asking them to do something new, to find a new audience and make sure they can talk to them.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah. All right. Anyway, we'll see. This is this is exciting development, to be honest, uh, because I looked up what uh Joe Rogan uh was paid for the you know the Joe Rogan experience on Spotify in 2020, before the AI era, you know, when we lived in the Stone Ages, it was 200 million paid out over multiple years. And I think in 2024 there was a refresher again. But uh yeah, so this is about as big as it gets, and their viewership isn't in the millions or hundreds of millions that Joe Rogan has, you know, their viewership is in the tens of thousands, I think 70,000 viewers. But it shows you what the value of that audience is because these are those the the tech minds of Silicon Valley who control, you know, now trillion uh trillion dollars maybe in capital flows who are listening to this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

That's actually really, really interesting. Like obviously, in the era of traditional media, like TV advertising, you know, if you're Coca-Cola, you just want to get in front of as many people as possible, but everyone is kind of considered like not super valuable. How many Cokes are they gonna actually buy? Now, in this era, this AI era where there's truly like we're spending, you know, a trillion dollars of CapEx, but it's actually coming from like five companies, like you could probably count in the low hundreds of people or maybe low thousands of people, how many people contribute to that decision, right? Like how many people at each of these companies. And so, like, if you have distribution amongst those listeners, yeah, like that's outsized value. Like, yes, maybe someone would be willing to pay like hundreds of thousands of dollars per listener.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Yeah, that's the value of the niche, you know, and that's kind of what we go on our sub go for in our sub stacks too, because what we write isn't for the general public. Like, you know, I I'm not I'm pretty sure my mom would understand nothing of what I write. Like, you know, this is not for her to read. So the niche audience and the value of your listener or reader is outsized in this AI, you know, technological scene right now. That's what this story says to me. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

All right, so let's carry on. With the idea of new creator-led, interesting media. You wanted to talk through Citrini, who's trying to do something new and interesting, and some sort of recent post from Citrini, which I have not read.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Okay, good. You know, I wanted to go with this story first, but you know, maybe save the best for last. Not because it's like an AI news, you know, important development or any such thing. It is just like an amazing story that is just like fantastic to listen to, okay? And I can't believe like this kinds of stuff happens. That's all it is. It's like it totally made my week in a sense. So let me explain it to you if you haven't read it. And I'm glad you haven't, because like all of this would be fresh to you, right? So for those who have not heard of Citrini research, this is uh Citrini is a Substack, which is like the top Substack in finance, and they pretty much write about thematic investing on Substack. They are famous because they've made some pretty big calls. Like Nvidia was called early by Citrini, the whole AI infrastructure was called early by Citrini. So they legit have a great track record. Okay. Now, the biggest question in the global markets as a finance substack like Citrini is is the Strait of Hormuz open or is it closed? Because 20% of the world's oil flows through this like 50-mile gap between Iran and Oman. Okay, and actually nobody knows what's happening there because everybody is like staring at like satellite images and probably stale ones, I don't know, because I don't know how how uh much those have been blocked off. And they track the shipping data to see where the ships are going, and then you got some people talking on CNBC, all of this stuff. So Citrini's office is you know is in midtown Manhattan, and they're listening to this, going, you know, none of this stuff makes sense. I don't know how to make any finance decisions, like if I don't know how goods are moving across the street at this in this uh wartime. So, how about uh what if we just like went there and take a look at it? Okay. So they decided, let's just go there and take a look. So, okay, so what do they do? So they take a Pelican case, which is like the standard, you know, heavy duty case, and inside it, they put a Xiaomi phone because it has like 150x like a zoom lens. So they're like, okay, let's put the Xiaomi phone inside. Let's put a gimbal, a mic kit, and like recording sunglasses, right? And an emergency beacon and 15 grand in cash into this box. And to add to the you know the badassy of the whole story, they put like a box of Cuban cigars and a roll of zin, you know, which is like nicotine patch thing. You know, to put that. So that's the toolkit. This is the wall the toolkit with which this question is going to be answered. So then they send their guy called analyst number three. So in the Substack article, actually, it's it's they say it's it's really funny. You say, you know, we gave him a number instead of a name because we want to get, you know, avoid getting emotionally attached to him. So we're just gonna call him analyst three. Do they think he's gonna I don't know, but you know, it's it's it's written in a funny way. I think it's funny, you know. Okay, so analyst three is is badass, okay? He's like going to be sent on mission impossible to do and you know the hardest stuff and find out information that cannot otherwise be found out, right? So, you know, he's like he's like a he speaks four languages, including Arabic. So he's like he's like legit, like James Bond over here, or like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Legit. Okay, so he's so what he does is he takes a flight, he goes to Dubai, and from Dubai, he travels to the Oman border, and over there, an officer hands him a document over T and it says, You agree not to do any photography, journalism, or any sort of information gathering inside Oman, right? So he signs it. Said, okay, fine, I won't do any of this stuff, right? And the officer, check this out. The officer opens this pelican case, okay? I have no idea. Like, what did I tell you was in this? Like, all it had other than this like spyware, like a spy kit that in this box, it he there was like cash and Cuban cigars and a roll of like nicotine patches, right? Everything else in this pelican box is like spy equipment. But somehow this officer misses the gimbal, the mic kit, and the recording sunglasses. Like may you know uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

So he's like, oh yeah, it's just your purse of 15 grand and some cigars.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

I don't know, it just I don't know what this electronic stuff is, whatever. Fine, get out of here. You know, he's probably tired.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

And so, yes, assignment is on. Let's go. Game on, right? Because the whole Pelican case went through with all of the spy equipment in there. Like, so and so this is like the story gets better. It gets more unhinged. So analyst number three decides, against the advice of an Omani border agent, right? Two Coast Guard officers holding assault rifles, against all their advice, he says, I'm going to the center of the strait. Whoa. In a live war. So what he does is he gets into a speedboat, it has no GPS, and is captained by this guy who he met like three hours ago, right, at a port nearby. And he flashed his 15 grand at him and he's like, Yeah, sure, sure, come on board. That's how he got this guy to take him out to the middle of the strait. So he rides out, and then there are drones flying overhead, and there are like the Iran Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the distance. And I don't know whether this is like made up, but it makes for such a great story. He literally goes swimming in the Strait of Hormuz while smoking the Cuban cigar he packed in the Felican case. I want to see a picture. I don't like picture didn't happen, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

But yeah, like seriously, who is this like invincible guy? Like Chuck Norris, like, you know, and then he gets intercepted later by the Coast Guard and he gets detained, and then his phone gets confiscated, and you know, whatever they I I'm probab I'm sure they're still like sorting through his phone right now, but the phone is gone. Okay, they got his phone. So the Xiaomi phone is gone. Such a great ad, by the way. And then he makes it home and then he explains this whole thing, like has an eight-hour debrief with his boss, aka Citrini, and then, you know, finally he comes up with after all this, you know, he the conclusions of all this adventure isn't really as fantastic as the adventure itself. If he comes up with the conclusion that the strait is actually not fully closed, so because everybody's like fighting, open the strait, or else I will this and that. So it turns out that it's really not fully closed because Iran is now running an orderly transit system because they control who passes. So diplomatic immunity or agreements, they let certain countries' boats go through, or they ask people and countries to lift sanctions against them and let boats through, or they take money and let boats through, something like that. There are some agreements being made between the countries that are letting certain boats through. Shipping information, it captures only half of the information that like this analyst number three actually collected by going to the Strait of Formos. So going there, he realizes like, wait, half of the economy is still running. It's it's fine. Some of these big tankers are not going through, but the smaller tankers with LPG and you know whatever, they're moving. So it's like, but it's not enough volume. The question is, like, his point was like, is our economy completely messed up that we have to worry about it? Because if there's no goods passing through, how are what is going to happen to the economy? Which is the most important question the finance substack is going to ask. So the conclusion is like, no, the the volume isn't enough to prevent a crisis. So it's even though the ships are moving, it's actually it's actually still like a concern. Gotcha, gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Wow. So as a research for investors, you're always trying to get information asymmetry and find out something to give you an insight that other people don't have. And so they thought the insight that they could get is whether the strait is actually open or not. And even if it is actually open, is it materially open? Is it enough for it to matter? Yeah. And the the best way to answer that, if everyone else is using satellite imagery or secondhand accounts, the best is to go there firsthand and see for yourself, would you? I guess I'm like, do you act going there is crazy enough, but then do you actually have to get it like go in a boat and actually go in the water? And I guess if it's 50 miles across, maybe if you go out, you could actually see the ships going down the center of it.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

But yeah, I mean, I don't know if you saw on X though. There are actually videos posted on Citrini uh uh account of actually a burning oil tanker. I mean, there's literally video of it. Oh wow. That they took. Yeah. It's on X. You can see oil tanker.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

I think the phone before it got confiscated. It must have got updated.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

I don't know. Maybe this is with the glasses. I wonder whose glasses it is, which is another great ad. No, but it's a pretty decent video. I mean, I could literally clearly see the ship was burning. Brought to you by Meta Ray Bans.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

Get yours today.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Yeah. Swimming in the Strait of Hormuz with a Cuban cigar and Meta Ray Band on.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Crazy. That is uh that is one way to get some alpha. Pretty risky, pretty gnarly. I wonder how much of it's true.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Yeah. To what extent would you go to get alpha? You know, that's the question here.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Yeah. Uh I got wife and kids. I would go not that extent. Yeah. I I I would love to know how much of it is embellished versus true. You know?

SPEAKER_01 34:54

I don't know. There's no way to tell. They took his phone, and the the the video footage is what it is. Anyway, even if it's embellished, so what? I love the story of swimming in the strait with a cigarette. At least it made my days. I'm quite happy with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

Wow, what a year, and it's only April. 2026 is getting interesting.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Totally. Yeah, so I mean, I think we should uh end this podcast with that story because you know, nothing can top that for today. Okay, let's end up with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Nothing can top that. So speaking of nothing can top that, then the question is is Sitrina gonna try to top it? Is it like uh evil can evil where you always just have to keep getting crazier and crazier?

SPEAKER_01 35:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Or was that a once and done gimmick?

SPEAKER_01 35:37

We shall see. We shall see. Yeah, that's to be decided. Now the challenge is on. So who wants to beat this alpha?

SPEAKER_00 35:44

There you go. Substack who wants to beat this alpha. Come on, let's hear it. There you go. Interesting. A new wave of young kids starting Substacks doing crazier and crazier things to get some alpha. Oh my. Okay, well, all right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode. That's it for today. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying semi doped, share it with friends, subscribe to our newsletters. Thank you for listening on podcasts, on YouTube. Feel free to comment, and we will talk to you next time. Thanks.