The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private

I don't like them. I don't think that they're like good. I don't think they're productive. I think that a bunch of people are going to put money in and lose money. And a few people are going to make a lot of money.

judging by the tweets that I see, there are a lot of ticker symbols and charts and prognostications about future price trajectories and so forth that lead me to think that people are placing somewhat more weight on the asset and security value of these

People are gambling and they are being presented as financial instruments and they're trying to trick the suckers at the table, the suckers in this case being the people who voted for Milei.

Yeah. Look, I don't like meme coins. I think they're bad. And I think they're part of, like Patrick said, a broader suede of things that we need to figure out societally where the legalization of sports betting and combined with highly targeted advertising.

there's these people called snipers that go and like pump up the bids right as soon as the coin gets launched. And then they're able to feed. So there's like this entire mechanism. It's all so shady.

So I think it's a really big deal, certainly for people in those countries, and in some sense also for the US, because the dollar status as the world's reserve currency, I think is in the process of becoming much more deeply established.

Having USDC, having yours and other ones in the United States means we can regulate them and they have to buy treasuries. And so, okay, dollar supremacy continues, and that's fantastic.

I don't know, the whole thing just makes absolutely no sense that he was doing so much good and now he's going to go through this whole cycle of trying to wash his hands of this whole thing.

and this is a stupid one to make, but the taunting of his own followers, you know, I'm out on Milei right now.

People just said a lot of s**t during the pandemic. Do you remember, it's like, oh, handshakes are going to be over, business travel is going to be over, every company is going to be fully remote... I would say Stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot where it was beforehand, which is most people go into an office.

leaders can lead from the front, speak directly and say, this is the way things are going to be. My job is not to coddle my employees.

So I think it's important to get the kind of mentoring you get by being in an office. And in the absence of that, I think these young people, like Jamie said, are totally lost.

NVIDIA, last I checked, is doing pretty damn well, and Jensen is on the record as saying he doesn't give a shit about where you work... And so I guess I'm just skeptical of flat shoulds in this space.

I mean, basically what he proved was that there are still valuable gains in pre-training, and so the larger the cluster, the more value that there is... My first takeaway was I was sneakily surprised on the pre-training upside on having a larger cluster. So I think that that's very pro-NVIDIA actually, and it's actually also just really good in general for foundational model makers.

It's super consequential. I mean, complete agreement with Chamath

I also think the environment has changed quite a bit, where it used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, you know, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets. That's obviously not true today, where the, you know, stable private markets exist... And, you know, up to this point, we have determined private.

If you look at companies like SpaceX, they're able to provide this yearly liquidity, which actually is probably better because it smooths out a lot of the vol, and then people can get back to work and just kind of

you can't be spending three or four billion dollars a boat and taking eight, nine, 10 years to build these things. This is not sustainable... What you have instead are system integrators with extremely deep connectivity that are able to contract well, not necessarily to invent well.

We've seen it in the Ukraine-Russia context that a $10,000 drone can destroy a $10 million piece of equipment and China now has drone factories that can output millions of drones each month... do we really need aircraft carriers? Do we really need tanks?

I don't know if you analogize Evo 2 to, I don't know whether it's GPD 2 or 3 or something, but I think we're going to see a similar Cambrian explosion of applications over the next couple of years.

we talk a lot about the idea that you can use a computer, state the phenotype or the physical characteristics you want in a biological organism and have the software resolve the whole genome, all the DNA needed to make that physical organism real.

The biological models are different in that I think it's a much smaller population of people that will use it. I think they do have to figure out how to take these models and complement the existing pipeline they have. The pipeline they have right now I think is pretty brittle.

And if you look at Jamie's P&L, he spends $16 billion a year on IT. And I suspect that if you streamline that, you'd actually have half as many people because they'd be doing the job in a wholly different way... by adopting the off-the-shelf stuff, he introduces organizational bloat

Yeah, you got the marketing team, as you mentioned, using HubSpot, and then you got the sales team using, I don't know, sales force.

Stable coins are finally happening and they're really useful... Just stable coins are I think the first really big payments use case. And I think it's finally coming because the tech is good enough.

I think the interesting use of stable coins is cross-border, is outside the US. I mean, the big use case that's taking off right now is consumers in other countries seeking to hold dollars.

Yeah, that is the huge win for allowing stable coins and making them legal, giving them rails

One of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from non-farm payrolls to GDP, that they've become so unreliable.

Is there a moment guys where is it a regulatory event where you'll say the Visa Mastercard duopoly can get challenged?

Card programs are not actually big profit pools for most of the major banks... And maybe other points in that space are viable, but it is a set of trade-offs, and it's not as simple as this enormous rent extraction happening.

I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's going to supplant all the consumer-facing networks. I think we're going to see consumer-facing networks built upon and substantially leverage these things.

We're talking about close to $300 billion in savings over five years if they hit, which isn't a crazy target, 8% a year.

as far as I can tell, the cuts proposed over the next couple of years for the Defense Department are of approximately the same magnitude as the reduction in the defense budget that occurred between 2010 and today. And so it's not like this is some unprecedented transformation in DOD budget.

And we plundered and we wasted them by adding 16 trillion to the debt during a good time. Like, what's going to happen during a bad time? Just absolutely brutal.

I think that I was completely wrong on a couple of my earlier thoughts. One of the thought that I had for a long time was, it just seemed like all these base models were asymptoting. So I was not convinced where all this CapEx would go in a productive way.