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Friday · 6 min read · Lightly edited by a human who definitely didn't listen at 2.5x speed (lie)

Good morning, capo. The IPO music is back on. SpaceX filed for the largest offering in history, OpenAI filed too, and every panel at the All-In conference this week was some variation of "going public is cool again." But the most important number all week had nothing to do with valuations. It was copper. As in: we need to dig as much of it out of the ground in the next eighteen years as humanity has in the last ten thousand. Meanwhile a security CEO found five years of software bugs in six weeks, a billionaire got told to put his phone down, and David Senra resurfaced yet again, this time holding Jony Ive. Let's go count someone else's money.

All-In — "Dan Dreyfus: The Next AI Bottleneck Is Copper" (listen)

1h+ → 90 seconds

While everyone argues about chips and tokens, Dan Dreyfus came on All-In to point at the least glamorous input on earth and explain that it is about to break the entire AI build-out. The frame is almost biblical: "We're going to be measuring human progress by how much electricity we consume." And electricity needs copper. A lot of it.

Here is the number that should stop you mid-scroll: "Over the next 18 years, we're going to need as much copper as we mined in the last 10,000 years. That means we need five world-class, tier-one mines coming online every single year. You can count on one hand, and have fingers left over, the number of tier-one mines coming on between now and the end of the decade." So the demand is five a year. The supply is roughly zero. That is not a gap. That is a wall.

It gets worse, because the metal has to plug into something, and the something is rusting: "We have not invested in upgrading and modernizing and hardening the electric grid since post-World War II. The last three or four administrations were sleepwalking." We are planning to run civilization-scale AI on a grid built for black-and-white television.

And the supply chain has an owner. "China has an absolute grip on all of these critical minerals, and it's going to take at least 10 years, probably 20, to catch up." The country building the most data centers does not control the metal that wires them.

Takeaway for operators: Dreyfus's real point is that the market keeps pricing the AI boom as a software story when it is, underneath, a mining-and-power story. His most quotable jab is also the thesis: "A lot of urban Americans still think a ham sandwich comes from the refrigerator." If your AI roadmap assumes infinite cheap electricity, you are budgeting for a ham sandwich without thinking about the pig.

My First Million — "Exposing the Fake Financial 'Gurus' Destroying Your Net Worth" (listen)

1h+ → one idea you can steal

The whole episode is a takedown of the finance-influencer economy, and the single most valuable thing in it is a story about a man so rich he should have known better. The guest jokingly tells the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs to simply stop: "Lloyd, listen to me. Put the phone down. Stop trading. If you're actively trading 70% of your net worth, which is a couple of billion dollars, I am disappointed to tell you that you are making the biggest risk-adjusted mistake of your career." The richer people get, the more they confuse activity with skill.

The reason almost everyone loses is not intelligence. It is wiring: "The buys are a rational spreadsheet. The cells are always emotional." You build the position with a model and you blow it up with a feeling. Every guru selling you a system is selling you a cure for a problem that lives in your nervous system, not your spreadsheet.

The antidote is unsexy and free, and it starts with admitting two things. First, that "90% of everything is crap," including 90% of the advice you will be sold this year. Second, a little humility: "I'm as dumb as everybody else. But at least I'm aware of it, and I start from the place that we all need a little humility, because we don't know what's going to happen."

Takeaway for operators: the move is to automate the rational part and remove the emotional part from the loop entirely. Decide your allocation once, in a calm spreadsheet, then make it boring and hard to touch. The fake guru wants you checking the phone. The real edge is putting it down.

Founders — "The Simple Genius of Jony Ive" (listen)

1h+ → three quotes and a vibe

Two issues after we watched Steve Jobs survive his wilderness, Senra circles back to the man Jobs spent the rest of his life standing next to. Jony Ive's whole method was subtraction taken to the point of obsession: "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don't see that effort. We kept going back to the beginning again and again. Do we need this part? Can we get that part to perform the function of these other four parts? It became an exercise to reduce and reduce and reduce." The simplicity you admire is the visible tip of an enormous amount of deleting.

His one-line standard is the cleanest definition of taste anyone has given on a podcast this year: "It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better." Different is a marketing budget. Better is the work.

And then the moment that explains the whole partnership. Ive, caring for his bruised team, once asked Jobs to soften his critiques. Jobs refused, and his reason is the most useful and uncomfortable thing in the episode: "No, Johnny, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I thought you held the work up as the most important thing, not how you believe you're perceived by other people." It is brutal. It is also, if you sit with it long enough, completely correct. The kindest thing you can do for the work is care more about it than about being liked for it.

All-In — Palo Alto Networks' CEO: "AI Found 5 Years of Bugs in 6 Weeks" (listen): The headline number is genuinely staggering: "In 6 weeks we found vulnerabilities which would have normally taken us 5 to seven years to find." But the catch is the whole story of AI in the enterprise right now: "The false positive rate was 30%. It's great for attack. It's horrible for defense." AI is a brilliant burglar and an unreliable guard, and he makes the stakes vivid: "I'm not putting my kids in that car with a 10% false positive rate. Are you?" Oh, and the line that should terrify every model lab: "The entire weights of their newest model fits on a USB stick. That's the IP."

Prof G — Anne Applebaum & Fiona Hill: "Are the Autocrats Winning?" (listen): Two of the sharpest foreign-policy minds alive deliver the stat of the week on American decline: "We used to be the operating system for two-thirds of the world's economy. It's been cut to a third, because Canada, Europe, and Latin America decided they need to develop their own." And the math is merciless: "To go from 66% to 33%, your power gets cut by 80%, because you're no longer in majority control." Influence, they argue, was never only about the military: it was about being the country others wanted to align with. That is the asset getting quietly sold off.

20VC — Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles (listen): On why an infrastructure company can never coast: "It's like a shark. You're alive when you move. So we have to move." On the brutal short-term reality of the compute crunch: "In the next 6 months, capital cannot help. Six months is too short. You have what you have, and you need to deliver." All the money in the world does not pour concrete or wind copper any faster, which is, conveniently, the entire point of this issue.

What the AI boom is actually constrained by, per this week's tape:

Two issues ago this newsletter was measured in gigawatts. This week it is the metal that carries them. The AI boom keeps discovering, to its visible annoyance, that it has a body, and the body needs copper, a power grid, and a security team that doesn't cry wolf 30% of the time. The IPO music is loud. The plumbing is louder. We remain, as ever, bullish on the plumbing.

If you only listen to one episode this week, make it Dan Dreyfus on All-In. It is the rare macro conversation that will change what you notice on a drive past a substation, and you will not be able to unhear the copper math.

If you only have 20 minutes, the Jony Ive hour on Founders. It is a master class in the difference between different and better, with a Steve Jobs cameo brutal enough to screenshot.

Last issue we announced we had stopped trying to predict David Senra. He waited approximately one issue, then reappeared holding Jony Ive, presumably to prove the point. We have learned our lesson and will simply report his sightings as they occur, like a cryptid with excellent taste in biographies.

Forward this to a founder friend who thinks the AI boom runs on vibes. It runs on copper. We're a newsletter, not a guilt trip. (Okay, a little guilt trip.)

— The Capo 🎙️🤌

Made with coffee, too many podcast apps, and the firm belief that nobody has time to listen to 15 hours of content per week. That's our job now.