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Oracle Rips, Larry Ellison's 1997 Vanity Fair Article, Global Fertilizer Crisis | Diet TBPN

30 min
Mar 12, 2026about 1 month ago
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Summary

Oracle delivered blowout earnings with 84% infrastructure growth, beating analyst expectations and validating their massive AI infrastructure bet with OpenAI and Meta. The episode explores Larry Ellison's aggressive AGI strategy, the exponential growth in AI compute demand despite slowing user adoption, and the broader implications for cloud infrastructure competition.

Insights
  • AI compute demand is growing exponentially even as user adoption curves flatten, driven by reasoning models and agents requiring 10x more tokens per interaction
  • Oracle's infrastructure bet is paying off with profitable margins from day one, contradicting fears about financial overextension
  • The market is demanding another AWS-scale cloud provider, positioning Oracle as the primary alternative for hyperscalers without their own cloud platforms
  • Token consumption per user is exploding through AI agents and reasoning models, creating sustained infrastructure demand beyond initial adoption waves
  • Oracle's success validates the strategy of targeting companies like OpenAI and Meta who need massive compute but lack AWS/Azure/GCP access
Trends
Exponential growth in AI token consumption per user despite plateauing adoption ratesEmergence of Oracle as a major cloud infrastructure alternative to AWS/Azure/GCPAI reasoning models and agents driving 10x increases in compute requirementsHyperscalers without cloud platforms seeking external infrastructure partnershipsProfitable AI infrastructure deployment from day one becoming the new standardMedia companies integrating AI for operational efficiency in M&A scenariosRising fertilizer costs due to geopolitical tensions affecting global food supplyEmergency oil reserve releases to combat price spikesJones Act shipping regulations hampering US coastal transport efficiency
Companies
Oracle
Delivered blowout earnings with 84% infrastructure growth, beating estimates on AI infrastructure bets
OpenAI
Major Oracle infrastructure customer driving demand with massive AI compute requirements
Meta
Key Oracle partner for AI infrastructure, lacking own cloud platform like AWS/Azure
Amazon
Referenced as benchmark with AWS cloud platform that Oracle is competing against
Microsoft
Mentioned as hyperscaler with Azure cloud platform advantage over Oracle customers
Google
Cited as having GCP cloud platform, unlike Oracle's major customers OpenAI and Meta
Nvidia
GPU supplier to Oracle for AI infrastructure buildout requiring advance payments
Apple
Historical context of Larry Ellison's 1990s takeover interest during company struggles
Paramount
Subject of Warner Brothers Discovery merger discussion with AI integration plans
Warner Brothers Discovery
Merging with Paramount in $110 billion deal with AI streamlining focus
Netflix
Competitor in Paramount bidding war, discussed for potential AI-generated content
Disney
Has OpenAI partnership but low probability of AI-generated series by 2027
People
Larry Ellison
Oracle CEO driving aggressive AI infrastructure strategy, featured in 1997 Vanity Fair profile
David Ellison
Larry's son leading Paramount acquisition, focused on intellectual property accumulation
Bill Gates
Historical rival of Larry Ellison during 1990s Microsoft dominance era
Steve Jobs
Close friend of Larry Ellison mentioned in 1997 Vanity Fair profile context
Rupert Murdoch
Media mogul who lost fingertip while crewing on Ellison's sailboat in 1995
Michael Jordan
Basketball player heckled by Larry Ellison from seventh row at Bulls game
Quotes
"Oracle had earnings yesterday and it was an absolute blowout. The stock's up 10%."
Host
"The market is demanding another AWS and so let's go through the top line numbers first."
Host
"Oracle's AI infrastructure is profitable the moment it comes online."
Host
"I can do that! he shouts after one thunderous Jordan dunk."
Larry Ellison (from Vanity Fair)
"The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly."
Oracle (earnings call)
Full Transcript
3 Speakers
Speaker A

So Oracle had earnings yesterday and it was an absolute blowout. The stock's up 10%. The Godburst, the God cancel. I like that. It's still way down from the crazy highs of last September. So it was a, it's a $470 billion company now. Not bad, but not quite the almost $1 trillion company that it was last year. But they're still up over the last 12 months so they've sort of ridden this crazy curve up of the stock basically doubled, then it sold off by half but it's ticking back up and the main thing is that like you know, was it overhyped, under hyped? I don't know. But this earnings was important because a lot of people were worried about the CapEx, the infrastructure build out. Was there going to be demand? What was the timing of.

0:00

Speaker B

Yeah, timing, timing was the big thing.

0:44

Speaker A

Yeah.

0:46

Speaker B

Because when, when, when you had that initial like the announcement around the RPO last year.

0:46

Speaker A

Yep.

0:52

Speaker B

The criticism was hey, you're basically going to try to build AWS in like two years.

0:52

Speaker A

Yeah.

0:57

Speaker B

And no one like, I mean obviously the market at the time was quite excited about it, but there was some concerns around just how aggressive the timeline was and so seeing them hit their timelines at this stage is super important.

0:58

Speaker A

Yeah, it was like 500 billion of RPO which is like that's AWS size numbers and that's a lot of what I think is going on here. That's actually the dynamic like the market is demanding another AWS and so let's go through the top line numbers first. So analysts estimated 86.7 billion on revenue. Oracle said that they will hit 90 billion for fiscal year beginning in June. Now people don't care as much about the top line number. Everyone's obsessed with infrastructure business, the infrastructure business. So the previous quarter showed growth of 68%. That's not bad. Analysts said this quarter we're looking at, we're looking for 79% and Oracle delivered 84% so they beat estimates. That's why the stock popped. Of course the infrastructure business is particularly important for two key reasons. So first Amazon, Microsoft and Google like they like there's more than just them when it comes to hyperscalers but they are unique among hyperscalers in that they have AWS, Azure and GCP. They have true cloud platforms. Cloud infrastructure platforms. OpenAI does not yet Meta does not yet Meta is a hyperscaler like, like they build huge data centers but they don't have this flexibility that comes with operating something like AWS and so who signed big deals with Oracle? It's OpenAI and Meta. And fortunately those deals are going better than people expected. People were worried and people were saying, is Larry going to get caught holding the bag? Well, it looks like things are penciling out so far. So Meta and OpenAI both have massive ambitions around AI. They both signed on with Oracle to ramp up data data center capacity. Oracle is just this extra burst of capex capacity the system and they're ramping up. So 50 billion in capex in the current fiscal year and they're consistently outpacing analyst estimates. In the fiscal third quarter, analysts predicted 14 billion in capex. Oracle spent 18.5. So Larry is certainly opening the pocketbook, digging for coins in the couch cushions. But we'll get into the long term implications of like what does this mean for becoming over leveraged debt, drawing down on cash flow. There's actually a lot of interesting structure going on with within the financials that shows you even though he's definitely risk on, definitely AGI pilled all full tilt ahead into the build out, it doesn't feel like financial recklessness because of the structure of the deal. So the second reason that infrastructure is so important right now that I think people on the outside are sort of missing is that compute is still growing exponentially. But AI adoption curves often look like S curves and so the classic one is consumer LLM usage. So OpenAI came out with ChatGPT and the numbers were just like insane. It was like 20 million users overnight and then 100 million and then 200 million and it was just like, okay, this curve is going completely vertical, we're going exponential. But of course there's only 8 billion people on earth and a lot of them just don't use really computers apparently, because Meta over two decades has only gotten three and a half billion users to use the whole suite of apps, including everything. So just WhatsApp, you can just be a dau of Instagram and you count in that everyone in this room counts in Meta's dau for sure. Even if you're like, I'm not really that big on Facebook or I'm not that I don't use WhatsApp that often. Like you definitely they got you. Except for half the human population, which is not on meta platforms for a variety of reasons. Some geopolitical, geopolitics, some economic. But basically there's going to be a slowdown. So OpenAI shot up to basically a billion MAU monthly active users. The official number that's getting like trotted around right now is 920 weekly active users, but everyone behind the scenes says, like, yeah, they're well past a billion. And so that curve is slowing down. Like, there's just no way you can be like, yeah, actually, like, we're expecting 10 billion ChatGPT users next year because, like, there aren't 10 billion people. So there's gonna be deceleration in consumer AI usage.

1:12

Speaker B

Sufficiently aligned super intelligence might want to stimulate the growth rate. Human population.

5:13

Speaker A

Good take, good take. Yes. You go to ChatGPT and says, like, hey, I know you've been thinking about having a fourth kid. You should do it, and here's why. Maybe. But at least for now, we are seeing deceleration. And I think for just a lot of people, they're like, yeah, I use AI, I have an app on my phone. Maybe Gemini, maybe Claude, maybe OpenAI, maybe ChatGPT. I use it, maybe I use Grok, maybe I see it vended into different systems. I interact with it on Instagram, but I'm in. But I'm not blown away by the growth of this thing because everyone started using this a year ago and we're still all just using it. But COMPUTE is scaling very differently because when we went From LLMs and ChatGPT to reasoning models that probably 10x the amount of tokens that people were generating with O1, and then once GPT5 came out, the reasoning models became much higher usage rates. And then the agents framework, the open clause, the codexes and the cloud codes that all did another 10x in token volume. 10x is like a very rough number, but it's basically growing exponentially. So you have these, these double exponentials.

5:20

Speaker B

The way to think about it, instead of, you know, coming into ChatGPT to do some type of query. Yep, you're effectively one person can effectively multiply themselves by 1020. And then it's just constantly using it all day long, all day long, all day long.

6:25

Speaker A

The actual, like, experience surface area and the number of people that are, like, trying AI for the first time is, you know, decelerating because everyone's tried it. But compute is still 10xing. So token consumption per user is exploding. And openclaw and agents like Codex and cloud code are also an early part of the S curve adoption. So we're still in that. It's still in that exponential. They're melting GPU fleets. There was some viral bear posting about how Oracle was in financial trouble because of the economics of their infrastructure bets. So naturally they have to buy the GPUs before they can rack them and sell them as infrastructure. This is business 101. But people were maybe surprised by that or something. There was a whole press cycle about this and it seemed very silly at the time. And I think it, everyone was like, yeah, this is exactly what we expected. But a lot of people from the

6:42

Speaker B

people that brought you the 1 gigabyte

7:30

Speaker A

data center, similar, similar crowd potentially. But there was a lot of fear around that and some of that is legitimate because if GPUs depreciated really quickly, Oracle had to buy the GPUs, they had to send the money to Nvidia a year in advance and then it took them two years to get them into data centers and actually do the deals and all this stuff. That would have been a squeeze on cash flow for sure, but that's not what happened. We have some data on profitability now and Oracle is first up. They're on or ahead of schedule with 90% of the capacity deliveries and that means happy customers. And then second, gross margins actually improve. So guidance was 30% and they hit 32%. So Oracle's AI infrastructure is profitable the moment it comes online. And they're also increasing that backlog. They increase the backlog of RPO remaining performance obligations to $553 billion. So customers are happy, they're ramping and the overall the demand is flowing in the right direction. Companies and consumers are happy to pay for AI tools and LLM tokens. Labs and AI inference providers are happy to pay Oracle for infrastructure without crazy delays. And this means Oracle doesn't need to get into dangerous financial engineering territory where they need to go crazy. Negative cash flow, issue a bunch of equity, issue a bunch of debt. And we saw the God candle print. The Kobese letter shared Oracle Stock surges over 8% after beating earnings in four, posting a 44% jump in cloud revenue.

7:32

Speaker B

They also had some comments on the SaaS apocalypse from the earnings hall. You've all heard the thesis that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS. I don't agree with that at all. I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren't adopting them. But we are. And very rapidly, Oracle is using the best AI coding tools and the best developers. The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly. We are building brand new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing application suites. By embracing AI with small engineering Teams. We have built three brand new CX applications. Let's give it up for customer service and our new website generator. They said in fact we just used the website generator to build and launch the new website Dog fooding.

9:00

Speaker A

Let's go.

9:50

Speaker B

How does it look?

9:52

Speaker A

It's beautiful.

9:52

Speaker B

It looks AI generated.

9:54

Speaker A

It's very good. It opens with just eight buttons. Cloud, multi, AI database. Multi cloud, AI database, AI data platform, Cloud at customer.

9:57

Speaker B

You might not like the design of this, but this is peak.

10:08

Speaker A

This is peak performance.

10:11

Speaker B

Look at this, look at this.

10:12

Speaker A

I like the way the buttons lay out horizontally is particularly crazy. So we need to go back in time to understand Larry ellison. Because in 2013 Vanity Fair wrote a profile about Larry Ellison that is absolutely unhinged. I've never seen. I've never seen a profile like this about a taxi. At the time he was easily the richest man in California with $6 billion. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, co founder of the world's second largest software company is Silicon Valley's most.

10:16

Speaker B

This is from the 6-9-19. This is our 97 issue.

10:45

Speaker A

1997 issue. This has been uploaded to Vanity Fair in 2013. Sorry, this is from 1997. So right in the heat of the dot com boom, things are just kicking off. We are far from the crash. Everything is off.

10:49

Speaker B

Genuinely incredible that back then you could be the richest man with a paltry 6 billion.

11:03

Speaker A

It's crazy. That's like an Aqua hire these days.

11:08

Speaker B

It actually is. Love from.

11:12

Speaker A

I know. Oh yeah, love from. I was thinking of Windsurf but the fact that we're thinking of multiple is insane. He was easily with the the richest man with $6 billion in California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, co founder of the world's second largest company, is Silicon Valley's most notorious playboy and a sportsman of the first rank who flies fighter jets and races world class sailing boats. But his burning ambition is simple if naive. Bring down Bill Gates. They were in a bitter rivalry at the time. As Ellison moves to add Apple Computer to his anti Microsoft arsenal. Brian Burroughs locates the fragile psyche behind the bravado. Michael Jordan is streaking down the court on a fast break as Larry Ellison sitting seven rows up from courtside. Weird right? Is that a better seat? I don't know enough about basketball.

11:14

Speaker B

I just think 6 billion.

12:01

Speaker A

Maybe he wasn't liquid. Maybe he just couldn't afford the actual courtside seat. It seems crazy right that he's seven rows up. Although I don't know he's having fun cuz he's at the United center in Chicago. And he begins enthusiastically telling the story of Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch's severed fingertip. This is a crazy story. I had no idea that this happened. It happened when Murdoch was crewing on Ellison's championship sailboat, the Sayonara, making coffee and handling minor chores during a race off the south coast of Australia in 1995. You're just like the guy who's just going to hang out and like, hey, you don't really know anything about this. You're just on this boat for fun. Make me coffee. And it's Rupert Murdoch, which is insane.

12:03

Speaker B

We got to shake Rupert's hand. I didn't notice any missing fingertips.

12:43

Speaker A

We're going to get to that.

12:46

Speaker B

I didn't notice any missing fingertips.

12:47

Speaker A

What happened? So, just as the race ended, Murdoch made the mistake of grasping an overhead rope, which promptly shot through his hand, ripping the tip off of one of his fingers. He didn't say anything. He just kind of put his finger in his mouth, sucking on it. Ellison says, chuckling.

12:49

Speaker B

Brutal.

13:07

Speaker A

I can't remember who picked up Rupert's finger, but we picked it up and put it in a plastic bag and put him in the chase boat that night. After successful emergency microsurgery, there's microsurgery. I guess it wasn't that big of a deal, but that seems insane that they had to reattach this finger. They do the emergency microsurgery at an Australian hospital. Murdoch amazed Ellison and his crew by making it to the after party and then several days later, by crewing again on a race to the Tasmanian capital of Hobart and Rupert Murdoch. It's not like he was 25 in 1997. I'm pretty sure he was in his 50s.

13:08

Speaker B

He's 95 now.

13:47

Speaker A

Yeah. So he must have been.

13:48

Speaker B

He must have been almost closer to 70.

13:50

Speaker A

Yeah. Wow, that is incredible. Of course, Ellison says with his little boy's grin. That doesn't alter the fact that his coffee was horrible. I mean, the man runs a great company, but his coffee sucks. It's incredible. Over the course of the Bulls pounding of the Indiana Pacers, Ellison, who grew up on Chicago's tough South side and remains an avid Bulls fan, breaks into lusty cheering and Jo, I can do that. He shouts after one thunderous Jordan dunk. Such a crazy heckle.

13:52

Speaker B

Heckling.

14:23

Speaker A

Heckling Michael from the seventh row. You didn't upgrade to the front courtside seat, but you're still heckling none other than Michael Jordan to gossip about nearly every power player at the nexus of technology and communications in the 1990s, his arch rival Bill Gates, his best friend Steve Jobs, his business partner Mike Milken, Mike Ovitz, Ted Turner, Murdoch. He just piloted his Cessna Citation into Chicago's downtown Migs field from New York, where he spent the previous day in meetings with Viacom, Sumner, Redstone, Intel's Andy Grove and Ray Smith of Bell Atlantic. So you may be wondering, you might

14:24

Speaker B

think it's crazy he's piloting his own Cessna, but during that era he was getting into dog fights with his son.

15:02

Speaker A

Exactly. He needs something more agile. He can't be flying a 737, 747 at that time. For one thing, Ellison is the wealthiest American you've probably never heard of. With a Fortune estimated at 6 billion, he is easily the richest man in California. Think three David Geffen's ten full Milkins, and according to Forbes, the fifth richest man in the nation. For another, he is co founder, controlling shareholder and chief executive officer of the world's number two software company, Oracle Corporation, which makes the giant computer databases in which American Airlines keeps track of its planes, Ford Motor keeps track of its spare parts, and the Central Intelligence Agency keeps track of, well, whatever the CIA keeps track of. He could also be the next head of Apple Computer. This was a crazy rumor that never came true. The famed but faltering industry icon he has been eyeing for the past two years. At the end of March, Ellison surprised Silicon Valley by suggesting that he was about to launch a takeover bid for the company. So he was friends with Steve Jobs but was like it was underperforming all, all the way until the iPhone basically. But the 90s were like a very rough time for Apple as they sort of rebuilt. Tim Cook of course, joined and did a ton of work to improve the supply chain, get them to the place where they are today where they've been so dominant. On top of all that, Ellison is the mind behind the most talked about new idea in computing in the last two years. The network computer known as the nc. A stripped down personal computer that stores its files on a network instead of a hard drive. It doesn't have to use Microsoft's omnipresent Windows operating system. The NC represents one of the stiffest challenges yet to Bill Gates dominance of personal computing. It's the original Mac Mini. There was a time, few months back, a few months back for instance, when he created a stir by going on Oprah to talk about the nc. He goes on Oprah and is like,

15:09

Speaker B

we gotta talk about network computing.

17:02

Speaker A

We gotta talk about network computing. Guess what? It's Headless. You're not gonna need Windows. And they're like, what? So he's talking about the nc only to have the show take a sharp turn toward his personal affairs when he confessed that he had yet to find the right woman to fill the void in his life. After his Oprah appearance, Oracle's phone lines were jammed with thousands of calls from women. The joke inside Oracle was that the company's new recording would be press 1 if you want information on Oracle's products. Press 2 if you want information on Oracle services, press 3 if you want to fill the void in Larry's life.

17:04

Speaker B

Larry would have loved Instagram.

17:44

Speaker A

DM's insane. It's one of the craziest profiles. We don't have time to go through all of it.

17:45

Speaker B

Julia writes, is Paramount's AI first merger a force multiplier or flyboys all over again? Hollywood is bracing for layoffs and big creative changes if the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery merger goes. Mega merger goes through.

17:50

Speaker A

So there's a very funny vignette to start this Vanity Fair piece by Julia Black where she's talking about, she went to A16Z's American Dynamism Summit and was asking people there about media. So she was talking to a media executive in line for the bar. And he predicted countless small indie outlets catering to highly niche audiences. Love that prediction. And then he says, and then David Ellison's Skynet, he deadpanned. The Terminator reference was the kind of thing CGI explosion fanatic Ellison might actually appreciate. And the joke being dropped at a defense Tech event in D.C. goes to show how many different industries, from tech to politics, are keeping an eye on the M. And a drama unfolding in Hollywood this month. The merger brings together dozens of media properties. Paramount, Warner Brothers, HBO, CBS, TikTok, Oracle, Silicon Valley's ties. There's a lot of stuff that is going together, but they're going to be using AI to streamline back office. They're going to move to Oracle cloud databases to centralize everything. These are standard M and A things everyone's worried about. Layoffs might happen. People are particularly worried about one of the two physical studios that they own selling. I think they got to give us a call because we're looking for a new ultra dome. And nothing would be greater than having the entire Warner Brothers studio to ourselves. We're like today on tvpn.

18:04

Speaker B

Yeah, ideally we'd have launching a car

19:23

Speaker A

off of a and we're gonna light ourselves on fire. You really can't do that in these studios. But you know they want to produce 30 films. Realistically, how many of those are going to be shot in Hollywood studios? Does it make sense financially to do some stuff in Atlanta, some stuff in Toronto, some stuff overseas? It all depends on where the moviegoers taste lands, what ticket sales are like. Paramount right now is saying, look, layoffs aren't really the primary way we are going to get consolidation or value here. What did they say? They said something like layoffs. A rumor. Let me see. The layoff fears are overblown. Synergies will be achieved in six key areas. Jobs are not the majority. I did give a quote here. Julia writes, AI could unlock new potential for Warner Brothers discovery. Treasure trove. I from Harry Potter to DC Comics. For that potential, Ellison and company are paying a hefty $110 billion, a number that was driven up by a fierce bidding war with Netflix. And I said the Ellison family is fascinating. On one hand, you have the very aggressively AGI pilled Larry. I love that. I stuck AGI pilled into the Vanity Fair. AGI pilled, Larry. Building the future, investing heavily in Oracle data centers. And on the other side, you have David buying the past, accumulating intellectual property that feels impossible to rebuild. Duo is basically long slop and long anti slop. And so this is an interesting.

19:25

Speaker B

They're hedged, I think market neutral.

20:55

Speaker A

I actually don't think it's market neutral. I think. I think they genuinely believe that both generative AI will accelerate and the value of intellectual property will increase. It's not. It's not. Oh, we're going to live in a future where we're all watching the Dark Knight on film in theaters again. Or we're watching Genai Sora feeds. We're doing both. And they're actually going to meet. And so I believe that they are long both of those. It's not a market neutral bet, in my opinion. Will they have the creative freedom or will Larry Ellison step in and put his thumb on the scale and try and inject a little bit? And there is real cause for concern. We actually got a. A little leak here of a script for potentially seventh synergy. Yeah. For what could be the next Batman film. So this is called the Dark Knight Migrates. So we're going to do a little table read of the Dark Knight Migrates. It starts in the Batcave at night. Batman stands before an enormous monitor. Alfred approaches with tea. You'll be Batman. Geordie. Sir. The Riddler has taken Gotham's entire power grid hostage. He's encrypted every System in the city.

20:57

Speaker B

Pull up the city infrastructure schematics, Alfred.

22:09

Speaker A

I'm afraid I can't, sir. Our on premise servers are buckling under the load. If only we had a cloud based solution with autonomous threat detection and built in machine learning.

22:12

Speaker B

Alfred, launch the Oracle cloud infrastructure console.

22:21

Speaker A

Oh, so the integrating. Integrating sponsored content for Oracle. That's how you monetize the Warner Brothers ip. Yeah, yeah. The DC Universe, Alfred.

22:24

Speaker B

It looks visibly relieved.

22:36

Speaker A

Right away, sir. Spinning up an OCI tenancy. Now, I've taken the liberty of provisioning a few ampere compute instances as well. They have an excellent price to performance ratio, I might add. So they're giving the viewer what they want. They want the story of Batman, but they're also sneaking in just a little bit extra detail that Oracle's offering.

22:37

Speaker B

And migrate the Bat computers databases, all of them.

22:56

Speaker A

Oracle does do great migrations to Oracle data to Oracle autonomous database, sir.

22:59

Speaker B

Is there another kind?

23:05

Speaker A

It does patch and tune itself, sir. Which is fortunate since I also have to iron your capes. See, they're still putting in the cape ironing. That's still in the Batman world. You're getting a little Oracle, but you're also getting a lot of Batman. So now let's shift over to the Riddler's hideout. Tyler, would you like to be the Riddler? Yeah, okay, I'll be the henchman.

23:06

Speaker C

Riddler is in front of a wall of monitors showing Gotham in chaos. Okay, riddle me this, Batman. What has no locks but can't be opened? Gotham's grid. I've encrypted it with my own proprietary algorithm running on seven different NoSQL databases held together with Python scripts.

23:25

Speaker A

Oh, that's a nightmare, boss. The systems are getting kind of laggy. Says henchmen 1.

23:40

Speaker C

Just restart the servers.

23:45

Speaker B

Which ones? There's like 400.

23:46

Speaker C

All of them.

23:49

Speaker A

Oh, no. So we go back to the Batcave. Batman types furiously. Oracle logos glow softly on every screen. A hologram of Larry Ellison rotates slowly in the background for no discernible Batman.

23:50

Speaker B

Batman says, I've identified the Riddler's encryption vector, Alfred. Deploy the decryption countermeasures across all OCI regions simultaneously leveraging Oracle's global network of

24:04

Speaker A

over 40 cloud regions. Sir, latency is under 2 milliseconds. Shall I enable Oracle data guard for disaster recovery?

24:15

Speaker B

Always. Gotham is the disaster.

24:23

Speaker A

I've also taken the liberty of enrolling us in Oracle support, the premium tier.

24:25

Speaker B

That's the most responsible thing anyone in this city has ever done. Oracle Cloud from the Batcave to the boardroom.

24:30

Speaker A

That's not even a good answer. He fires his grapple gun and vanishes into the night. The Bat signal illuminates the sky, but tonight it's shaped like the Oracle logo. Gordon alone, quietly. I really should talk to him about this. Smash cut to black title card. Oracle the Cloud. Batman Trust. Shouldn't you. So there's an interesting call sheet out there today. Which companies will release a fully AI generated multi episode scripted series before 2027. Overall, it's pretty low. It's 16% for Netflix, 14% for Disney. Remember, Disney has a deal with OpenAI alongside Sora, but Disney has not said, oh, okay, yeah, we're actually going to do this. And Paramount plus is a 10%. Of course David Ellison has been talking about AI mostly in the enterprise, mostly actually unironically in OCI and Oracle databases.

24:36

Speaker B

I would expect Paramount to not want to be the first mover here. Odd Lots has a new episode on the impending fertilizer crisis. Yes, they say we all know that the war with Iran has sent oil prices spiking, but it's also pushing up the cost of all sorts of chemicals, including fertilizers and other nitrogen products that are essential for food production. This is all happening at the worst possible time, just before the spring planning season when fertilizer is most needed. And while farmers have seen higher spot prices for things like urea before, which is a fertilizer, notably back in 2022, there are already signs that this crisis might be worse. So how is fertilizer actually made? And what do higher fertilizer costs mean for farmers and food prices?

25:35

Speaker A

Oh, I love Odd Lots. It's so good how deep they get into into the supply chain. Over in the oil world, the IEA has approved releasing 400 million barrels of crude oil reserves, in effect to lower oil prices, the largest emergency oil release in history. How is oil trading today? It's at $86 a barrel for crude oil, up 5% today.

26:16

Speaker B

Little coverage here on the Jones Act. The Jones act has four requirements. Vessels must be US Built. Vessels must be US owned. Vessels must be US crude. Vessels must be US Flags. The crippling part of the Jones act is that US built US Shipyards, for a variety of reasons, are incredibly inefficient. We don't have that many of them, and they cost about five times what a ship from South Korea would cost. As a person who actually believes in trade, I fully would love for South Korea to become our U.S. shipyard. We just buy ships from them because they're Good at making them. Coastal water transport in the US could be 60% cheaper because of the Jones Act. It's actually cheaper to ship goods from the US to a foreign country and back to the US Than between two ports, which is completely bonkers. Insane. As a byproduct, we have killed all the growth within the Mississippi, which should be the most powerful inland economic advantage in the world. Maintaining the requirement of US owned, US crude and US flagged is perfectly fine and in line with my general national security concerns. But US Built has destroyed our shipping industry. There's tens of billions of GDP lying on the table here and a direct step in reducing our dependency on foreign suppliers. It's also how you kickstart rebuilding an American shipyard industry. If you 10x the number of US ships working in ports, you start building all of these maintenance businesses at U.S. ports and the demand increases. The U.S. bill requirement of the Jones act is horrifically destructive to America and in particular horrifically destructive to middle America. And it should be destroyed.

26:41

Speaker A

The Jones act, the last gasp of the Prohibition, is signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. Since the since 1920, when the 18th Amendment went into effect, the United States had banned the production, importation and sale of alcoholic beverages. But the laws had been ineffective at actually stopping the consumption of alcohol. The Jones act strengthened the federal penalties for bootlegging. Of course, within five years the country ended up rejecting Prohibition and repealing the 18th amendment. But we'll end with this post from Zag. Lefty Zag on X said T100 Wednesday and post a photo of reading the Business and Finance section, today's newspaper, today's Wall Street Journal. I love seeing that on what appears to be some sort of private aircraft. Someone asked and they said what type of plane and where are you headed? And Zag said, king Air, short flight, staying in North Carolina. Took Rev's plane for a spin. So they're all having. Well, go have fun.

28:07

Speaker B

Naval says AI is going to drain a lot of moats. And we have some advice. Keep a hose in the moat and put some alligators in it.

29:07

Speaker A

Okay, well, I believe we do have the end credits. We have a new outro for you today and we worked very hard on this. So we hope you appreciate it. We hope that you enjoy. We hope you enjoyed this show today.

29:14

Speaker B

It's been an honor.

29:31

Speaker A

Whirlwind tour. I really enjoyed talking.

29:32

Speaker B

We have a special show tomorrow. We'll be in person.

29:34

Speaker A

We will be in person and we have a very special show on Friday. That one's going to be special.

29:37

Speaker B

The Friday show is so sad.

29:41

Speaker A

Subscribe to our substack tvpn.com leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and see you tomorrow.

29:43