8 October 2025

9 new episodes (8.7 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 3 highlight clips below (9 mins total).

Investment 8 October 2025 · 3 clips

Acquired

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Episode

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Hosted by

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

6 October 2025 · 4h 6m · 1 clip below

contrarian

Alphabet earns roughly $400 a year from each US user of a free search product, and Acquired cannot name who pays that much for an AI subscription.

Google holds about 90% of search against a plausible AI steady state of 25 to 50% across several funded products, so matching today's revenue per head still leaves a much smaller business. The queries likeliest to move to a chat interface first are the expensive ones, trip planning, health, legal and insurance, and the hosts add that in 1998 Google was the better product and had AdWords within two years, neither condition holding now.

2m 30s · from 3:43:13

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My observations
- Search revenue can hold while travel, health and insurance queries migrate, and then the headline stays flat while the revenue underneath it deteriorates, which shows up in cost per click long before the top line. A board holding the name through an index cannot see that mix change until it reaches earnings.
- The 25 to 50% share estimate is asserted with no method behind it. It is a reasonable prior for a market with four or five funded competitors, and it is the number that would need modelling before this case carried any weight.
- Both hosts say in the disclaimer that they may hold positions in companies they discuss, and the episode is broadly admiring of Google, which makes this the section they had to build against their own sympathies.
- equities
- ai-and-markets

AI 8 October 2025 · 3 clips

Acquired

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Episode

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Hosted by

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

6 October 2025 · 4h 6m · 2 clips below

1 of 2 contrarian

Acquired puts Broadcom's margin on Google's TPU work near 50% against Nvidia's 75 to 80, and argues that in an industry running 50% gross margins the cheapest producer of tokens takes the market.

Chips and their depreciation are over half the cost of running an AI data centre, engineering and research a quarter to a third, and power only 2 to 6%, so the markup a silicon supplier takes is the largest single lever on cost, and Google pays roughly 2x where everyone else pays about 5x. Gavin Baker of Atreides is cited against this, on the ground that Google did not win search by being cheap.

3m 45s · from 3:36:48

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My observations
- The hosts source the Broadcom margin as something they have heard rather than anything disclosed, and the conclusion does not survive if the real gap is 65 against 80 instead of 50 against 80.
- Chips and depreciation are more than half the cost and power is under 6%, so the energy story that dominates the coverage is the small term and supplier margin is the big one.
- Where the purchase turns on model quality, enterprise trust or switching cost, a 5x hardware markup is a drag on margin and not a verdict on who wins. A committee hearing the low-cost-producer case from an equity manager can ask which of the two the thesis actually rests on.
2 of 2 framework

Waymo reports 91% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers, and Acquired sizes the business against the $470 billion the CDC attributes to US crash deaths in a single year.

The hosts discard the frames that would normally be reached for, automaker market capitalisation at 2.5 trillion globally because Waymo does not make cars, and ride-hailing at around 300 billion because the plan runs to owned vehicles and long-haul freight. Applying the claimed tenfold reduction in serious collisions to that figure leaves roughly 420 billion annually, larger than Google's entire revenue, set beside cumulative investment of 10 to 15 billion.

3m 14s · from 3:04:38

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My observations
- Nobody invoices for a crash that did not happen, so the 470 billion bounds the value created and says nothing about what Waymo can capture. The hosts half-acknowledge this and then use the number anyway.
- Ten to fifteen billion since 2009, against 2,000 vehicles, over 10 million paid rides and 100 million driverless miles, puts Waymo's capital intensity well below the frontier model labs. For a committee weighing venture exposure to autonomy against the labs, capital per unit of service already delivered is the comparison that survives both stories.
- What would test the thesis is cost per vehicle-hour rather than market size. Charging, cleaning, depot returns and sensor replacement all get named here and none of them get quantified, and that is the line between a Google-sized business and a permanently subsidised one.

8 October 2025

Investment 8 October 2025 · 3 clips

Alphabet earns roughly $400 a year from each US user of a free search product, and Acquired cannot name who pays that much for an AI subscription.

AI 8 October 2025 · 3 clips

Acquired puts Broadcom's margin on Google's TPU work near 50% against Nvidia's 75 to 80, and argues that in an industry running 50% gross margins the cheapest producer of tokens takes the market.

Waymo reports 91% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers, and Acquired sizes the business against the $470 billion the CDC attributes to US crash deaths in a single year.