The Wall Street Skinny

Every week, Kristen and Jen, best friends since the second grade, have smart, funny and honest conversations about investing, tech and business. From Princeton and Brown to Morgan Stanley, as former investment bankers turned entrepreneurs and podcasters , Kristen and Jen take the most complex deals, market moves, and stories in business and tech and distill them into what actually matters for you. From conversations with the biggest names in investing to deep dives people can’t stop sharing (not to mention the occasional HBO Industry red carpet), this is the show Wall Street is obsessed with.

The Wall Street Skinny is a business podcast hosted by Kristen and Jen, with 260 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Kristen and Jen hosts The Wall Street Skinny, a business show with 260 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  The Wall Street Skinny

  Is Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO in Jeopardy? What We Learned from Leaked IPO Prospectus

  Oct 1, 202647 min

  Go to groundnews.com/skinny for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe through our link for 40% off unlimited access to world-wide coverage. We're back at the intersection of AI and high finance! Anthropic is reportedly targeting a $2 trillion IPO valuation. So what did Reuters find when it got an early look at the S-1? Kristen, our resident investment banker, walks through the numbers: $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, a $42 billion loss (and how much of it was an accounting charge on a convert), $20 billion in cash against a reported $518 billion compute plan, and a quarter of revenue coming from just two customers. Why don't those compute contracts show up as debt when the neoclouds on the other side are borrowing against them? And with open-weight models closing the gap, is it time to get nervous about this IPO? Then we turn to the off switch. After a summer of OpenAI agents breaking out of the sandbox, a paused model, and a scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra release, who is actually reaching for the brakes? We cover Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay and the cynical read on it, the AI Kill Switch Act and the AI Emergency Button Act stalling in Congress, the executive order rebranding AI as "super intelligence," and the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, typo and all. And why did the industry name its newest products after the villains in The Matrix? Finally, NVIDIA swore off kill switches in 2025, citing a 1993 government fiasco called the Clipper Chip. So why did it just announce a two-part system called OpenShell and Sentry, and what would it catch inside a private equity data room or on a trading desk? Can any guardrail keep up with something built to be smarter than us? Plus the trolley problem, Iain Banks' Culture series, and whether we should just give up and let the robots win. Make sure you're subscribed to our Substack so you don't miss our more in-depth coverage on these complex topics: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

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  The Wall Street Skinny

  How NVIDIA Is Secretly Coming for Anthropic & Open AI | Morgan Stanley's Head of US Thematic Research

  Sep 26, 20261 hour

  Go to groundnews.com/skinny for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe through our link for 40% off unlimited access to world-wide coverage. NVIDIA just agreed to buy Hugging Face, and the deal won't add a cent to its earnings per share. So why do it? In this episode we dig into what NVIDIA really gets from owning the home of open-weight AI, and whether this is a threat to OpenAI and Anthropic that the market hasn't priced in yet. What's the actual difference between open source and open weight, and why does almost everyone (yes, even us included) mix them up? If Amazon, Google, and the frontier labs are all building their own inference chips, where does NVIDIA's next wave of customers come from? And if the free "Temu version" of AI gets good enough for most people, who keeps paying for the Prada bag? Then we bring on Michelle Weaver, Head of US Thematic Equity Research at Morgan Stanley, to ask the questions everyone in finance is worried about. Which companies are actually seeing AI show up in their margins, and which are just burning tokens so they can say "AI" on the earnings call? Is AI already showing up in the jobs data for young workers? What happens to the traditional Wall Street analyst class if the org chart stops being a pyramid? Does the Jevons Paradox of economic theory help or hurt the frontier model companies? And why are American companies nervous about building on Chinese open-weight models? We also get into the growing fight over AI data centers. Why has this become one of the few issues uniting voters on both the left and the right? What do power bills, water use, and old brownfield sites have to do with it? How big is a 57-gigawatt power shortfall, really? And what does Oracle declaring force majeure on its New Mexico Stargate site tell us about where the AI build-out is headed? 00:00 Intro: Revisiting our early episodes 03:00 Life updates: Flying, dogs & kids 06:10 Our Yahoo Finance Market Hang recap 07:50 Why NVIDIA bought Hugging Face 11:10 Training vs. inference: Where AI compute is headed 14:15 CUDA and NVIDIA's software moat 15:50 Open source vs. open weight, explained 19:20 Is NVIDIA a threat to OpenAI & Anthropic? 21:25 Meta's Muse and why easy AI wins 25:00 Why companies struggle with AI adoption 27:20 Oracle's Stargate force majeure (Ground News) 28:45 Michelle Weaver joins: What is thematic research? 30:15 AI enablers vs. AI adopters 35:05 Open vs. closed models and Jevons paradox 37:25 The risks of Chinese open-weight models 39:45 Pricing security risk in AI adoption 42:15 Token budgets and the end of token maxing 44:00 Is AI already costing jobs? 46:55 What AI means for Wall Street analysts 49:25 Data centers: People, power & politics 53:00 Tax breaks, brownfields & state moratoriums 55:35 The 57-gigawatt power shortfall 57:35 US vs. China: Chips, power & the AI race 59:20 Where to find Michelle's research

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  The Wall Street Skinny

  Why Stocks Could Drop 10% Before Year-End: feat. Wellington Macro Strategist Mike Medeiros

  Sep 18, 202637 min

  Go to www.groundnews.com/skinny for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe through our link for 40% off unlimited access to world-wide coverage. The first Fed rate hike since the summer of 2023 hit today, and we went LIVE from New York City to cover it. Minutes after Chairman Warsh wrapped his press conference, we brought on Wellington's macro strategist Mike Medeiros to make sense of the 25bp hike, the unanimous vote, and a statement that leaned unmistakably hawkish. We asked Mike everything we've been dying to know: Was this hike a nod to the political pressure campaign coming from President Trump, or would cutting in this environment have been, in his words, "clinically insane"? Are Warsh and Treasury Secretary Bessent working together or against each other, with the Fed pushing financial conditions tighter while Treasury intervenes in the long end? How does Treasury actually fund those interventions next year — bills, buybacks, or the TGA — and does the debt ceiling take one of those off the table? We also dug into what the hike means for the coming wave of corporate issuance financing the AI buildout, whether the midterms change the policy calculus, where positioning is most offsides, his S&P target for year-end, and what the death of forward guidance means for volatility in the front end of the curve. Plus: what nickname does Trump give "No Cut Kevin" now? Thank you to our sponsor, Ground News — our go-to news aggregator for getting all the headlines moving markets in real time, gauging bias across the political spectrum, and seeing what's factually accurate reporting and what isn't. Go to https://groundnews.com/skinny to subscribe for 40% off their unlimited access Vantage subscription — whether you subscribe yourself or send it as a gift — and use our link so they know we sent you.

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  The Wall Street Skinny

  Everyone is WRONG about Scott Bessent's Treasury Intervention. LISTEN TO THIS.

  Sep 4, 202657 min

  Everyone in the financial media is telling you the same story: Scott Bessent's surprise Treasury buyback announcement is a thumb on the scale of the bond market, and it's making Kevin Warsh's job at the Fed harder. But what if the headlines have it exactly backwards? What if the Treasury Secretary is actually running interference for the one thing the Fed Chair can't do himself? Fresh off asking Bessent this question face-to-face at the Charlotte Economic Club, Jen breaks down why she thinks there's a stealth rate hike hiding inside what looks like yield suppression, and why the best way to understand it is a three-act magic trick straight out of The Prestige. To get there, we have to answer the questions most coverage skips entirely. What actually happens at a quarterly refunding, and why does the Treasury auction schedule matter more than almost anyone realizes? What's the difference between an on-the-run and off-the-run bond, and why are aged long bonds from the COVID era trading below 50 cents on the dollar? When the Treasury buys back 30-year paper and funds it with T-bills and short-dated notes, is that QE, or is it something closer to the opposite? And why would Bessent make this move right before the AI hyperscalers flood the corporate bond market in September? Then things get weirder. Why did the US just participate in the biggest coordinated yen intervention in decades, and what does it have to do with Japan's Treasury holdings? How do stablecoins, a resurgent crypto market, and a shaky dollar all fit into the same trade? And what do Bessent and Warsh, supposedly at war, have in common through their shared mentor Stan Druckenmiller, whose AI-generated op-ed became its own scandal?

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  The Wall Street Skinny

  Is a Private Credit scandal brewing behind the LA Lakers Sale?

  Aug 19, 202637 min

  The LA Lakers --- a prestigious basketball franchise that didn't change hands for 46 years --- just sold twice in ten months, the second time for $2.5 billion more than the first. The seller is Mark Walter, CEO of Guggenheim, owner of the Dodgers and part of Chelsea FC, and the man whose laptop and phone the FBI seized off his private jet just as the Lakers deal was coming together. Since then, one of the insurance companies in his orbit has revised its reported related-party investments from $1.4 billion to $17 billion. Quite the rounding error. In this episode, we get into the questions everyone on the Street is suddenly asking. Why would anyone sell the crown jewel of American sports a year after fighting to buy it? What do a bunch of boring life insurance companies most people have never heard of have to do with the trophy assets of the billionaire class? Why do private equity and private credit firms keep buying insurers in the first place — and what happens to that entire model when the disclosures around "related parties" turn out to be, let's say, incomplete? And why did Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, who spent months chasing a Las Vegas expansion team, pivot to the Lakers over a single weekend? The bigger question hanging over all of it: this structure — asset managers selling their own loans to insurance companies they control — underpins a massive share of the boom in private credit. If regulators start pulling on this thread, how many other portfolios look like this one? By way of disclaimer, no charges have been filed and no wrongdoing has been established nor is implied here; our research merely summarizes reporting from Bloomberg, the FT, the WSJ, and the LA Times.

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