Placebo Backpacks
Jul 3, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min · 13 segments
# # Hosts: Max, (Jordan?), Peta, and Gabe (and Maximillian) **Timestamps and Links:** - 00:00:00 - Intro to Know Idea - 00:02:08…
Jul 3, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min · 13 segments
# # Hosts: Max, (Jordan?), Peta, and Gabe (and Maximillian) **Timestamps and Links:** - 00:00:00 - Intro to Know Idea - 00:02:08…
Max, NVIDIA has been in the news a lot because they've hit market cap of over $5 trillion, the most highly valued company in the world, if you're not aware.
They're the ones making the chips that power...
Many of your devices, but also now the chips that power the data centers that are powering the AI investment surge.
But it's not, but potentially not the highest market cap valuation of a company ever.
I had a look into this and there was, this is highly disputed, I want to say, because how you calculate these stats lead to wildly different results.
But I'm going to just go to one conference paper.
Did
KPMG do this or what?
They may have.
A conference proceeding, so not peer-reviewed, published in 2021 that restated the claim there was one company back in the 17th century, the 1600s, was worth what would today be the equivalent of $7.9 trillion.
Do you have any ideas what it was? Yeah, that freight company, the Indian Pacific or whatever it's called.
Yeah, that's the biggest company ever.
During its period of dominance in those 1600s, it lost 75 vessels to shipwrecks, another 23 to capture by enemy forces and pirates, which sounds like a lot until I then looked into how many ships they actually built.
LAUGHTER Do you want to take a guess at how many ships? 706.
That's it, Max.
706 ships were built by the VOC or Dutch East India Company through the 17th century, which is a huge amount of production.
which I've been to, it's very cool, which found one of the ways they managed such an impressive feat is by diversifying out of oak, which had been dominating the shipbuilding across Europe and they moved to other woods and were very selective though.
They were very selective about which woods they use, even though they were able to diversify out of oak.
But yes, Max, 706 ships and it just happens to be our 706th show.
Max, NVIDIA has been in the news a lot because they've hit market cap of over $5 trillion, the most highly valued company in the world, if you're not aware.
They're the ones making the chips that power...
Many of your devices, but also now the chips that power the data centers that are powering the AI investment surge.
But it's not, but potentially not the highest market cap valuation of a company ever.
I had a look into this and there was, this is highly disputed, I want to say, because how you calculate these stats lead to wildly different results.
But I'm going to just go to one conference paper.
Did
KPMG do this or what?
They may have.
A conference proceeding, so not peer-reviewed, published in 2021 that restated the claim there was one company back in the 17th century, the 1600s, was worth what would today be the equivalent of $7.9 trillion.
Do you have any ideas what it was? Yeah, that freight company, the Indian Pacific or whatever it's called.
Yeah, that's the biggest company ever.
During its period of dominance in those 1600s, it lost 75 vessels to shipwrecks, another 23 to capture by enemy forces and pirates, which sounds like a lot until I then looked into how many ships they actually built.
LAUGHTER Do you want to take a guess at how many ships? 706.
That's it, Max.
706 ships were built by the VOC or Dutch East India Company through the 17th century, which is a huge amount of production.
which I've been to, it's very cool, which found one of the ways they managed such an impressive feat is by diversifying out of oak, which had been dominating the shipbuilding across Europe and they moved to other woods and were very selective though.
They were very selective about which woods they use, even though they were able to diversify out of oak.
But yes, Max, 706 ships and it just happens to be our 706th show.
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