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YOU ARE WATCHING TVP AND TODAY IS MONDAY, January 5th, 2026.
We are live from the TVP and ultra lounge, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Uh we missed you guys.
>> many updates for you, but one that's not changing is that this show is still brought to you by Ramp.
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Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
We are very happy that Ramp is staying with us on the journey. Uh that's right. Massive news.
>> uh new graphics package if you haven't noticed.
Uh we worked with uh John Palmer and Luke over at Area Technology.
They updated the overlay, the logo, whole lot of stuff.
>> in there telling you we're taking you all over the world with news every day.
>> Uh it is so good to be back. >> It's amazing.
>> This so we met this morning at the gym with the whole team and I hadn't seen you for more than 2 weeks.
>> been the longest time we've gone uh without uh hanging out since uh we started the show.
>> last break was was crazy.
We were still doing we weren't even live yet.
We were doing it just as a podcast, but we still I was in Yosemite once and we did like a 20-minute episode that was recorded locally and we had to sync them up and like edit it together. It was a very odd show.
>> We did a show on the eve of Christmas Eve. >> We did.
It's very That felt really unnecessary, but at the same time there was so much news over the last 2 weeks.
There were a lot of moments where we wanted to be live.
>> I feel like there were three or four, maybe five really big stories where we could have had great shows, but there were a lot of days where uh you know, probably would have been us just hanging out which still would have been fun.
And there were a lot of situations to monitor, too, that were kind of outside of our our domain, but uh but still interesting and we'll take you through some of those.
But fortunately we have a ton of content and a ton of uh stories to get through because so many things have built up.
The Grok deal, the Manis deal, uh uh Dan Wong's annual letter.
There's so many different things that we're going to take you through today.
We have a very light lineup today, just Justin Biersch from TrueMed joining, but we have >> Pull it up. Let's see it.
>> lineup which explains the run of show.
So we're going to be building this out for you.
>> keep you guys in the dark.
>> exactly what we're doing when so you know when to tune in.
Um but we should kick it off with Dan Wong's annual letter, his 2025 letter.
He skipped 2024 apparently.
Uh this sort of rocked the timeline.
Uh Dan came on his show during his book tour uh for his uh uh a you know, excellent book that that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition.
He uses this phrase uh AI uh he doesn't like the phrase AI race. Yeah.
He likes he doesn't think he it's something that you can win.
A race has a like a definite ending. There's a finish line.
Whoever crosses it first wins and that's where a lot of super >> prefers to say that the US and China need to win win the AI future. >> Yeah.
Yeah, and and and I feel like he And this echoes what Gurley has said, too. True.
>> Obviously at the time he was coming out in defense of Manis and Benchmark's investment in Manis.
He was saying I don't He's like I don't know what the AI race is.
>> I mean he looks great now that Manis is an you know, an American company. It's a Meta property.
So uh you know, uh and I mean the Manis team of course it was from China, but quickly moved to Singapore and now Menlo Park presumably.
No, I think they're going to stay in Singapore.
>> But still I mean you have to imagine that a lot of the talent talent migrates and it's like a fully American controlled asset essentially now that it's uh controlled by America and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
Uh let me tell you about Public. Still with us.
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Let's take it over to Tyler.
Let's check in with Tyler.
Oh yeah, what what what what what are we checking in with Tyler for?
>> The the chat misses Tyler.
>> Oh, they just miss Tyler. Also we signed for 2026.
>> massive contract extension with Tyler.
Uh he hasn't he's not technically a college dropout yet, but he may as well be. It's a gap year. It's a gap decade. It's a gap century.
Uh Tyler uh Tyler's parents if you guys are watching, I'm just joking around.
It's the age of gap years.
We're in the age of gap years.
We're in the age of research and we're also in the age of gap years.
And so we thank Tyler for sticking around hanging out with us.
We're going to have a lot of fun this year.
Um so the Dan Wong piece, we should read through some of it.
Uh I wrote it it inspired me to think about you know, what what am I really looking for this year?
We've seen sort of benchmark saturation.
AI can kind of do everything now.
We'll we'll talk about the Claude the the Claude Opus 4.
5 and Claude code uh sort of sensational takeover of the timeline.
So many people clearly uh hadn't really tested Opus 4.
5 when it came out which was a couple weeks before the break, but they got their time off.
They were you know, with their families and probably stepped out to the laptop and fired off some Claude Claude code prompts and had really good experiences uh because it is really magical the first time you go to it and you say build this website and it just does it.
It's it actually remarkable for small hops.
>> throwing around the Claude AGI thing.
Fortunately, we picked up a goalpost.
You know, if we have a camera view that we can put on there. Just pull pull it over.
Uh so, we picked up a goalpost.
So, you know, as we continue to see AI progress, we can actually move this goalpost ourselves physically here in the studio.
Physically moving a goalpost now. There you go. There you go.
Because my new definition of AGI is it needs to be able to smell.
It needs to be able to smell.
You have to be able Uh if it can't smell, it can't do all white-collar work because I regard the job of a sommelier as white-collar work. Now, >> is. AI disagrees with me.
I actually went to one of the models and I and I said, "Is a sommelier considered a white-collar worker?" It said, "No."
And I think that's all just a side hop.
I consider it I consider it white-collar work.
>> You often drink wine wearing a white collar.
Do sommeliers not wear white collars when they're serving wine? Absolutely, they do.
They should be considered white-collar workers.
And in order to fulfill the AGI promise of automating all white-collar work, it must be able to smell.
It must be able to to decant.
I sent you that paper, though.
That that about the olfactory sense of of training models to have olfactory senses.
>> Well, well, as soon as it gets baked into the next version of Claude, we'll need to come up with a new benchmark and then we will move the goalpost once again because that is the that is the nature of the show.
We continue to move the goalposts endlessly.
But, you know what doesn't move the goalposts?
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>> through YC with them or they were like right either right before me.
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>> I've actually my entire career I have been getting paid via Gusto. Used it >> That's true. at my first company.
I still get paid through it. >> Yep.
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So, very very excited to be a part >> Serious serious endorsement.
Anyway, back to Dan Wong, the goat.
He is reflecting on the AI future, what it takes to win the AI future.
And the thing that stuck out to me was that we've seen this amazing just, you know, this remarkable march of research.
The models are getting better.
All the benchmarks are getting, you know, completely dominated.
Then we're seeing the massive hyperscaler build-outs.
We're We We were reflecting on like, "What does reindustrialization mean?
What does American dynamism mean?
What does this idea of like America needs to build big things.
We need to be able to build big things, new bridges.
We need to build high-speed rail."
And and we've failed at a lot of that, obviously.
But, we've we've succeeded at building multi-billion dollar data centers.
No, I I mean, yes, podcast, yes.
I mean, truly truly media has been a cultural export of America for a very long time.
Um but uh but But yeah, so Dan's saying we're getting we're very good at making data centers.
Haven't been so good on the energy side. >> Yes.
And so and so I I tried to pull some of the data on, you know, my big question was like, "We've been talking a big game about energy being a bottleneck for AI for a long time."
It wasn't truly the bottleneck.
The bottleneck was chips and then data centers and then just moving the energy around.
It feels like the last year we were just kind of shuffling energy assets around the board and that's why we saw energy prices go up where if just supply and demand, if we'd been building a ton of energy infrastructure, well, supply would have gone up and actual prices would have fallen or at least stayed flat because all the net new all the net new data centers would just be using the new energy infrastructure.
But, that's not exactly what happened.
So, um so um the from 2008 to 2021, uh America's uh annual growth in energy production was 0. 1% annually. Really really bad. Not good.
But, it is getting better.
Uh the the EIA's December 2025 short-term energy outlook projects generation growth of 2. 4% in 2025 and 1. 7% in 2026.
That's like, you know, what, 20 times higher?
That's great, but also that doesn't feel like, "Oh, fast take-off.
We're going to be doing 10% jumps.
We're going to be really really ramping up here."
So, it feels like there's something that still needs to change.
And then simultaneously, you have this, you know, massive political backlash to rising energy prices.
It And and I think most importantly, like we've identified some of the characters that drive AI. You know, we know Dario. We know Demis. We know Sam, right?
We also have identified a lot of the people who are, you know, running the neo clouds or doing uh you know, build-out of new data centers.
We don't really know the characters.
Who's the Elon Musk of energy is something I keep coming back to.
And we've talked to some of these people.
Doug from Radiant is like a contender in the sense that he's building nuclear power plants.
Isaiah is also getting in the race with a with with data centers.
Blake Scholl from Boom is sort of pivoting or or expanding into energy generation.
But, there's no one who's really become like the main energy guy or gal, right?
Yeah, I would say like Chase at Crusoe is potentially a contender, but unclear yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO, right? >> Sure. Sure.
>> feel like when you think about who the Elon of energy, it's somebody that can go and and throw down on a 3-hour episode with Joe. Yes.
But, but also like Chase and like the rest of the neo cloud founders are are, you know, marshaling energy resources, but not really driving the underlying infrastructure as much as I think.
They're more like, "Let's go find where the energy is cheap. Let's build there.
Let's do the construction project."
So, other other crazy stats.
So, while we're growing at like 2. 4%, 1.
7%, China is consistently putting up 6% growth.
So, not great by comparison.
China now accounts for 1/3 of global electricity consumption and contributed 54% of global demand growth in 2024.
So, more than half of the growth in demand came from China.
So, stack that up over a few decades and it feels like the AI future is basically in the bag because if energy is a bottleneck, they'll have a ton of it.
Now, I guess the wild card is maybe you go to space.
Dan has an interesting point where he Let me Let me actually find this exact thing.
You see SemiAnalysis Dylan was sharing that the Venezuela has a bunch of underutilized gas turbines. No way.
He was showing satellite imagery.
Did you see their Instagram?
It's I don't know if they if they have like a bug or something, but they posted the same video to Instagram like 50 times.
And I think they might just have like automated it and it just like went haywire or something.
Or maybe Yeah, SemiAnalysis.
Like the official SemiAnalysis Instagram.
>> Maybe they cracked the code.
Maybe like the trough wants >> funny video of like all these guys in this like bar. I I don't know.
And then it has some comment.
It's just like a funny thing.
But, I was just like, "Why did they post this seven times in a row?"
Um anyway, so what what what Dan says he says, "I think that So, he says, "I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the than the exception."
He says like, you know, China's obviously caught up in so many different technologies, drones and EVs.
Uh there are two fields in which China is substantially behind the West, semiconductors and aviation.
The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions.
Meanwhile, China's answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway.
I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological leadership almost every anywhere everywhere else.
And I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their western competitors over the next decade.
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Um so, there is one that I think he missed.
And maybe you put it in aviation, but I think I think space travel.
Like they're way behind on rocketry.
Yeah, he said the the Boeing and Airbus, they don't they don't have that equivalent.
>> And maybe you put SpaceX and Blue Origin in the same category as Boeing and Airbus. I particularly don't.
I think of them as separate technologies and I think of this as potentially like the third category that China's way behind in.
And if you I still weight it with somewhat low probability.
Like I'm still somewhat convinced by Delyan's take that it's going to be really hard to actually get a ton of data center capacity in space on a short time frame.
But, at the same time it's like, you know, never bet against Elon.
He's got to figure something out.
There There's like it just feels like something that could happen.
I I don't I don't understand enough of the physics to really to really figure out like what timeline it happens.
That was also before people went on break and were using Claude code.
You know, maybe Oh, so now updating their code.
They're like, "Yeah, space."
He's going to put this up there. Yeah.
Um but uh like if if if the end if the end game really is like you got to do you got to do compute in space because the math just works so much better up there over, you know, a decade or two, uh well, then the advantage kind of flips back to America.
But, uh you know, something needs to change clearly.
We're not asleep at the wheel.
There are a lot of companies working on this in America.
Some public public company stocks have already mooned.
Lots of people are tracking the gas turbine market.
Risky startups that could never get funded a decade ago are pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars now.
And we are taking the problem seriously, but I'm interested to to how quickly things can actually change.
As the big AI labs mature and probably go public this year or next year, the neo clouds and hyperscalers build ever larger clusters and energy prices become more of a political issue.
I suspect discussions of what we're doing to make more energy to dominate the conversation in 2026.
Let's get this growth rate up.
So I'm I'm I'm optimistic it can happen, but I feel like it's the it's the new benchmark that I want to be tracking.
I obviously we were tracking the the the performance benchmarks of the models.
Then we were tracking the diffusion.
What's the actual revenue? Is it sticky?
Like there was a lot of risk of like, oh this this uh this company comes up with some AI app.
They, you know, ramp to 100 million.
Will it stick around or will they just get, you know, swept by the wayside and people will go back to doing it the old way or they'll use something else or they'll pay way less.
Um all of those, I feel like we kind of beat all of the bubble allegations over 2025 for the most part. What do you think?
Uh I I I don't think that that is a public perception.
I would say like the most popular topic Well, beat the bubble will pop in 2025 allegations.
Like like at the start of the year people were predicting that like Open AI would not be would not do an up round, for example.
And like that just didn't happen.
It was like all up rounds for basically all the major players.
There were a few that got kind of stuck in quagmires.
>> Yeah, I would say that we've in general things have broadly stabilized since the infamous infamous podcast, right? Yes, yeah. Yeah, totally.
Like if you were long AI broadly in 2025, you did very well.
And and you did not see some sort of collapse. Yeah, Tyler.
Yeah, uh there's actually a a a cool chart that Axios put out about um like the 2025 news cycle and it's like distribution of like how often the search was and yeah.
>> So you can look at the AI bubble and um yeah, it did peak and we're like definitely not at the peak right now. We're way down. Tyler vindicated. Vindicate.
Never lost faith over there. Jordy was skeptical.
I was maybe a little skeptical from time to time.
Tyler never lost faith and that's why he's here.
Sticking around riding out the singularity. >> Max contract.
Let me tell you about Linear. Still with us.
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[Music] Um So uh in in other uh in the other section of the Dan Wang piece, uh he talks about competition and I thought this was just an interesting uh element to read.
He talks about Sputnik moments and uh we we we got to read a little bit of this. So uh >> Yeah.
One might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war, but there have been too many declarations of Sputnik moments without commensurate action.
I I I hadn't thought about that, but we we we we at one point we were memeing like a Sputnik moments for Sputnik moments. Remember? Do you remember this? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was super.
That must have been like a year ago.
Yeah, it was like a year ago or something, but but you know when it becomes like a meme that we're like, you know, everything's a Sputnik moment.
Like it really is overused.
Uh yeah, so Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China's high-speed rail.
Mark Warner repeated with Huawei's 5G.
Marc Andreessen called it with deep seek.
The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.
It's a good point, right?
Uh so he says, I think the US continues to systematically underrate China's industrial progress for several uh reasons.
Uh first, too many Western elites retain hope that China's efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord.
Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, or maybe even a political political collapse.
I won't rule these out, but I don't think they are likely to break China's humming tech engine.
Dan has so many interesting insights.
He had this one where he talks to people and he reflects a lot on like talking to people in San Francisco cuz I think he just moved from Yale to Stanford spending a lot of time in SF.
And he was saying that like everyone he talks to about Taiwan thinks that China only wants to invade Taiwan because of TSMC and semiconductors.
And he has to be like, no, no, this goes back like 60 years. Multiple like decades.
Yeah, like back to the Civil War that led to the exile and whatnot.
Like this is not some like new trendy thing where like, oh they need this particular resource this day.
>> This is not about ChatGPT, little bro. Yeah, truly.
>> Um yeah, I mean they were this this uh I mean yeah, it was interesting because you could say this was a 2025 letter, but this felt like the best possible summary of the geopolitical economic dynamic between China and the US.
Uh there was a paragraph here that stood out.
Uh he said, third, Western elites keep holding on to a distinction between innovation, which is uh mostly the remit of the West, and scaling, which they accept that China can do.
Dan says, I want to dissolve that distinction.
Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor.
By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time.
American scientists maybe world leaders in dreaming up new ideas, but American manufacturers have been poor building industries around these ideas.
Um and so again, there's some uh interesting commentary uh in here as well.
I forget the exact section.
Every Everybody should go read it.
Um but uh he basically says like in S in SF or within our world, it's become popular to just say like, oh yeah, we need to figure out how to build things again, but it's okay cuz AI will solve Yeah, yeah, AI will do it.
And it's like the thing that I would say you can be most sure about right now is that AI is not operating with like, you know, you have all this intelligence, all this this intellect, this horsepower, but it doesn't have any agency. Mhm.
>> Like it's not just sitting there in the background like fixing American manufacturing, right?
And while we have this idea that AI will automate manufacturing and create these sort of like feedback loops that allow us to start making stuff again in the US.
Uh currently like manufacturing jobs in the US are actually declining.
>> Declining, yeah, yeah. Uh month over month, so.
I mean at the same time there there are a bunch of people in SF who make a somewhat convincing argument about like the software only singularity and and and bootstrapping by kind of everything off of it.
I I I agree it's a little bit more of a sci-fi scenario, but um there there there are somewhat there are some good arguments on both sides.
But uh he does make this point about manufacturing that uh even when you you how do you do an apples-to-apples comparison?
Well, you look at Tesla and how they operate the gigafactory in America and then how do they operate the same gigafactory building the same vehicles in China. Yeah.
And he says, uh I hear I sometimes hear that the US will save manufacturers through automation.
The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation.
That's a big part of the reason why Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than California Tesla workers.
And and he says What what what does he say? Gigafactory? Is that in here?
He says, uh according to Tesla's corporate disclosures, a worker at a gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year.
A worker at a gigafactory in California produces an average of 20. That's like a huge gap.
More than twice because they have more automation over there.
And you think of it as like a copy-paste thing.
Like the gigafactory here should be the same as there.
But there really are like more machines, more automation.
Just, you know, walk across the street in China and there's some sort of, you know, CNC factory that has 10,000 CNC machines or something like that.
So Um there there there there's just a lot more to build off of there.
So they China's automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else.
I keep a scrap as I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers.
Quote, most of what German Mittelstands firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well, said a consultant to the Financial Times.
Quote, in my sector, they look at the price point of the market leader and sell for roughly half that, the boss of a medical device maker told the Economist.
It's never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans.
Now more than ever it looks like their core competencies are threatened by Chinese firms. >> Yeah.
Anyways, go read it, but he called Europe cooked and chopped.
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Uh the last section here.
So uh Beijing has been working relentlessly to build up its resilience.
While the US talks itself out of Sputnik moments, Beijing has dedicated immense resources to patching up its own deficiencies.
It's not a theoretical fear that Chinese companies might lose access to American technologies.
So the state is pouring more money than ever before into semiconductor makers and research universities.
It is investing in clean technologies not so much because it cares about the climate, but because it wants to be self-sufficient in energy.
And that's a huge huge uh just economic incentive.
Uh and it's rewriting the world the rules of the global order with caution because it's been a giant giant beneficial >> to try to get Dan on again.
I'd curious to ask him uh get his read on uh everything that happened in Venezuela Oh yeah.
uh over over the weekend just given that the uh Chinese delegation was there on the ground meeting with him effectively the night before he was uh What a what what crazy crazy story. Wild weekend.
Let me let me finish reading this.
So Beijing has been preparing for a cold war without eagerness for for waging it.
While the US wants to wage a cold war without preparing for it.
So here's a potential way that China succeeds.
Beijing's goal is to make nearly every important product in the world while everyone else supplies its commodities and services.
By making the country mostly self-sufficient and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi Jinping might hope to make China resilient.
He is building fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary.
Beijing doesn't have to replicate American diplomatic, cultural, and financial superpowerdom.
It might hope that its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter the US and its success in manufacturing might directly destabilize the US by delivering the coup de grace over the Rust Belt.
The US might shed a few million few million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade.
The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media, and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse.
Black pill, but then he says, "I don't think this is going to happen." which is good. Yeah.
Um anyway, Turbo puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Well, >> Uh should we talk about Manifold?
Let's talk about Manifold.
>> Let's talk about Manifold.
This all started because because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manifold and he and whatever he's on >> Bill Gurley has the best voice in venture. I I I agree. I agree.
>> The best voice in venture, hands down.
Who's got a better voice than Bill Gurley? It's It's amazing. He's got pipes. >> He's got pipes.
He He does have a He does have a good voice for podcasting, too.
It's great It's great to hear.
Uh well, he's going uh he's going on a podcast tour Yeah.
and uh we're we're We're going to get him.
We're I think we'll be a part of it, so >> Fantastic.
>> to hear him on >> So, this all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, formerly Scale AI.
Uh he says, "Excited to announce that Manifold AI has joined Meta to help us build >> Randall in the X chat.
Did anyone check on Delian?" Oh, yeah.
That's funny cuz Jack Jack worked with with Delian.
Yeah, I mean, it it really it really is >> Delian might be taking a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing, Delian totally vindicated, right?
>> also that uh and Patrick Collison was bullish. Oh, yeah.
He's saying So, did Delian capitulate?
Did they capitulate early?
No, no, he he gets to play musical chairs. He's like, "What?
I I never said anything about Manifold.
I I don't know about that.
It's a fine It's a fine investment. Makes sense."
Uh Did I mention that Facebook was a Founders Fund back company?
Oh, yeah, I work in Founders Fund. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there was so I mean, You should put on It's great to see a portfolio company acquire Manifold.
The moment in time that Benchmark invested in Manifold, >> Yeah.
it was it was a really it was crazy.
I was like, "What's going on here?"
It was It was just It was just very strange.
>> It was It was It was truly like >> It was truly contrarian.
>> It was very contrarian.
>> It was truly contrarian.
Yeah, I mean, the vibes were like it was the most it was the most intense like part of the trade war.
Trump was really putting the screws.
He's back in, so he's going to go extra hard.
And it's not like Biden took the the the his foot off the gas of, you know, the trade war with with China.
Like the initial volley of chip restrictions happened under Biden.
Like the like Chris Miller writes Chip War during the Biden admin and and everyone really wakes up.
All the Anduril folks are talking about it like it became a thing.
>> So, AI 2027 was released in April of 2025.
Benchmark did Manifold in April of 2025, same month.
And so, obviously a lot of people processed AI 2027 as like, "Cool, this is like sci-fi kind of like uh you know, let's just extrapolate a bunch and it was kind of a thought exercise."
But at the same time, this was kind of the peak in some ways of like the AI war narrative.
So, to have a famed American venture capital firm, you know, backing a Chinese AI firm, >> Sorry, we got to go back to Dan Wang.
There's so many good things. He talked about AI 2027. I want to read it.
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So, Dan Wang says the most read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027.
The five authors who come from the AI safety world outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027.
A decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons.
My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form after the AI reconstructs creatures that are {quote} to humans what corgis are to wolves. I somehow missed this.
I I listened to the Door Dash podcast. I read most of AI 2020.
Did you pick up the corgi line, Tyler? You read this, right? I don't remember that.
>> Somehow the corgi line just got completely missed by me, but I love it. It's so funny.
It's such a funny detail.
I'm going to control F for corgi.
It I'm not It's not pulling anything up. No? I don't know.
Okay, maybe maybe Dan's taking some some some creative uh Uh you have to like choose an ending. >> Okay.
Oh, you have to find the corgi ending. That's key.
Uh we'll take the golden retriever ending.
>> It's hard to know Yes, turn us into golden retrievers. We're ready. We're ready for 2026.
>> I don't know who's trying to be a wolf.
I'm not trying to be a I'm the wolf uh the the lone wolf sigma grindset.
>> to be a golden retriever on performance-enhancing drugs.
It's a golden retriever with 40 delts.
>> Yeah, I mean, we've been growing out our hair like the golden retrievers, working on looking good.
Everything's Everything's lined up for a golden retriever 2026. It's good time.
It's hard to know what to make of this document.
He's talking about AI 2027.
He says, "Because we authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction."
Uh six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening, but even at the start, their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027.
Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me.
Uh sort of an interesting I know why they put it in there cuz it's it's engaging. It's entertaining.
And it makes for it makes for good banter.
Um anyway, he goes he goes on to talk a lot about the the dynamic of how Silicon Valley works, how uh New York finance works, how how it's different. It's very interesting.
He He We We We We should read a little bit more of this since we have time today.
Um he says, >> You want to go back to Dan? >> to go back to Dan.
It's so >> We got a Dan addict over here. This Yeah.
Uh What What What What do you say about uh finance?
He said like they're wrong before breakfast or something. Finance, let's see.
Uh One thing Okay, one thing I One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions.
Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast.
So, they relentlessly seek new information sources.
Consensus is rare since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market.
Tech cares less for dissent.
Its movements are more herd-like in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time.
Startups don't need dissent.
They want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent.
showing again and again that many have thin skins. Uh taking shots.
Uh that contributes to a culture I think of it of as Silicon Valley soft Leninism.
When political winds shift, most people fall in line.
Most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right.
Uh so, uh he he's he calls San Francisco a very insular city.
He still has a lot of nice things to say about it.
Anyway, let's go back to Dan.
>> since you're back here, I thought I thought it was I I I he he talks about uh humor within tech and the CCP. >> Yeah, yeah.
Uh he he gives a line from Sam Altman that is uh uh Sam says, "I think that AI will probably most likely sort of lead to the end of the world.
But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."
I think that is >> It is funny. >> That is really funny. That's really funny. It's great.
It's also like maybe true. I don't know.
It's like a whole >> I think this is this is the the key problem for the tech industry in 2026 is like how do you need to paint a more like the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision >> Yes.
for AI because it's not working right now because people see their energy bill going up or they even hear about the idea of their energy bill going up and then they see some of the slop in their feed and the the the slop is getting better, right?
You look at some of the videos coming out of the slop in Venezuela debacle, right?
Uh >> I saw videos from there.
I mean, there there's >> Well, I saw I saw Maduro like face swapped into a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That kind of So, so the the the the video is higher definition, etc.
But people are people in all types of roles are worried about job loss and you know, they see the investment going into AI and they're just scared, right?
And so, when you you do quotes like this, whether they're serious or not, saying I think that AI will probably lead to the end of the world, people are starting to ask like, "Wait, why are we automating all of this in the first place?
Can we just stop, right?"
Like I don't Actually, I don't want my job automated.
I'll keep doing it, right?
Um so so the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimistic you know, because there's a lot of way There's a lot of very opt you know, I think Dan talks um in here about uh uh what is What is the line he says around uh uh young people, uh you know, uh people, you know, maybe in 10 years reminiscing about a time when young people didn't just have shelter and an income provided for them.
They had to fend for themselves, right? Um and so, Yeah.
So, anyways, I think that's real.
He He also talks about um CCP humor, which was uh he saying uh the PM 2.
5 back then was even worse than it is now.
I used to joke that it was PM 250. What is that? What is it?
Like he's just saying Like PM 2.
5 is uh is a as a measurement for air like air quality. Oh, oh, okay. Can you say that? Particles per million. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like PM 2. 5. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh let me I have a few rebuttals, but first let me tell you about Restream.
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So, uh first rebuttal on humor, some of the tech people are funny, and I was noticing this I I was remembering this as we watched our year-in-review video that Jackson and our team put together.
And in there, one of the clips is uh is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as like famously humorless because he's like trying to speak in many levels of and it's this thing >> Best Sam joke ever? Him coming on our show?
I mean, he was making the joke on the timeline. >> Yeah. He explained the joke.
He was saying, "I'd never buy a car for for $250,000." >> $250,000, yeah. It was hilarious.
So, so someone someone posted this uh this like this what it was GT3RS or something.
And And they were like, "Would you buy this >> for $250,000?"
And Paul Graham says like, "Oh, what a waste of money.
Like, I would never buy this."
And and Sam just said, "I would never buy it either."
And and everyone was like, "Oh, like, he's so out of touch. He has a Koenigsegg. He has an F1.
Like, he's it's ridiculous. Of course he'd buy it."
And and then he came on our show and explained that no, the joke was that he would never buy a car for 250 because he wants a multi-million dollar car, which is hilarious.
And a lot of people that I've talked to who've interacted with Sam a lot behind the scenes, like, in the right context, he he is truly very funny, but it's just hard because he's trying to speak seven different languages anytime he's on screen because he has to speak to politicians who want to regulate him, to people that might be losing their jobs, but to people also who want to come work for him, and also to investors who want to return.
>> it was so much easier it it it you know, in the uh in the 20th century, it it it was like you know, it was easy mode being a politician or a CEO cuz you could go into a room of business executives and said, "Okay, you currently spend" like if you were running like an AI company >> Yeah.
before the internet, before everything was recorded, before everything hit >> Yeah, yeah.
you know, every single distribution point immediately, you could go and say like, "Hey, you currently spend, you know, uh uh a billion dollars a year on payroll.
I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's going to you're going to be able to uh conduct lots of layoffs."
And then you could go on TV and say like, "AI is going to create an abundant >> Yeah. you know, future."
And that and the and the the clips wouldn't kind of circulate everywhere, right?
Or politicians could go to talk to >> Yeah.
a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here, right?
And then you just didn't have >> we see this on our show where where people come on and we're all having a conversation and we're all like, "Oh, yeah, this makes sense.
We all have the context."
And then a clip goes out and people are quote-tweeting it like out of context and being like, "Oh, I hate this.
I hate what they're saying."
And we're like, "Well, we weren't trying to get them to say something controversial, but they Before they Before you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TVP of 2025 just get context.
Just you get some context.
>> There was Oh, there was one more thing.
I want to go to this Dan Wang thing.
Uh he he has a great line in here about uh about feedback he got on his book.
Uh obviously there's criticism and stuff, but he has this great quip.
He says, "I learned of Leo Rosten's quip that it is the weak who are cruel, and gentleness to be expected only from the strong."
I thought that was a very good quote.
Just very interesting just saying that like uh like the the if you're you know, like like the the negative comments usually come from a from a from a place of weakness.
But that doesn't mean that there should be empathy.
Um there's one more thing about the AI future >> It's Reminds me of my It Reminds me of my 1 and 1/2-year-old who uh will bite my 3-year-old >> There you go. uh because Weakness. he's weak.
And so Yeah, so to take the cruel action of of trying to chomp the 3-year-old.
3-year-old's like, "Hey, look, I'm I'm a little mass monster over here." It's hilarious.
Uh Let me tell you about the two AI futures that are sort of dueling right now that I think are interesting.
And then we got to go back to Manas because you still haven't given your take on Manas.
Uh but let me tell you about Plaid first.
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>> So, we we we will have to dive into these pieces in more depth at some point, but basically I I I do think that uh even though Dan says that uh you know, tech is very insular, it's less contrarian, there's only you know, everyone aligns themselves around one vision of the future and just like runs at it.
And I think he he is correct in in some ways.
There is some dissension and and at least conversation back and forth, mainly between uh Dwarkesh right now and Ben Thompson.
Ben Thompson wrote a piece on AI and the human condition where he sort of reacts to uh Dwarkesh's uh piece with Phil Trammell uh Trammell uh called Capital in the 2020s 22nd century uh and Dwarkesh is talking about capital accumulation, inequality, how things might need to be redistributed in the future.
It's unclear exactly the the the the timeline and if you go out really, really far, it becomes much more much easier to wrap your head around all of this.
Like, the at one point they start talking about buying galaxies, uh which is sort of like a funny thought experiment.
Um and and and at that point like if you were to just say, "Hey, we're going full communist with the galaxies.
We're distributing them equally."
It's like, "Well, there's there's trillions of galaxies.
Like, you personally would get a thousand galaxies."
And it's like, "Yeah, that's probably like enough."
Like, it takes 25,000 years to get to the nearest galaxy.
Like, imagine the life Imagine the life you're living where you're immortal and you're like, "Just to go between my two my two galaxies that I own, it takes 25,000 years."
Like, I don't know that I'd be so pissed off that like, "Oh, I I wasn't able to get more than the one one six billionth of the galaxies out there." I I don't know.
It just feels like such crazy stuff.
>> to kind of stake a claim?
I know America we the moon's ours.
It's not legally yet, but it is ours.
>> It's somewhat inevitable.
>> it's crazy no one's been to the moon.
Like, we went there like 50 years ago, more.
And everyone was just like, "We're good." >> Lost art. Lost art. We'll send some robots.
But But literally, like, this is the crazy thing.
No No other country has landed a man on the moon. I I don't know why.
I What What are you waiting for? Get somebody up there.
Anyway, what were you saying about uh acquiring galaxies? You want one? You want more than one?
You want more than a thousand?
>> I want more than a thousand.
>> You want more than a thousand?
>> Say Say you're not a Say you're a uh A communist. Yeah. Like, I want more.
You want You want 2,000 galaxies?
But so I I think that quote was actually referencing Leopold. Yeah, it was Leopold.
And and people were arguing whether Leopold was being serious, and he was. >> It's sick. Yeah. It's a great quote. I love it.
I I've I've I've I It It is It is sufficiently sci-fi for me.
I'm I'm very, very excited about that quote.
Uh and it and it's thought-provoking.
It It's It's truly It's truly thought-provoking to think about what what property rights look like in a world where it takes you 25,000 years to get to the place that you own.
Like, your vacation home.
I Unless I I don't know I don't know if the AGI-pilled people are so AGI-pilled that they think we're going to defeat the speed of light.
Every like physicist I've ever talked to has always said like, "No, the the the the like that one holds forever.
That's not like, 'Oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple decades away' or fusion or fission."
Like, all these other things are like somewhat engineering problems.
I think the speed of light is like going to be around forever. Um I don't know.
Just needed a faster horse.
It's the year of the fire horse, by the way. >> Yeah. >> What does that mean?
Wait, I thought they only 2026 Chinese year of the fire horse.
But are we Are they adding superlatives to the animals?
I thought it was just horse, snake, dragon, and then they rotated through those.
It's the year of the fire.
It's We upgraded animals. It's the fire horse. It's amazing. Uh I'm I'm a fan. I'm a fan.
Manas is acquired, I think uh Okay, back to Manas?
>> Great great Chinese century coming up.
I think we're going to be I think we're going to be putting on those hats soon.
So, uh Ramp Labs modeled it out.
They uh of course Ramp Labs uh is AI agent for uh a spreadsheet software.
So, you can give it a prompt and it will build the spreadsheet for you. Very, very cool.
And uh they did a little analysis on the Meta acquisition of Manas AI.
They said the estimated price is 4 to 6 billion dollars based on AI M&A comps.
It's the fastest hunt to 100 million ARR in history, just 8 months. Wow.
And benchmark likely 8 to 12X in under a year.
Uh so so again, they're they're sort of estimating here.
I think uh people were kind of putting the deal between two and three billion. Yeah. Is is what I had heard.
Um so uh so again, so yeah, I mean, I guess let's get in Let's get it What What was I guess What was your immediate reaction?
Uh the thing that I was excited about is this is >> Zuck buying that people love.
>> Well, that's a debate.
But But I I like your take, but But they're Uh Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions.
>> what That's what I'm saying.
So So, he's he just went He just went through a talent acquisition era.
>> Uh he he they they they're the you know, biggest investor in Scale, right?
But But they didn't acquire the product, right?
>> Um still >> And And I think they're actually acquiring data from other >> And so historically >> companies has been saying, you know, drum you know, beating the personal superintelligence drum.
It's been very unclear what that means. >> Yeah.
Manas has been building high-quality agents.
They're sort of uh time and time again I talk to people that are just very excited about Manas.
They're like, "Just use Manas.
It's the year of the agent, right?
Like, use it, you'll see the future." >> Sure.
And so uh just given Zuck's history from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what their like one version of personal super intelligence is you have AI agents that can go out on the internet and do things for you.
They can go I think in the context of meta, I think about like shopping, right?
You see something on Instagram that you like and you can you could trigger an agent effectively like go find this product.
Like you see a car that you like go find this product.
And >> The elusive GG 3 best that that that you can't buy. >> Yeah.
Yeah, basically like you see you see a a like make make any image or video shoppable.
>> And and and in fact, I would I would probably argue that uh LLMs in the chat form where you have a bunch of information with a you know, knowledge cut off baked into a uh into some big model llama 4 and it's vended through you know, the Instagram search box that you chat with.
Uh that just it it can never fully satisfy the the vision of personal super intelligence, a personal assistant, something that actually can take actions for you.
It it feels like it's incredible. It's amazing.
Like obviously for knowledge retrieval, it's great.
But uh it was never going to fulfill the the the the real vision there.
So uh this does feel this does feel like I don't know.
I would I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way.
I wonder if if we are talking about going out and shopping for you off platform or if it's more doing things within the meta ecosystem.
I don't even know what that would look like, but a lot of the image models that they're training, um you can imagine that that they that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystem.
So if meta trains a amazing image editing model a nano banana, right?
Direct nano banana competitor.
What's that going to look like?
It's probably going to look like you take a photo, you put it in in Instagram and then you say, "Hey, change the background.
Make the sky less gray, right?"
And it'll just do it really really well.
And and that would exist purely in there.
And maybe they open source it, maybe they put it out, but that's not the that's not the product.
The product exists in the >> I guess one way that I am thinking about Manas in the context of what Zuck and and the AI team at Meta are saying which is personal super intelligence, right?
They're talking about they they've they've talked about integrating AI into Ray-Ban Meta's, right?
So when I think when and if you're using Ray-Ban Meta's, you can say, "Hey Meta" and then you can give it a task or or ask it a question or things like that.
And so I I expect that Manas type workflows will be heavily integrated into a hey when you say hey Meta and you're wearing glasses like, "Hey, build me a slide deck >> Yeah.
to help me prep for my final later, right?"
And I can imagine like effectively the the same product experience that Manas has today will be integrated into like Meta AI. >> Yeah.
Let me tell you about Vanta.
Automate compliance and security.
The leading AI trust management platform. Uh I I agree with you.
At the same time, there's a lot of areas where it feels very natural for Google to expand into.
It feels very natural for for Microsoft to expand into, Apple to expand into.
Like Apple has a spreadsheet app, right?
They have a word processor.
They like Meta doesn't really have those.
They did Meta for Meta for Meta work for a while, but they they doesn't this whole idea of like go to in open Instagram to do your homework feels crazy to me.
And the same thing with open Instagram to build a slide deck. That feels crazy to me.
>> Yeah, but but everything that they're doing in AI, they're they're piping through Meta AI, the new standalone app, right?
So that's a bunch of like to me, I look at that as like experimental area that you can just put anything into it.
Uh I I was told by uh someone uh close close to the action that uh apparently like the the Meta AI trough, the the the >> Meta vibes. The vibes. Yeah, Meta vibes.
Actually the usage is actually insane. >> Really? Yeah. >> No way. So trough. >> Trough.
Wait, no, but but I mean it's it's terrible in the App Store, right? It cannot be ranked.
Even even Sora is not ranking well.
Like can you just look this up? I don't know. Yeah.
>> looking that up, let me tell you about Phantom Cash.
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You see that ticker down in the bottom telling you the crypto prices?
That's thanks to Phantom. Um Ledgers.
Let me try and find I I I don't think Meta vibes is going to rank, but at the same time, they might have gotten a bump over Christmas because when you get the Ray-Bans, you unbox those, you have to download the Meta AI app to integrate with the Ray-Ban.
So maybe they got a pump from that. I don't know.
But Sora, um let me let let me see what It's not in the top 25 right now.
>> So Ben Thompson Ben Thompson recently wrote, "It's also worth noting the relative popularity of human generated content versus AI generated content.
Sora is down to 59 in the App Store.
And I count double digit human nominated social apps that rank above it.
Yet I get the argument that this is the worst AI will ever be, but it will also never be human, which is what humans want most of all.
There's a bunch of great posts about content and where all this goes.
And I think Ben Thompson offered a very very compelling white pill.
Dwarakesh is a little bit more like this is going to be extremely rough, so it requires you know, aggressive aggressive maneuvers and and rethinking the entire social contract and potentially the entire economy.
Ben Thompson is a little bit more like things can continue as they have been for the most part.
That at least I was like One thing with Manas uh This is maybe the first acquisition of in the billion in the billions for a company with a Isle of Man domain. They're manas. im. I am.
You don't you don't see a lot of multi-billion dollar. im acquisitions. >> Isle of Man.
Tyler, is that where you're from? Isle of Chad?
You Did you get any Did you get into looks maxing over the break?
I've been bone smashing over the >> like you got into looks maxing, doesn't it?
Doesn't his midface ratio look different?
>> to fix my recessed maxilla.
>> I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better.
He doesn't have the filter on.
Do you Wait, do you guys have the filter on?
I think yeah, I think they do.
I think they do have the filter on.
>> Cuz it's >> go like this. Do that. The double jaw, sir. >> definitely.
They definitely have the filter on. Definitely. Definitely.
Well, speaking of Dwarakesh, he's sponsored by Labelbox.
We're sponsored by Labelbox.
Labelbox are delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. We love Labelbox.
We're considering making a physical Labelbox.
>> And putting Tyler in a box.
We will figure out if we if we can figure out how to He's wanting to put Tyler in a box. I just like boxes.
So Signal asks, "Can someone explain why Meta bought Manas?
What's the one pager for Zuck other than we have an F ton of money, so why not?"
And Lucas Beyer, Meta's list researcher, says they know how to build they they know really really well how to build good agents and maybe that's enough.
Nick Joba says, "Best tool set on the market.
They bought a Swiss Army knife to handle any AI model, wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder, connectors."
So yeah, they're just good at product.
You got to give them Yeah.
Uh Eric Mehear says head in the head in the box.
His His handle has box in it.
He says, "I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to be commoditized and the value would be in the products on top of the models, but Meta made in GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all the oxygen in the room. As always, I was right." Hilarious line. As always, I was right.
>> Ex ex-Meta people are getting spicy.
Do you see the Yann LeCun Financial Times deep dive?
Uh we we should dig into that, but he took a bunch of shots at a lot of different people basically just saying like you can't tell a researcher what to do, especially not me.
He was very very salty over uh Alex Wang coming in and and becoming his boss effectively.
Um at the same time, it it feels like >> leveled.
Well, yeah, it it isn't odd I mean, it's a bold choice to to put Yann LeCun on the bench.
He's a I think Turing Award winner.
He's like one of the greatest AI researchers in history.
>> on the Meta's list, Tyler?
Yann LeCun, how did he do?
But he's back with a $3 billion fund raise valuation.
But the the interesting thing is like I think there's two ways that you can read into the Ilya Sutskever we are in an age of research story.
Tyler, do you have Yann on the Meta's list?
>> He actually wasn't on there. He wasn't on there?
I think we were we were trying to rage bait him or something. No way.
We Yeah, he he wasn't on there. Wow, we are so bad.
But anyway, um uh you can read Ilya's >> To be clear, you were trying to rage bait him.
We don't We don't participate in rage bait.
>> We we don't we don't have anything to do with the rankings.
Um the you can interpret the Ilya Sutskever age of research concept as uh hey, we we we if you're a hyper scalar, you need a really really solid research team to go extra hard into research because you want to be the first one to to have that research breakthrough.
So you need a lot of you need a lot of true researchers.
Or you can read into it as like, hey, this is kind of an AI winter and the and the research is sort of stabilized, so we can pull in all the best research.
Yeah, we need to get to the frontier, but we can be a month behind.
If we productize really well, we can win and we can have a really great outcome here.
And then, you know, when Ilya comes up with something great, it's going to get copy pasted all over the industry because of the you know, SF house parties and you know, papers that get written and you know, open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely silent, but typically it doesn't. Yeah. Anyway.
Yeah, Ali from Databricks was was at the end of the year was talking about how he he's fantastic. Got to have him back on.
But he was talking about putting people in different buckets.
So like there's a super intelligence, right?
There's a super intelligence bucket.
I think that when you look at like Zuck can say we are trying to build super intelligence. >> Yeah.
That is a much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising. >> Yeah. And commerce.
That is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around, right?
In some in some ways in some ways OpenAI is doing the exact same thing, right?
There are there are different groups that are that are taking you know, maybe the Anthropic's taking it taking a different uh approach in terms of saying like yeah, we're trying we're actually trying to build super intelligence and we're doing it in a very opinionated way. Yeah.
But anyway, so I I just I just like to see I will be very excited to see um hopefully see them try to take what Manis has built and dramatically scale it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Quick shout out to 2. 6 in the chat.
He says he's down 99 pounds. That's fantastic. >> Whoa.
He's up 20K and he says life is good.
So what an amazing start to the new year.
I also saw Sam Sheffer in the chat earlier.
He launched a new product over over the break called Timelines.
It's like a a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. >> fun.
Excited to check this out and congrats to to Sam.
Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.
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That's that's how it works, yeah. Anyway, Grok.
So there were two major blockbuster deals before the end of the year. Unclear.
I mean were both sort of these zombie acquisitions or were were were any of them just clean normal deals?
I guess we don't fully know.
We know that the Grok Nvidia deal was very much a a sort of go ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP, license, pay out the investors.
>> 20 billion dollar deal.
What should we do with that, John? Should we hit that?
Should we hit that AppLovin gong?
We have a new gong, everyone. Look at this gong. It's bigger than ever. It's bigger than ever.
We actually it's it's so big, it's so loud.
We have to be kind of careful with it.
I mean it's it's a John sized gong.
So John is 6'8 if if you're just tuning in for the first time. >> It's a massive gong.
And it is a massive gong for a massive company, fantastic company. Yes.
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Um So there's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Primack, about how Grok employees made out in the Nvidia deal.
He made some calls to find out and in short they did very very well even if not fully vested.
We did We did hear that so if you were there a very short amount of time and you were not senior at all, you might have had a bad run, but we'll have to dig into that a little bit more, but it seems like in general they did it was everyone sort of got paid.
It sounds like Chamath did very well on this.
He was a very early >> Oh, I mean Chamath haters were in shambles.
We need to check on that.
We need to check on that.
If you if one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them.
If you haven't heard from them, >> Well, check on them. Are you doing okay?
>> Let's just go hang out.
Let's go play some golf or something. Take him out. Touch grass. Touch grass.
It's going to be rough for a while.
Chamath is on a on a tear.
And what didn't he like didn't he basically give back the LP capital right before?
So it's like 100% of his own money or something.
I saw some take about that.
I'm not sure if that's when that happened, but I know Social Capital kind of converted to a family office.
Yeah, but that was that was way after. Way after, okay.
At least the first I mean he I mean the the the haters will hate to see that he invested back to back to back I mean with conviction, with authority, really.
And got to give him credit.
So Alex Heath over at sources.
news has new details on the Nvidia Grok deal.
The whole process took less than two weeks and was personally driven by Jensen Huang. No other bidders.
Huang wired money early and wanted the deal to close before the new year. What a chat. What a chat.
Send the 20 billion dollar wire.
Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs.
I'm good for my 20 billion. That was actually crazy.
Yeah, I mean very interesting.
Grok is we were we were talking about this like why is Nvidia buying Grok?
Is it a response to the TPU?
We'll have to get some of the semi analysis folks on the show to to dig into it, but I I think that there is you know, Grok has been they've been on this like super crazy roller coaster.
I I think not a lot of people expected them to wind up at 20 billion.
A lot of people assumed that the because I mean there's two sides to it.
One is like when if you read the actual Social Capital the actual Social Capital like memo that Chamath put together, it's it makes so much sense to invest at the valuation he did because Jonathan, the CEO and the founder, was early on the TPU team, the father of the TPU.
Like the guy understands how to make a chip that does one thing really well.
This was what seven years before people in tech broadly knew what the TPU was. >> Totally.
Yeah, yeah, very very early, yeah. Crazy.
But the So so so there was always like that sort of bull case that it was like it was a real team, real expertise, building something real.
But with a lot of the custom silicon, the custom chips, you could you sort of like point your bow and then you release the arrow and then you just like wait like five or 10 years because like tape out just just tape out just like going from the design of the chip to actually getting the first one made takes like 18 months or something like that.
Like takes years and then and then you're sort of locked into the specific spec and you're building an ecosystem of developers that can run on your chips.
And so like there's this you you you make a bet on a certain architecture and there's other firms right now that are betting on like we're going super long with transformer architecture.
We're going super long Cerebras like wafer scale.
We're we want to put the whole model on one chip instead of a rack instead of a rack of a whole bunch of chips.
Or we want to be really memory constrained or or have a ton of memory or something like that.
So you make your decisions about what tradeoffs you're making and then you kind of just wait and you hope that people come up with a use for what you made.
And with Grok, people were like okay, it's fast.
When when Llama came out, people were like oh, it can stream tokens really really fast. It's very cool.
Some of the demos are really cool.
But there was there were also a flip side where people were saying well, it was very expensive to do those demos and maybe it wouldn't scale properly.
But I think there was a little bit of like like uh the the team is great, obviously, and I think Grok was probably getting comped like you you were effectively looking at like Grok V2 versus like TPU V7 and you weren't necessarily accounting for like okay, if you continue to invest in this like Jensen will, obviously, and the team's
great and they have somewhat of a direction and there's also some sort of bifurcation of the models where sometimes you need a really big model, sometimes you need a really small model, sometimes you need a model that's in your phone, sometimes you need a model that's in a data center, sometimes you need a model in space. And sometimes you need a chip company
And sometimes you need a chip company that sponsors the winner of the Constructors' Championship. Grok sponsored McLaren. It's a one. It was a good omen. Jensen saw that.
He's like I got a lot of cash.
Why not buy a winning I mean they're the the chip company that's sponsoring the winning team. Pretty compelling.
Meanwhile Red Bull, loser. No chips. Works with Oracle.
Oracle stock been down in the dumps. Ridiculous.
Just doing F1 F1 sponsorship based analysis of markets. Anyways, continue.
So yeah, I mean I I I think as as this I I I heard an interesting take that that one of the wafer scale bull cases that if compute does go to space, you don't necessarily want a rack in space because not only does that take up more space, but you there's so many different points of failure of like is this connected to this?
Is this connected to that?
Whereas if you just have like one big you have the entire model just on one chip, you could potentially put that in space much much easier.
But Grok made a specific bet and and it's still it's not like it totally panned out and it's like they're winning right now.
Like TPUs are the hot thing, but then there's you know, Nvidia G you know, GB200s are still like flying off the shelves and there's all these debates about Blackwell and stuff.
And Nvidia's doing great, but I think if you look to the future where there's different models for different things, sometimes you need something really fast, sometimes you need something really smart, then you want to be able to control you know, all of the different chip architectures, all the different chips.
And and I remember didn't Jonathan tell us he doesn't fab at TSMC?
I believe he told us that and I'm I'm I'm pretty sure that's true.
And so there is also Where would he Maybe either Samsung or GlobalFoundries, I believe.
And then I think By the way, we got to give a shout out to Ryan Ryan Seibert LinkedIn chat.
He says W stream best content on LinkedIn. >> Ryan. Thank you for watching.
One of our two we we typically will have like three viewers on LinkedIn but but yeah thanks for restream we are there so thank you. Thank you for tuning in.
So closing out Grok there's a few different takes.
Tyler Hodge says it appears Grok will return over 4 billion dollars to social capital and Chamath.
I don't know how big the fund was but it's safe to say this is one of the best venture outcomes of all time. Unbelievable.
Power laws rule everything around. >> Okay.
Yeah just getting so did you did you read this as like defensive at all? This? Tyler? No no no no no.
No no I'm saying I'm saying just buying Grok.
It like is this offense or defense for Jensen?
Clearly he's got the he's got the he's just got a lot of cash.
He's got to do something with it.
Dividend he's not going to just dividend out cash.
He's willing to take bets with it.
He's investing in all the labs all the neo clouds right?
>> I I mean I think he's like almost like even though he's not literally the richest person in the world he's running the biggest company so he has the most capital like fire around the places.
And I think to put to put this into perspective this is like us saying investing in a nice camera. Right?
Like it's not the kind of like it's we take like Jensen took Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early.
You would you would do the same thing for for a nice camera.
But I don't I I I I guess the bigger question is like is is Nvidia spread too thin and they don't even own a social network.
Every other every other mag seven company owns a social network right?
Facebook Amazon has Twitch. Maybe they should.
Nvidia chat just for AI researchers on Rumble something like that. I don't know.
But but it it it it feels like it feels like they did DJX Lepton the the cloud that was competing with some of their customers feels like they sort of pulled back on that.
It feels like they've they've remained a as much of a pure play as you can at that scale and so this feels like I don't know maybe it's a little defensive but it it feels just like a very natural extension of what they already do which is selling chips.
It would be very different if we were if we were seeing them like oh they're they're they're they're they're buying power assets and they're going to build their own data centers and they want to get into or they want to step on Oracle's toes and they want to step on Crusoe's toes or anyone else's toes. Um so I don't know.
Um but let's go into Gavin Baker and what he says about Nvidia buying Grok.
He says Nvidia is buying Grok for two reasons.
Inference is disaggregating into prefill and decode.
SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth.
Ruben CPX Ruben and the putative Ruben SRAM variant derived from Grok should give Nvidia the ability to mix and match chips to create the optimal balance of performance versus cost for each workload.
Ruben CPX is optimized for massive context windows during prefill as a result of super high memory capacity with its relatively low bandwidth GDDR DRAM.
Ruben is the workhorse for training and high density batched inference workloads with its HBM DRAM striking a balance between memory bandwidth and capacity.
The Grok derived Ruben SRAM is optimized for ultra low latency agentic reasoning inference workloads as a result of SRAM's extremely high memory bandwidth and at the cost of lower memory capacity.
In the latter case either CPX or the normal Ruben will likely be used for prefill.
Two it has been clear for a long time that SRAM architectures can hit token per second metrics much higher than GPUs TPUs or any ASIC that we've seen yet.
Extremely low latency per individual user at the expense of throughput per dollar.
It was less clear 18 months ago whether end users were willing to pay for this speed.
SRAM more expensive per token due to much smaller batch sizes.
batch sizes. It is now abundantly clear from Cerebrus and Grok's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed and so we've seen this with a lot of the the you know the meme of like you're sitting there waiting for a deep research report in ChatGPT or you're firing off Claude code and then you're just waiting and you're scrolling or you're doing something else and um and there's just there's a lot of like
you know sitting around waiting around and now the really good developers are able to orchestrate six different Claude code instances all at once but uh everyone would be happy with faster responses and most people are in this weird in between where they're paying
$200 a month for something that they're that they're using constantly and is doing like all of their job and so would they pay $2,000 a month for something that's 10 times faster or even two times faster? In many cases yes if they're
In many cases yes if they're doing extremely economically valuable work.
And so anything that can that can offer a different dimension of optimization on that Pareto frontier is going to be interesting and that's why you're seeing folks try and become not just GPU rich but like ASIC rich on a particular on a particular scalar vector of the of the performance trade-off curve.
Anyway we should get Andrew from Cerebrus back on the show.
He came on for five minutes.
It was one of those it was one of those things that we had like We had two million people and we're like this guy's like a legend.
He's got an eight billion dollar company.
>> I'm glad we could ring the gong for you but this feels disrespectful at this point.
Anyway let me tell you about vibe.
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Should we talk about uh DoorDash. >> DoorDash.
Well no we're not talking about we're not talking about DoorDash.
We're talking about a post that people assumed was about DoorDash. Yes yes yes.
Um and Okay so the the the to the post is titled holy effing ass.
Not swearing really really hurts the quality.
Are you going to read it on the screen?
But he's very sensational.
So it's a screenshot from Reddit.
It has 36 million views and 207,000 likes. It's a massive post.
It got 11,000 upvotes on Reddit.
So it says I am a developer of a for a major food delivery app.
The priority fee and driver benefit fee go 100% to the company.
The driver sees 0% of it. $0 of it.
So here's where it gets conspiratorial.
It says I am posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don't care anymore.
I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly I hope they sue me.
I've been sitting on this for about eight months just watching the code get pushed I hope they sue me but I'm on a library Wi-Fi with a burner laptop.
>> into all the different aspects of this but this is crazy.
Some people in the chat already read this but we're going to go through it.
Um So just watching the code getting pushed production I can't sleep at night knowing I helped to build this machine.
You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you but reality but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I'm a back-end engineer.
I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings with where product managers PMs thanks discuss how to squeeze another 0.
4% margin out of quote human assets.
That's literally what they call drivers in the database schema.
They talk about these people that like they are resource nodes in a video game not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent.
First off the priority delivery is a total scam.
It was pitched to us as a psychological value add.
Like I said in the title when you pay that extra $2.
99 it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON but the dispatch logic literally ignores it.
It does nothing to speed you up.
We actually ran an AB test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders.
We just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by five to 10 minutes by making the prior to make the priority ones feel faster by comparison.
Management loved the results.
We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse not by making the premium service better.
Wait so it does this is this is incorrect because he says it is it does nothing to speed you up but like it you are getting a faster delivery there.
I mean it's like it's even in this scenario it's like maybe unethical but like this is actually a bull case for paying $2. 99.
Because like if the default service is actually slower and $2.
99 gets me five to 10 minutes faster >> This made me think they should add a feature that's whenever you get around I'll take it whenever you get around to it.
And so it's just like it's just like really really I'm feeling like I mean no it's just like the lowest cost version.
You might not get the pizza for three hours. >> Line.
Do you remember that or Uber Pool those?
Amazon does this for packages too.
So you get a credit if you like take it a Yeah yeah you get like a Kindle store credit or something on Prime.
It's kind of interesting.
But yeah so so I use DoorDash pretty regularly.
I never pay for priority delivery because the time always seems about the same and so I just don't care and I never push that button but this makes me feel like the button works even though he's saying it does nothing to speed you up.
And so that's kind of odd.
But anyway it goes on that to to to much darker places.
He says but the thing that makes me sick the main reason I'm quitting is the desperation score.
We have a hidden metric that driver for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.
If a driver usually logs on at 10:00 p. m.
and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high desperation.
Once they are tagged, the system deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders.
The logic is, "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he's desperate enough to do it for $6.
We save the good tips for the casual drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience while the full-timers they get grinded into dust."
That feels like that might not work.
Like you that might just wind up putting like a like a strain on the entire system and just slowing Like you feel like you would just want to like optimize for the fastest possible delivery at all times, but I don't know.
Anyway, uh theoretically this could be happening.
Um Then there is the benefit fee.
You've probably seen that 100 $1.
50 regulatory response fee or the driver benefits fee that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed.
The wording is designed to make you feel like it's you're helping the worker.
In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions.
We have a specific internal cost center for policy defense and that fee feeds directly into it.
That's so That's so interesting.
I I I feel like That's not really how That's not really how money money works in the business. >> works, right?
It's not like it's like route, you know, >> This is earmarked for this.
It's not a guy in linear being like, "Tag the you know, revenue from this product. >> Yeah. Send it to that.
No, no, you know what this is?
This is This is like dude logic for being like, "Oh, oh, I got I got a I got a $5,000 bonus.
Like this is watch money.
I should buy a watch or something like that."
Like this this money is for this thing, right?
It's like, "Oh, I got a bonus.
I got I'm buying a car with this with this money."
Instead of just being like, "No, you have a pool of money that is that is completely fungible and liquid.
And I would say I would say so so in restaurants around LA you'll see like an employee well-being charge which is like one you know, one to three, four, sometimes 5% that is going and I would assume that is going entirely to the employees, right?
Like the the the place we go for breakfast uh has a charge that that they advertise as going to the health care the employees.
And so if it turns out that restaurant owner was taking that money and kind of putting it towards rent, I would be very upset.
So so that I can understand the general the general framing here.
Uh all all of this is I mean The Well, so so so so the key difference is like is the money actually fungible or or is it a function?
Because it in theory like tips go to the service workers and if the restaurant has a great year and lots of people come in and they all tip a lot, then that money goes directly to the workers as a bonus, right?
And so they they get that delivered to them.
If you say, "Hey, the tips go to the workers and >> Just say you haven't worked in a restaurant. What do you mean?
Oh, the because it's pooled?
Well, I mean that when I when I worked in a at a at a restaurant, we'd get the tips.
I mean most of the tips were daily.
You get paid out Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
But but it is a function of the business.
It's directly aligned with the business progress.
And so and so you would expect that if if this delivery service, which everyone is alleging is DoorDash, um if if there are a lot of deliveries, there are a lot of people paying $1.
50 for driver benefits and so that creates a larger pool for driver benefits.
If the amount of drivers stays flat, then the amount of driver benefits should increase.
If that's not happening, then that is a violation of this promise, right? Basically. Yeah.
Uh in reality, the money goes straight to this corporate slush fund, they they say.
So, uh in regarding tips, we're essentially doing tip theft 2. 0.
We don't steal them legally anymore because we got sued for that.
Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.
Uh if the algo predicts you are a high tipper and you'll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay.
If you tip zero, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved.
Uh the result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver, it's subsidizing us.
You're paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and angry.
Ask me anything before this gets taken down.
I mean, really I mean, first of all, got to feel bad for this person who if it's real, they just quit working at delivery app.
The software and back-end software engineer.
Now they're drunk in a public library. On a burner laptop.
>> you allowed to be drunk in a library?
It feels like you shouldn't be drunk and angry in a in a in a public library on a burner.
Imagine Did they When did they buy the burner laptop?
Did they get drunk before they bought Did they get drunk and then go buy the burner laptop and then hit the library? Very premeditated. I don't know.
It's a No, I do so so I I get extremely I'm extremely frustrated I I will say this like This feels like This feels like This feels like fan Yes. Yes. What restaurant? Uh in in high school.
I worked at a my first my first my first job first job outside of reffing soccer was picking up cigarette butts with my hands for 2 hours in the morning.
And then I'd go at a restaurant and then I'd go work at a surf shop.
Then I eventually worked my way up the restaurant from picking up the cigarette uh butts off the >> Picking up the cigars.
No, it's just pure cigarette butts.
I was like I was like I I think I was Wait, people could smoke indoors or something It was it was like a it was a brewery. Okay.
Uh so people would sit out sit out there.
outside late at night and so that they would go until like >> child in a smoke-filled environment.
I'd go pick up the cigarette butts with my hands.
I didn't even wear gloves. Very very very gross. Yeah. Um Disgusting.
And so so I So this feels like it's fan fan fiction. Yeah.
There's there's certainly some truth to it which is the truth is that like if you're using a delivery app, you should assume the delivery app is trying to get as much money as possible from you and going to psychologically manipulate you into feeling better about the order, feeling better about the value, feeling like you're supporting this this this person.
They're going to do everything they can you you XY's to make it a delightful experience And and as somebody who I appreciate the I appreciate the the art of tipping. There's an art to it.
It's it's something I've always enjoyed doing because I'm always getting a service and I want to uh and I uh at multiple times in my life worked for for tips.
So, having this sort of digital intermediary that is messing with that relationship sucks, right?
Like if I order groceries and somebody's driving all around, I want to give them a meaningful amount of money for doing this service.
And so if if you have a this intermediary that's kind of messing with that and uh that's super frustrating.
Um Again, I don't I don't know exactly where this goes, right?
This is clearly a product that um participants on both sides are happily maybe not happily, but they're still like you know, you can say you hate these platforms, but you're still using them, right?
And people are still accepting these jobs.
There are people that as much as they don't like the experience maybe of being the labor side of this equation are ultimately still like the flexibility of being able to earn $10 here, $20 there, etc. So.
Yeah, the thing that always The thing that always bugged me was when there's not enough financial education among the workers that you saw like Uber drivers who would be like renting a car or or they'd buy a car with high depreciation and they wouldn't factor the depreciation into their wages.
And so they were actually upside down on the deal and losing money every month.
That felt like, "Whoa, okay, like there needs to be something that helps that."
I know that there at least with the Uber days, there were some forums where people would go and calculate the highest ROI vehicle you could possibly buy and sometimes it was a Tesla, sometimes it was, you know, "Oh, you get this version of the Escalade that's 4 years old so it's already depreciated and then you can do Uber Black and it's the highest ROI possible."
But but if if someone's not doing that, then they could actually not be making money which is very rough. But anyway, Yeah.
Tony rebutted this and said, "This is not DoorDash and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated this kind of culture to the kind of culture described in this Reddit post.
There's so much wrong with this post.
Dashers are not human assets.
Having a metric like a desperation score is an abomination.
We've never had a driver benefit fee.
Why would Why would you charge for faster delivery but not make it faster?
Uh we're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we work every day to make our platform better for everyone who comes to it.
What's described here is appalling and if true, whoever's operating in this manner should be ashamed."
And DoorDash, the official account, quoted as well and said the the awful claims in this post clearly hit a nerve.
To be clear, this is Reddit post is not about DoorDash.
Uh given how differently we operate, we thought we'd take a moment to share what our approach is actually like.
And uh There There's a whole bunch of back and forth.
Some people were were screenshotting it saying that it might have been AI generated and I think that's not a good rebuttal because first off, just you know, I read the whole thing.
It doesn't feel like it's written by AI.
But even so, if you're if you're a whistleblower and you have a bunch of information to share, I don't see a problem with passing that through an LLM to punch it up and get it spell-checked and grammar-checked.
Like it might not do you any good if people feel like it's written by AI and they feel like oh this is just someone trolling on Reddit anonymously but >> like to better what I would like to better understand is how many people um what what the actual churn is like on the on the driver side >> Yeah.
>> Yeah. uh of these businesses because uh you know people talk about you know this acceptance rate and and who gets what jobs and things like that uh in a traditional environment like in a restaurant if you are like a server let's say and uh your manager is like hey like you're you're in this kind of zone like what you're you're in the zone of the
restaurant any table that comes in here you're handling tonight and the server's like well I don't want to do that table because I don't think they're going to tip very well or that person always comes in and they just order they they they they're they're needy but they don't order that much and it's not going to be a big bill like that manager would probably end up like firing the person
right you have to like kind of accept the good and the bad right whereas for this it's different because DoorDash doesn't actually employ these people the drivers I think like the flexibility of the work I think that's like a big value prop and so again like it it creates a scenario where you have to use bunch of weird incentives to to make the to ultimately make the entire like if
half the time you went on DoorDash like your food never got delivered the service would cease to exist because people would just be like well I'm not going to I'm just going to drive and go pick it up myself um and I'm sure some people would argue that that uh that that's actually good but anyway >> Big question is did he tip his librarian? He was at the library drinking I think
He was at the library drinking I think if you're getting drinks at the library I didn't even know you could get drinks served at the library that's awesome I want to go to this library So so at least hit the librarian with a BuzzBall For sure. For sure.
This is a this is a life life hack.
>> If you have a 30 rack if you bring a 30 rack into the into the library you throw it down on the desk throw a BuzzBall to the librarian as a sign of respect >> Yeah.
librarian go beer me beer me brother if you're going to be in here posting on Reddit and and chugging beers all day long uh tip me tip me Oh well.
I think I think I hope that 2026 is year of the BuzzBall You're you're into BuzzBalls I was BuzzBalls were post my time Yeah.
BuzzBalls were post my time Yeah. They were big when I was in college >> and what I appreciate now in college people were ready for BuzzBalls like you were trying you were no you were you were trained in the sense of like if somebody threw a BuzzBall at you your
arms are staying at the side >> Oh we we oh this is a this is like a prank I I'm I'm completely unfamiliar with this Tell me the culture So the culture of the BuzzBall so you get a BuzzBall obviously like near the checkout at any type of like Yes I've seen I've seen them I've seen them. And
And so the idea is like you're going to buy the thing that you're actually going to drink but you just pick up one of these they have a few that's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol >> That's pretty strong for single >> Very yeah it's very strong >> It's more than a single serving of alcohol.
Yeah it's very strong and tastes terrible so it's like a punishment you would never drink one of these for fun >> Sure.
and and uh you go back to whatever your house or apartment and you you throw the ball at somebody if they catch it they have to drink it Got it.
>> Normally if you throw something at some somebody and they're not expecting it they're going to catch it cuz they're like what what's going on >> Um but in in in kind of at least the heyday of BuzzBalls for me >> Yes.
you knew this was something that could a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time anytime it could come out at 9:00 a. m. right 10:00 a. m.
And so you're going to keep your hands down and you're not going to catch it you'll like kind of you'll you'll side step it but now What if it like smashes into the TV are there like BuzzBall disasters that happen I imagine results in a lot of destruction And but now people people are not I I hit my dear friend Ben Ben Taft he's a venture capitalist he's my neighbor I hit him with a BuzzBall When?
A couple days ago like like three weeks ago he was fully unprepared fully unprepared he just caught it I would be unprepared I feel bad that I feel bad that you that you caught this Scoot in the chat says I I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a BuzzBall this is
good lore It's good it's good This is great This is good scoot see see BuzzBalls Is is the is the is the culture of the BuzzBall alive and well on college campuses or do we need to send you back >> 21 I never had alcohol Oh okay oh yeah yeah that makes sense. Uh well well
yeah that makes sense. Uh well well maybe we have to send you back for for for one one non gap semester day on your 21st birthday to go experience uh college life and and the life of the BuzzBall Anyway let me tell you about
Gemini 3 Pro it's Google's most intelligent model yet state of the art reasoning next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding Okay let's uh let's go to uh one of the more viral posts from the last uh few weeks from the holiday Kick us off read this. Oh you want me to read it? Yeah.
Oh you want me to read it? Yeah.
You want me to No no no I'm I'm okay I'm I'm kidding um this is just one of Uh so Justin says am I just a monster?
I just a monster? It's been four years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul the truth is I just don't like being around kids for very long historically this is not uncommon among fathers but today it feels almost illegal it's causing me a lot of confusion confusion and anguish The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably
about 70 to 140 minutes a week roughly 10 minutes each day maybe two times a day taking breaks from work My feelings of love towards them are perfectly strong but I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil I just want to be working or accomplishing something I try to be grateful but it doesn't work it's 9:00 a.m. this morning Saturday m.
this morning Saturday January 3rd it's a sunny warm day here in Austin my 4-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street I was drinking coffee still waking up so I didn't really feel like it but at this age his desire to play is insatiable he begged and begged so I conceded and with a smile I have no problem being a kind and loving father the problem is I only is only that I do not enjoy it Brutal.
Very very brave to to post this it's not that I'm trying to maximize >> but we haven't seen the other side of this what if his son is like yeah bro I don't enjoy it either Yeah.
Yeah another father >> what if this is going to be like a generational you know father son rivalry where Some some patricide going Yeah we don't know. I don't know.
Anyway Justin continues it's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure it just seems wrong that I experience so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much It was beautiful we live on a picturesque tree lined block I'm even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest Give it up for tree lined blocks great places to raise kids >> how to make them anymore.
>> how to make them anymore. Uh playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience yet for every single minute on the inside I just don't want to be there I want to be drinking my coffee in peace then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed When we're done I know that when he is a
teenager I'll long to have these days back I have all of this perspective rationally and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it but nothing fixes me emotionally Am I a terrible person or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are
off whether it's my fault or not I don't even care I just want to figure this out something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this Okay well a lot of people weighed in 14 million views Uh 3,000 reposts 5,000 likes >> would I would ultimately say this is the the worst uh like to view ratio means that a lot of
>> Seven more replies than likes uh crazy crazy stuff Uh anyway I I like Justin he's been on the show he came and talked to us about Nick Land he's very interesting thinker uh very interesting writer um I think And one one thing that what that part of what he talked about was like how you can make it as an independent writer >> Yeah. or a creative
or a creative >> Yeah yeah.
>> Yeah yeah. And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is like their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass But also outside of institutions like he he's not in an academic organization he
he he could be doing like writing or in house somewhere at some tech company or something I think he was talking to us a little bit about that um but but he's been very very independent and that obviously creates the type of work that consumes
all it seeps into all sorts of cracks because there's no moment when when you're like okay I'm logging off and my boss doesn't expect me to do anything until Monday it's like oh you could always be doing a little bit more when
you're effectively an entrepreneur so there's a little bit of that in here I think in general skill issue skill issue I love Justin but skill issue um you have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method This is parenting a parenting the Dan Bilzerian method
especially this works especially well for 4-year-old boys so you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian but instead of entertaining like a Instagram girl you're entertaining a 4-year-old so you're like hey want to get in a really fast car and drive around fast they're like
absolutely that sounds amazing want to go look at fine watches want to go uh you know want to go look at guns or whatever else like whatever Dan Bilzerian does want to learn poker buddy they'll be like absolutely I want to play cards uh 4-year-old boys have the
mind of Dan Bilzerian effectively and so before you say oh yeah I yeah I can't I can't find I can't afford you know fancy car like Dan Bilzerian a 4-year-old cannot tell the difference between an SF90 and a Dodge Viper just get the Dodge Viper Get a red car tell
him it's a Ferrari They will they will be they will be so stoked my son wants to have a black wing themed birthday party and I'm like dude we're not we're not doing a Cadillac CT5 V Blackwing themed birthday party. It is a very weird thing. I got this car
It is a very weird thing.
I got this car half jokingly.
I know you love it because it it goes room and it goes very fast and he's very excited about it.
But truly like you have to return to like four-year-old boy mentality and that is the mentality of Dan Bilzerian.
And so if you adopt the mind of Dan Bilzerian, you will have a very enjoyable time with your four-year-old son.
But I I think the bigger picture is that is that like Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch and that's fine.
Like My son is a soccer player.
>> I think it's slightly deeper than that.
I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life as a man >> whose job is to provide for his family.
If you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting.
Unless unless you're behind the the wheel of a Dodge Viper that's red. >> Yes. Yes.
But what I understand here is is my my reading of it is like he doesn't feel sad like he doesn't he he like it's maybe a sense of stress.
It's hard to enjoy just playing catch or going for a walk or you know over the last two weeks I was spending all day with my wife and kids and it's raining, right?
So you're kind of like stuck indoors and you're and our options are like going outside like I would go outside and we would walk around and like pick up slugs and like box, right?
Because Dan Bilzerian >> four-year-old mode. And I I felt at peace. I was enjoying that.
In part because we worked so hard last year.
I was like, you know, norm historic historically on Christmas breaks I was like I would be annoyed that it was the holidays because I'd be like it's inappropriate for me to email somebody and say like hey let's talk, right? It felt like >> Yeah.
hitting it you know needing to slow down for like this couple speed bumps when you're trying to go 100 miles an hour.
And so Yeah, I think that's I I ultimately think that's that's just a huge part of it.
It's like the more satisfied you are by your life as a father, the more satisfied you'll be just doing the simple things of life with your kids.
The other thing the other thing that's that that I've noticed is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is.
It's actually like if if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend you know 10 minutes you'll get that sort of endorphin rush and that's that's enjoyable and then it kind of drops off from there.
But the more like increasing returns to scale. Totally. Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I I've been playing Mario Kart with my son and he beat me for the first time ever just yesterday and it was like this like very interesting moment, very cool. Felt very fun.
But also it's like I just I enjoy playing Mario Kart. So Yeah.
And same with like when we do Legos now.
>> And so now you guys can start you can start gambling his allowance on Mario Kart.
Introduce him to introduce him to putting some money on the line.
Every once in a while he like acquires coins randomly somehow and like he's very proud of that.
But yeah, I I do think that there's there's something to be said for trying to find activities that align because a four-year-old specifically a four-year-old boy I think I mean that's not my only experience.
But a four-year-old boy with with a father is like the most mimetic creature possible.
Like he's literally just looking to you for everything.
So you can say I like dinosaurs and he'll be like I'm so into dinosaurs.
But you but if you're not into dinosaurs, you can be like actually I want to go look at horses today or something.
Whatever you're into like they will be alongside like There's times when I can like like like whenever we're in the car like we he he doesn't request >> to read the Wall Street Journal.
>> Get ready to read the Wall Street Journal, buddy.
I actually am I actually am excited I I'm excited for that.
>> will read I will read all sorts of stories to him and yeah, I have to stop and like explain them in like I'm five literally explain them like I'm four.
But it's still fun and same thing with the music.
Like he he wants to listen to my playlist.
Like he wants to listen to rock music and like the songs that I like.
And yeah, I do I do a light filter so that there's no like extra Yeah, part part of that is almost leadership.
I think uh My son loves dinosaur is probably you know if there was a if Spotify wrapped >> on dinosaurs. >> Yes. Yes. Yes.
No, but what I was going to say is if there was like a if there was like a kids book Spotify wrapped, he'd be in the top point 0001% dinosaur enjoyers.
The problem is like I read I read to him before bed every night, right?
Seven days a week we're reading.
If if he was just like deciding what we were going to read, it'd be dinosaurs every night. >> Yeah.
And it's so hard to pronounce Dude, you got to give me some dinosaur book racks because uh No, but but let me finish.
So where I got to is I'm like, okay like I we got to introduce we got to introduce more books because like if if we're there there are like kids oriented books even for like the four-year-old range that are more that are like interesting parables Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> timeless and worth reading. >> Yeah.
And so I've like enjoyed massively over the break like switching it up a lot.
We got like a comic book comic book style like action comic of the Bible, right?
So we're reading that, right?
And that's like he enjoys it. I enjoy it.
It's just like you got to be like switching it up and not >> the same time like you want to be leaning into their interests but not not overly just doing whatever generate your own ideas. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Turn this semi-analysis deep dive into a children's book so that I can read it to my son. about the TPU V7.
There's something something there. >> Something there.
You got to give me some recommendations for dinosaur books because my son found a dinosaur toy, took a picture of it, ID'd it with one of the one of the LLMs and uh and then he was like I want to know more.
I want to read books and I realized I'm actually like woefully under resourced when it comes to dinosaur books.
Like I have like poop and none of them are particularly good. So anyway.
Um breaking breaking news >> Breaking news?
We got some breaking news. >> What's breaking news?
>> Uh Department of Energy just announced that it awarded General Matter 900 million for uranium Wow.
Hit that AppLovin gong John.
It shakes it shakes the camera. It shakes the camera. That's amazing.
Uh I think we got to figure out how to hang the gong from the rafters. >> We do. Yeah. Yeah. We we can keep refining. >> We're refining. Let's let's pull this.
Well, while we do that, let me tell you about Lambda.
Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Let's move on to our breaking news. Uh What you got for me? Let's see. So the US awards 2.
7 billion worth of orders to boost uranium enrichment.
So it sounds like there's a few players here.
Department of Energy announced Monday it was awarding orders 2.
7 to three companies to boost domestic uranium enrichment over the next 10 years in a broader effort to reduce US dependence on Russian supply. Yeah. Oh, no. No. No.
A lot of the a lot of the uranium comes from decommissioned missiles and stuff.
So it's already been processed and then they they they break it apart and and and and we you know just buy it from them because they're like basically denuclearizing I believe. Pretty pretty well.
>> Yeah, so it's American Centrifuge Operating, General Matter and Orano Federal Services secured the order. Nice.
The department said in its If you want to sell to the government, maybe put federal services in your name.
>> Well, I I I I think it's I think that might be not a startup.
I think that might be owned by the government or something like that.
>> Is it or is it a private Is it a private It's uh Is it private?
Says it's a private company.
But uh the contracts would require the companies to meet specific milestones to provide enrichment services for low enriched uranium and high assay low enriched uranium for existing nuclear power plants and new smaller modular reactors.
Today's awards show that this administration is committed to restoring a secured domestic nuclear fuel supply chain capable of producing the nuclear fuels needed to power the reactors of today and the advanced reactors of tomorrow said Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.
Uh Russia is currently the only country that makes HALEU enriched uh uh uranium enriched to between 5% and 20% which is said to make new high-tech reactors more efficient in commercial volumes.
Funds to make the fuel domestically in the United States were included in a law to ban uranium shipments from Russia fully by 2028. So. Um big uh big news. Very cool.
Um Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Your business's AI, their business is securing it.
CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches in the tracks. Check out CrowdStrike.
Um So uh the the the Dworkin piece it's it's it's sort of big.
We might want to go through it.
>> Let's save it for tomorrow.
Let's save it for tomorrow.
Um let's skip through this.
Uh the the the big shift to Miami. Miami is back.
Uh this was from Teddy Schleifer in the New York Times. He writes, "News.
Larry Page and Peter Thiel are making moves to leave California by the end of the year to avoid a possible billionaire's tax that could hit them where it hurts."
And uh Uh Patrick Collison said yesterday Miami posting might be a phenomenon whose time has passed.
But having just spent a few days visiting, it really does feel like a boom town in a way that no other American city that I've spent time in over the past few years does.
In some way, it reminds me of Chinese cities. Why was he in Miami?
Was he just there for the Soho Beach House?
Was he there to >> F1 maybe? F1? F1. F1.
It takes place in Miami every year.
Oh, you think he was in there like this week?
>> He said having just spent a few days visiting. >> Okay. I don't know.
Because I mean To be clear, like Patrick Collison would be subject to Totally.
the the billionaire tax that Ro Khanna Ro Khanna uh Former former guest of the show?
Former guest of the show.
It was funny it was funny so so Ro came on the show and I asked him about something that he had said like a week prior and he was like, "I don't agree with that."
It's like it seemed he seems to be a guy that does it's a weak beliefs weakly held. >> I don't know.
Um So uh anyways, uh but yeah, it was uh yeah, David Sacks uh announced the uh David Sacks announced that he was going to Austin. >> Yeah.
Um PT uh great press release.
PT clearly uh press release from PT. It was December 31st.
Ro Khanna said, "Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for 5 years to pay for health care for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts.
I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists.
When they threaten to leave, I will miss them very much.
So Ro Khanna will not be missed."
>> saying uh everyone that leaves.
There is the the the the the debate sort of shifted back to like, "Okay, if if if billionaires do leave successfully, um what will the impact be on the technology industry?"
Uh and I'm wondering if the question is not like Silicon Valley exists in San Francisco and Silicon Valley or like you you know, the Deli and idea of like, "Let's move Silicon Valley to Miami."
Like that didn't really happen.
But is there is there a world I I had this theory that Miami could become you're not moving Silicon Valley to Miami.
You're moving Sand Hill Road to Miami.
And like no startups move to the Bay and are like, "I need an office on Sand Hill Road."
They're like, "I'll get an office in San Francisco.
When I want to raise money, I'll drive down to Sand Hill Road."
Yeah, but almost every venture capitalist also just got a presence in San Francisco.
No, but what you what I mean is that like there is a there's a fundraising hub that that uh that founders go and visit and whether it's in Sand Hill Road or the Presidio or Miami, it is accessible if you're doing a road show.
Like if you're taking a series B seriously, you're probably going to spend a week in New York.
You're probably going to spend a week in Miami at this point and maybe Austin, too.
And going around to different locales for fundraising doesn't seem that hard.
And Yeah, in in 2021 Yeah.
people were doing Miami road shows and they were pretty effective.
You could go to Miami and get around.
Like Miami tech week that was the main thing with that.
Yeah, and you were you were uh sometimes just calling back to the West Coast doing Zoom calls, but you could meet a bunch of VCs and you know, tight And then also like most of these funds have like one or two billionaires at them.
And then the vast majority of employees of the fund would not be employed.
So you could have the founder or the core GP somewhere else and then the entire team there on the ground taking a ton of meetings.
And if it's time to meet the big guy, you fly out or you do a Zoom call. Yeah.
So So I don't know that this whole idea of like transplant everyone I guess it is a question it is a different question for the founders because like Sam, Dario, these guys like they they cannot be in Miami and actually run a an organization in San Francisco.
I would imagine they'd just have to pay this and uh it'll be very odd.
Well, I guess not Sam cuz he's like who knows where he is in terms of equity.
I mean, he's probably above it broadly, but >> Every definition that He's like, "Would you like some nonprofit credits?" No, every every Yeah.
I I'm sure Sam is close to a billionaire just off of his Stripe money.
>> Yeah, just off of other stuff for sure for sure. Okay.
The car collection alone. Here's a theory, okay.
Sam is actually behind this because it's going to force Dario either to pay a massive fine or whatever or they're going to have to move. Mhm. Right?
That's better for Open AI cuz he doesn't have the Yeah. Get the tin foil hat on.
So Sam is actually behind this. Maybe.
>> everyone out of Silicon Valley so he can stay there.
I maybe I somehow don't I somehow don't think that's going to uh that's what's going on.
Uh anyway, uh Ro Khanna is a >> Yeah, I mean, the the funny thing that this whole wealth tax debate was happening almost at the same time as the s- Somali daycare Somali daycare thing.
>> Yeah, which was very odd because uh it's it it it's this question of like, "How effective is government like once you get the money into the government?"
It sounds very nice that it's like, "Oh, it could be redistributed."
But if it all gets like stolen to me.
Which was funny which was funny uh because we we've had a recurring bit on the show where we said like, "Is PT really a billionaire?
Like I've never seen him in Chrome Hearts. Oh, yeah.
I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens.
Yeah, and then the guy is wearing a RM.
>> him with with an RM, a racing machine on the wrist, right?
And the Somali daycare founder was actually rocking Chrome Yeah, for a press conference. >> crazy. Crazy.
You know, uh on on on the on the on the >> on the question of like of like, "Is the government effective at just redistribution broadly?"
Um the I I was reflecting on this fact that there you can kind of put the billionaires in two camps.
There's like uh let's call them like the bleeding hearts that like they sign the Giving Pledge and they say, "I'm going to give away half my wealth or all my wealth."
Um and then there's like the the ruthless capitalists say, "I'm not giving away anything.
I'm just going to pass it on to my kids, right?"
Uh and and so there's those two camps.
And and let's let's call the bleeding hearts like they really do want to give away.
They want to do uh they they want to leave their their capital behind with other people in better ways.
They want it to be given away, right?
Uh no one that I'm aware of of the Giving Pledge folks has ever just said, "I'm going to give my money to the government."
Like they've never just been like, "Oh, actually I should just give it to the federal government because the federal government is an efficient way to >> the debt.
to distribute pay down the debt or just like distribute it to people in a tax rebate or something.
Like it's always been, "Okay, I got to go and do like this health care and this cancer research and this doc and the it's always something more specific."
>> Gates' uh new pledge is specifically going to deploy a lot of capital into Africa.
Yeah, but it's never it's never just, "Okay, yeah.
Like I built my wealth in California.
I'm just going to give my money to the state of California." which is odd.
Um but Ro Khanna puts a lot of context here.
He says, "My district is 18 trillion dollars, nearly 1/3 of US stock of the US stock market.
In a 50-mile radius, we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar uh and um we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar companies.
This is not AI written, but it maybe should be.
Uh if I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other members or 100 senators.
Those saying we would not have we wouldn't have a future Nvidia in the Bay if this tax goes into effect are glossing over Silicon Valley's history.
Jensen was at LSI Logic and his co-founders at Sun.
He started Nvidia in my district because of the semiconductor talent.
I I do I do sort of agree with this.
Like I I I I think the the effects would would take a very very long time.
No, no, the the the the issue I have is the s- is uh it's just a slippery slope down uh uh the the the asset seizure mountain.
>> They really they really got to build the high-speed rail.
Like like all of this is just so like the high-speed rail is just such an easy dunk on all of this.
Like high-speed rail, you know?
Like, "Oh, you want more high-speed rail?"
Like high-speed rail didn't work.
So like you need nothing you do works.
I- I- if I was Gavin Newsom, I feel like I'd just be like, "Okay, I'm I'm actually going to go finish the high-speed rail thing."
And then you can't say that anymore cuz I did it. Yeah.
>> But it's still and it's like we were we've talked about the high the high-speed rail thing was a meme like 3 years ago.
It's like you've had 3 years to go build more high-speed rail and like it just hasn't hasn't happened.
Uh and and I think that's like it's I mean, it was the it was the cornerstone anecdote of Ezra Klein's book Abundance with Derek Thompson.
Uh he it's like the main anecdote for like a new order among like liberal Democrats.
And I I thought it I thought it did it broke through really well because it met people where they were which is dissatisfaction with the lack of progress, lack of building, lack of abundance Yeah.
uh on on the left and um and uh and Ezra sort of like reset the discussion a little bit. Um so I don't know.
I I'd be interested to see where he weighs in on this particular is he a fan Yeah.
or does he think that this is a good one?
Uh Friedberg had some of the best commentary on this.
Uh he absolutely mauled Ro Khanna.
It was it was a brutal mugging.
Uh there's a quote from the All-In pod X account.
They say, "Friedberg, California's billionaire tax is a Trojan horse to go after the middle class's private assets." Mhm.
Uh Friedberg, "The reason they're calling it a billionaire tax is to make it easier for people to vote for it and sign up uh to this entirely new tax system that they're proposing to put on all Americans at some point and for the first time ever degrading our private property rights.
Forget how much wealth you have.
Forget about how rich you are.
Forget about the term billionaire, millionaire, whatever it is.
We're creating or proposing the creation of a new tax system that allows the government for the first time ever to come in and audit everything you own.
All the jewelry your grandma gave you, the value of all the couches in your house, the value of your car, the value of all your stocks and bonds.
And the government can come in and for the first time look through the veil into your personal property and say here's how much all this stuff is worth.
I'm charging you a percentage of that.
That's what I need to get paid.
And it doesn't matter that it starts with billionaires.
What matters is that we're giving the government the right to look into our private property and take a percentage of it every year.
The total net worth of billionaires in the US is 8 trillion.
The net worth of the US the middle class and everyone else is 170 trillion compared to the 8 trillion of the billionaires.
Chamath says they need a way to open the doors to think after the real honeypot.
The real honeypot is not 200 people.
And Friedberg continues, just so everyone understands what the real goal of this is not to tax billionaires because there are other ways to tax billionaires.
You could charge them a capital gains tax if they borrow against their assets that they haven't paid capital gains tax on. Very simple. That can resolve this.
Another thing you can do, you can raise the capital gains tax rate. Sounds unpopular.
I don't agree with that, but that's another way to deal with this, which is to take the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 30%. You could do that.
The real goal of this is to create for the first time in American history a private property asset seizure tax because they're going after the 170 trillion, not the 8 trillion that the billionaires have.
So, yeah, again, the founding fathers would be absolutely disgusted with the state of our current tax structure.
They would be throwing up.
Cover the New York Post would be crazy.
Yeah, I just think people need to realize like how how far this can go and I think that the political story of the next of the next seemingly decade, two decades potentially as our lifetimes is politicians running on I will raise taxes.
I will take assets from people.
I will take the assets from private citizens and I will redistribute them to you if you vote for me.
And that feels like an incredibly vicious cycle that I don't I don't see how it how it ever stops.
So, I'm so black pilled on it.
I don't even want to talk about it anymore.
The number The number of billionaires has grown globally from 140 in 1987 to over 3,000 in 2025.
With enough inflation, everyone will be a billionaire eventually.
If we go through a period of hyperinflation, you could see everyone making billions of dollars in the future.
>> Print Yep, hyper inflate. Hyper inflate.
Everyone's a billionaire.
You know, there's like countries where like you you like there there was so much inflation that people would be making billions of dollars for a loaf of bread, basically.
Quadrillion dollar I'm reading reading a book on the banking system in in the 14th and 15th century right now.
And they introduced various governments would introduce wealth.
They were always like going to war with other city states.
And so, various governments would like introduce a wealth tax.
And then so, people were just constantly trying to argue like, well, this isn't worth that.
Or they'd be putting, you know, they'd be putting assets into a bank under a bunch of different names.
Like there was tons of tons of tons of fraud and um but ultimately people do not enjoy earning earning dollars, buying assets, and then having those assets confiscated.
It does feel like it will create an immense amount of jobs.
Like assessing all these assets.
I mean, like the the family offices of these billionaires themselves, which is employs like dozens of people to track everything.
And then you have the the flip side of that, which is the private the the state effort to monitor all these assets It's so it just becomes Yeah, it's it's it's it's going to be truly it's truly an impossible like, you know, we we spend all of our not all of our time.
We spend a lot of our time covering the private markets, right?
And so, if you're a business owner and you have a some somebody in the government coming and saying like, hey, you made X amount.
You made you made a million dollars.
We're actually looking at public comps right now and companies in your category are trading at between 20 and 30 times earnings.
So, actually, you're worth, you know, you're worth 50 million dollars.
And and we have this tax where if you're worth 50 million or more, which which Elizabeth Warren has has proposed a wealth tax.
I think like eight eight per She's talked about doing like 8% above 50 million, something like that.
And and so, yeah, you're you're actually you you qualify Congratulations.
You qualified for the wealth tax.
And the person's like, well, we only had this much net income last year because of this one-time thing.
And suddenly you're having to argue against the value of your own um It'd be very weird because a lot of startups want to get the valuations high as possible for recruiting purposes.
And then you have like for tax purposes, they want to minimize the valuation.
Yeah, it's it's never it's never going to work.
I I was talking I was catching up with a portfolio company founder over the break and technically I have shares in the company that are marked at close to seven figures.
And he's considering a pivot right now, which means that like the value of the equity is is is worth like is worth like a tiny fraction it's a tiny fraction.
Yeah, it's it's starting over start basically like starting over from zero.
Or also there's a scenario that he just shuts it down, right?
And so, it's like I I kind of put the even though even though like investors in the company have that equity marked at tens of millions of dollars, I value it at effectively zero.
But the government will not.
The government will be like, oh, look at this reputable VC that backed that that that backed the company. And they just did it.
They did it in the last year.
Of course, how can you say this is not worth that this is worthless stock?
This looks like it's worth quite a lot.
And and anyway, so Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify and then let's move on to some outlooks for the future.
Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business.
It lets you sell in seconds online, in store, the backbone >> on social, on marketplaces.
Now with AI >> of the internet economy. Backbone of my career.
I've been using Shopify since 2012, I believe, 2013.
So, yeah, over a decade on Shopify. Wow.
All right, let's talk predictions. Okay.
What did Scott Belsky predict for the future {slash} 2026?
Number one, he said, massive amounts of talent arbitrage.
There is much fear and discussion about job losses as a result of AI, but the often young and fearless AI native talent that is most aggressively engaging with new tech has a fascinating advantage in the current workforce.
People with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses.
For example, companies want to hire answer engine optimization efforts or experts over search engine optimization practitioners.
Most marketing leaders are still not conducting old-fashioned focus groups rather than using AI breakthroughs in market research.
2026 provides a precious work window for young or overlooked talent to gain an advantage as early adopters. Two.
The buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by the reality of what audiences increasingly crave, craft, meaning, and shared experiences.
The industry This is particularly interesting because of course he works at A24.
The industry will start to realize that there's a stark difference between content creators, those who who willing those willing to trade control for speed using AI to make ads and social media content, and artists, those not willing to trade control for speed who only favor emerging technology that preserve control and precision to help new and better stories be told.
The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood, while the prompt-based slop tools will focus more on social content creator use cases.
Finally, the idea of personalize personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people fish favor shared experiences.
Ben Thompson's talked about this a lot, the Schelling point.
Like Taylor Swift is a specific event, and when you go to that when you go to that Taylor Swift Eras Tour and you run into someone else who also went to the same show, you can talk about that and it's the same thing.
And people, even though they like personalized content, they also like being able to say, oh, do you Do you agree with Dworkin's take?
Not just Do you agree with what AI told you specifically today and you saw something completely different.
People do like that shared experience.
And I think that's something that's a little more tractable than people give credit to.
Finally, the idea of So, people want to be inspired by craft and they want a common experience discuss or even share in theaters with friends.
Did you see any movies over the break?
Yeah, this is this is why people enjoy watching TVN is they can debate is Tyler using the gigachad filter right now.
It provides the shared experience that that you can have a conversation around.
What did What did you say?
Did you see any movies over the break?
Sicario one and >> Let's go. I recommended that. Give me your review. I mean, masterpiece. Masterpiece.
Goes in my top five films ever. It's fantastic.
>> You know, I've only seen four.
That's That's right, but it's still uh top Yeah, did you like You know the difference between one and two?
Like completely different team.
So, so one one is regarded as Taylor Sheridan didn't do two?
I I forget exactly the the the difference.
I need to look it up, but uh Sicario two, I I believe it had a different I believe it had a different team.
The director Stefano Sollima directed two. Exactly.
Yeah, and and I think I think it got it got worse reviews than the first one.
But did you like one better than what?
Did you tell me got >> Utopia. Just skip Utopia one. >> Utopia one is great. Go straight to two. Great movie.
Another with your four Yeah, anyways, what what what movie do you recommend I watch next? Ooh, that's a tough one.
There was there was a list of movies that was going viral from Was it Bill Simmons movie list? Movie list.
This one uh Did you watch the ping pong? Marty Supreme? I didn't.
I didn't get a chance to see it.
You watched it, what did you think? What's your review? Um it was pretty good. I enjoyed it.
I I like Saftie brothers, their movies. >> Yeah, me too. Okay, here's the thing.
The marketing was so good and so intense that I it feels very likely without having seen the film that the marketing overshadows the film itself.
Do you think that tracks?
Uh yeah, I maybe >> Like what what will we remember What will we remember more in five years?
The marketing or the film?
Yeah, I think that's definitely an argument you could have, which is like not you don't usually like say that about movies. So yeah.
Just by saying that it's like yeah, probably the marketing.
>> Yeah, maybe it's a lesson.
It's like you don't make your marketing too good, otherwise people They feel like they got the experience.
This is something Derek Thompson talked to us about and Dan Wang called called out again to go back to his piece.
He he said that like a a really really short TV hit would sell more books than going on a really big podcast for an hour because if somebody listens to someone lay out their thesis for their book over an hour Tell the most interesting story. >> Exactly.
They're like, well, it was it was I got one hour of this.
Do I really want to listen six hours of this on the audio book?
I kind of got the audio book version, the summary.
Whereas if somebody sees like on, you know, some daytime TV show, somebody shows up for two minutes and it just gives like one take, you're like, oh, like I could go more.
And then also demographically, the TV watchers are more likely to buy books.
Um but we're not talking about books, we're talking about movies.
And there's some recommendations here from Bill Simmons.
He calls these the most the most rewatched movies of the century.
Devil Wears Prada, Social Network, Anchorman, The Town, The Departed, Miami Vice, Hangover, Superbad. Have you seen Superbad?
I think that would be a good one for you. It's very funny. It holds up. I think you'd like that. Step Brothers?
You never seen Step Brothers?
Step Brothers, I feel like we did a meme around Step Brothers.
The the movie that I think you might like if you like Sicario might be Taken. Have you seen Taken? Liam Neeson? Yeah. Great movie. Great movie. Team team loves it. >> Studio goes wild. >> Studio goes wild. John Wick.
If you haven't seen the original John Wick, that's a great movie.
>> John, have you seen Prisoners?
Yeah, Prisoners is great, for sure. Prisoners.
Any Denis Villeneuve movie is good.
Jordy, maybe you should go like arthouse.
Have you tried any of those? >> Arthouse? How about Capital House?
Do you have any recommendations? Margin Call? Oh, yeah.
>> I saw Sicario as a double feature.
I went to the movie theater, bought two tickets, saw Sicario, walked straight into The Martian, saw that. It was great. Great day.
>> Well, this is this is the year of The Social Network 2. Yeah.
I somehow think it's not going to be as good as the first one.
It just feels like it's going to be mired in mediocrity. >> who plays Dwarfcash. Yes, yes.
I hope I hope that they really go into >> It's about It's about the pre-AI It focuses entirely on Yann LeCun's hot takes around the Llama 4 overfitting of the benchmarks. That >> Yeah.
That should be where where it's where it's >> Anyways, back to back to Scott.
He says behind the scenes proof of crafts content will enter the mainstream of advertising and entertainment.
As more AI generated content fills our feeds, we will develop a membrane of doubt.
That's fake will become a default reaction as we become That was kind of the slower reaction to this company pickle.
com >> Yeah, that was interesting.
People at first were like, wow, this is super cool.
And then people started being like, wait, is this real? It's fake.
Um we can get to that later.
Scott says that's fake will become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention grabbing content.
This is how I've been with AI generated kind of launch videos and vibe reels.
I just I haven't I haven't watched a single one.
I assume you'll tell me if one of them is good.
Um AI generated launch vibe reels?
>> Maybe you're not watching them either.
Tyler probably watches them still.
Pure AI purist everything.
Andy Two Cents, that was pretty good, I thought. That was AI generated.
>> that had that had like great ideas in it.
It was it was a lot more It wasn't just here's a bunch of cool images that that are trying to make you feel something. I'm skipping over those.
We got a couple recommendations from the chat.
Glengarry Glen Ross, highly recommend.
That is a fantastic movie.
Also, famous watch movie if you're into Rolexes.
Alec Baldwin's character says, "Look at this watch.
This watch costs more than your car." It's a Rolex president. Like the sun.
Margin Call, I feel like I saw that a long time ago. It's been a while.
Lioness, I haven't seen that. That looks pretty good.
I'll have to check that out.
There's a couple others here.
Anyway, Cognition, they should make a movie about cognition.
Let me tell you about the software engineer, Devin, the AI software engineer.
Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Um We got to get We got to get Scott back on the show. Yeah.
Uh Update on how things look in 2026.
He had some crazy predictions that came 100% true this year.
He came on the show very early and and predicted the IMO gold medal from AI exactly as it played out.
That was a great call and he's he's always been incredibly tapped in there.
Um so Scott continues, says multiple industries from insurance to health care will be impacted by the implications of materially better lifespan, health span, and joy span. That's interesting.
Well, we have Justin Mares from Truemed coming on the show in just 25 minutes.
Um and he's obviously deep in all of this and can tell us more about this particular trend.
Scott says as health wearables, routine blood testing, increasingly accessible preventive body scans, and AI health coaches proliferate the population, humans will have materially more insight and impact over their own health.
As we begin to live longer, multiple industries will change.
US life insurers with de-risked annuity exposure that are most impacted by mortality, like Global Life among others, are poised to benefit from the insurance policy living longer.
We will also see growth among the underlying plumbing companies that manage blood testing, like Quest Diagnostics, biomarker detection, and preventive scans.
Of the major consumer apps and Whoop-like devices proliferating our lives, we will also see shifts in travel, entertainment, dating apps, and beyond as the societal implications of longevity become a mainstream conversation.
I You got to get on Truemed.
We're having Justin on the show in just a little bit.
We got to get on Truemed and figure out the ultimate looks maxing stacks and make sure you're paying for your looks maxing regimen. >> the peptides?
>> Yeah, with pre-tax dollars.
You got to be looks maxing on pre-tax dollars. That's key. That's key.
Um And thanks to Truemed, it is now possible to looks max with pre-tax dollars.
Uh hardware becomes a more popular moat amid amid a surge of hardware startups.
Interesting reflecting on this year, there was a surge of hardware startups.
We demoed a lot of hardware in 2025.
I was I was asking you about the Xreal, those uh AR/VR glasses.
I was super bullish on those, um but you churned, I churned.
Uh haven't really been using >> you actually bullish on them?
Yeah, because when I used the Apple Vision Pro, my the one experience that I really liked was watching movies in it.
So I watched Citizen Kane, another great movie you should watch, from start to finish.
But Citizen Kane is an extremely difficult to film to watch by modern standards.
Like Sicario was like boom boom boom boom boom, there's always something happening. It's really exciting.
You know, you're watching the tactical stuff, the camera's moving, those sweet shots of like the SUVs moving from the air. It's amazing.
Like it's so visually stimulating, the color grade's amazing, the sound mix is amazing. Citizen Kane is so slow.
It opens with these like really slow title cards and like it's just the easiest movie ever if you're not locked in and really into it to like pull out your phone and just get and just get you know, just like tuned out.
Is Tyler watching a movie now?
Uh I mean, Citizen Kane, there's much more boring movies, I will say, that I've seen. >> No, I agree. I agree.
It's great It's a great movie.
But but it's just like any movie that's even more even before the '80s, I feel like has a slow start.
There's lots of exposition.
It's just less It's just less TikTokified versus like a modern Fast and the Furious movie.
Even if it's not a good movie, it's going to hold your attention cuz there's always something happening.
And so >> Yeah, that's probably true.
But I mean, Citizen Kane is known for having like the I forget what the term is, but it has like the the thing that starts the whole story, right? The like Rosebud. Yeah.
And like it's supposed to like get you >> Yeah, yeah, it's a good it's a good hook. It's a good hook. You know what it is?
The the the initial Rosebud where he drops the it's the the snow globe, right? Isn't it? The snow globe.
Have you ever seen those those brain rot TikToks where it's throwing the bottle of like marbles down the stairs and it smashes and they bounce everywhere? No. You've never seen those?
It's like the most brain rotty content possible and it's kind of like that.
Somebody should make a version of that where it starts out and it just smashes and just completely goes everywhere.
Anyway, uh but I was bullish on this because my experience in the Apple Vision Pro was extremely positive when it came to watching films.
Like I enjoyed watching movies in it.
You could put on Avatar and it's in 3D in an IMAX screen, which you just can't get at home otherwise.
So it was basically like a home theater just for yourself.
Now, I never had any time to do to to use it and so I returned it and it was not something that was going to go into my like daily driver.
But we tested a lot of these on guinea pig Tyler over there.
We we him a Quest 3 S Ultra Xbox Edition. Didn't play that much.
Didn't get You didn't prestige, right, in COD? No, I did not prestige. Skill issue.
Uh and and the X rails, you wore them on one flight.
You enjoyed it for that and you wore >> it was great.
>> But you just took a flight and you didn't bring them.
You didn't think, "Ah, I got to put those in my backpack."
>> Yeah, I mean, that was Not even aspirational.
That was in the summer, I think, I last used them. Rip.
And the rabbit and the humane >> only the hardware that I care most about this year is getting couple great uh racing sims here in this here in the studio.
Uh we got to see if we can get one on TrueMed. >> I wonder.
It is a It is a sort of a a lifestyle creed.
Um I I wonder what is the current meta?
I've been watching a lot of Instagram reels about sweet racing sim setups and I've and I was wondering what the is the meta is the best is the best racing sim VR or is it physical screens these days?
I wonder which one is like the true >> Still physical screens. >> physical screens.
Like the F1 drivers use physical screens. They don't do VR.
Cuz I've I've done some racing in VR and it's really cool.
Like it's it's amazing, but it is it is a heavy thing in your on your face.
Anyway, Uh there there will be more >> Ordinary data becomes a less valuable mode.
These days it feels like every company is trying to sync everyone's data and doing so is becoming easier than ever before.
Soon enough, all your products will have all of your data, whether it is via connectors now or computer vision plugins later.
As connectors of data between apps become ubiquitous, you can expect one the growing importance of proprietary graphs, who knows who, who works with who, who has access to what, etc.
Two, more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers.
And three, real-time data sources, whether X or the weather or ocean tide patterns becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots.
Graphs, portable memory, and real-time data are the new proprietary data motes.
Uh he says, "Seven, ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream.
Uh while many teams use services like Granola or Zoom to record and annotate their meetings. Not me."
I talked to these people that that loved the Granola wrapped because it had all the context on every like they they they specifically >> on my end, thanks." 400 times.
>> But I mean, there were some really interesting insights because it had If you run a remote startup and the vast majority of your day is spent in recorded Zoom meetings, you kind of have a record of every word and you can compress that down, summarize it, and it can actually give you some at least entertaining insights.
I don't know that it's going to completely reinvent your business, but uh people it definitely delighted a lot of people. So, that was cool.
What if Granola uh this year just has a pop-up and it's like, "Do you know you can automate this entire role?
For $1,000 a month, you can replace this uh brutal >> imagine you can I I I have to imagine that's part of like their Maybe.
their pitch to investors, right?
It's like we're going to understand like what work is actually getting done at these companies and who does what.
>> And how how things get made and how things get done.
>> far-fetched, but >> But yeah, I mean, like uh Will Manidis was posting uh about the like it was it like corporate wasn't like corporate espionage, but it was so some post about like about like corporate like backstabbing and like Machiavellian behavior within corporations.
And um and I think his point was just like there there are there are so many secrets within businesses about like how things actually get done that don't typically get documented.
And so, if you can get closer to that, uh just because like it like if if you're running business and and the and the secret to your brand is that you do things a specific way and that's not documented.
I mean, we notice this with uh we'll we'll go on podcast and get interviewed and we'll explain exactly the thesis of TBPN like how it works.
And and even then some there's still some like lost in translation when we lay it out.
It doesn't just come out of just watching it.
And and I'm sure that that's and I think that like that's clearly true for a lot of businesses regardless like there's just secrets that are kept within internally.
And if Granola's like a way to access that, like could be valuable. I don't know. What's the next one?
Uh the power in consumer AI will shift to tightly coupled hardware and operating system providers.
The desire for local AI, like ambient listening and summarization, will coincide with the shift to AI privately running on your device.
As one open source models that you can download, change, and run locally on your device become more capable. Two, consumer hardware.
Apple and Android phones, whatever Open AI is brewing.
And our computers become capable of running powerful LLMs locally, well, the world is going to change yet again.
Implications for the AI stack are tremendous from the chips that become valuable, the evolution of operating systems, the devices we use, and the role of open source AI.
I suspect these changes will be a major area of focus over the next year.
I'm very excited to see what Apple releases this year with Gemini.
Uh I I I expect it to be uh uh if it's better than the Photos app.
If it if if if it can be a I have noticed that the text-to-speech feature has gotten better.
I feel like they updated the model at some point.
And uh if I'm if I'm on a blog post and I click like read this to me in the car or something, it will do a good job and it sounds very human and they clearly updated that model.
Um I haven't tested a lot of other stuff.
Um but but the thing that strikes me as crazy is just that Apple really seems still stuck on this annual release cadence.
And in the boom cycle of AI, it feels insane not to just be like, "Yeah, Gemini deal's going live tomorrow."
Like it's like Okay, you did the deal.
Like just put Gemini in Siri today.
Yeah, I mean, people have been talking about um there was some some research paper about uh whether like AI tools are are actually benefiting companies.
And then you you look and like it was the models that were out in October.
It's like that's already like too late. Like >> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Opus is is much better than the previous Yeah.
>> Uh and and and you think just getting like actual customer feedback, um starting to troubleshoot these things.
There's also like just a benefit to I feel like Apple is in many ways very very cautious with their brand. They're very thoughtful.
And they don't want like like, you know, when Google launched their first image model, now they're loved for nano bananas. It's remarkable.
But remember the first launch, and people were doing like the the the accurate 1940s soldier and it was very controversial cuz it got the the the the the race wrong.
Um and and that was sort of like a backlash that Google was like moving fast enough that they got through that and it was not that big of a deal.
Um and obviously they had no negative intentions at that. It was just a mistake.
But uh Apple's not really in that in that mode of Oh, yeah.
Like like let's release things and then deal with like the backlash of things that aren't fully polished.
But it feels like there's a little bit of an advantage to actually releasing so fast because like OpenAI over 2025 probably had like seven different crises of like AI psychosis and adult mode and all these bad There were so many bad headlines.
But then there were like 22 really great days where people were like, "This is amazing. Thanks so much. This is cool new model."
And so, like it sort of netted out.
Whereas Apple was sort of like at this low din of like, "Uh what are they doing?" forever.
Um but I'm very optimistic about uh the next version.
Uh last I'm going to skip over a few. One more from Scott.
He says, "We'll we'll see the rise of internal development teams as companies replace single-purpose bloated SaaS products with their own apps that collapse functions in magical ways.
New internal application development teams will be spawned in large companies and they'll vibe code tailor-made software and agent-driven solutions for functions around the company.
At first, these efforts will replace SaaS products, especially those that are expensive, private equity owned, clunky solutions. >> Mhm.
Uh we we support private equity here and their clunky solutions, but uh I can see many of them getting replaced.
Over time, these homegrown tools and workflows will start to collapse functions into one another.
For example, why must legal and finance tools be so different in in an era where the distinct functions of social, marketing, sales, and customer support are blurring together, shouldn't new solutions collapse these functions into one?
As companies build their own solution, they'll be optimized for higher level of cross-functional work.
Let's give it up for cross-functional work." [Applause] Yeah.
Uh I mean, the Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation Software, was sort of talking about this, right? It's Craig. He just came out.
Sat on a on an investor call. It's over. It was a good run.
But I mean, like I So so I was I was wondering this cuz on it was January 2nd or something that the the the market opened and all the SaaS companies were selling off. Did you see this?
Um and and people were sort of like, "Oh, everyone's waking up to the Claude code moment.
You'll be able to, you know, vibe code any app and replace all your SaaS."
And so, it's bad news for all the SaaS companies.
And I was trying to think about that.
So, I pulled some stats on um on, you know, the actual revenue of the large SaaS players. And uh I have some here.
I mean, they're all they're all growing.
So, Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Palo Alto, Shopify, Workday, Atlassian, Zoom, CrowdStrike, uh Snowflake, Data Dog, HubSpot.
These are These are basically the biggest uh sort of pure-play software companies.
And uh they're all they're all growing revenue somewhere between, you know, 5% uh and and for this year, I mean, they're all still up.
I guess the question is like if one of them has a down year, that would be a real indictment.
But uh it would be it would be my my my initial thesis was like it'd be hard to justify this idea of like uh vibe coded software truly replacing SaaS if all of the big SaaS companies are still growing.
Then it's It's clearly a Jevons paradox thing.
We're just getting more software, but maybe it's the PE backed small point solution thing that's getting that's actually going to get ripped out.
And that might be more of like a collapse that we see.
And sure, the big the big software companies, they're so big and they do so much that yeah, it's not you're not going to one shot it with Claude.
So like you're not going to do that, but you do need to be worried about this like long tail software that just sticks around and just raises prices and doesn't add any features.
Yeah, the the threat to some of these uh I guess more if you think about like the Joe Lonsdale style companies where built to die, right?
You have the software that uh you know, uh an investor allocator like Joe would be comfortable buying knowing that the revenue is just going to decline and eventually cease to exist.
Uh and you can imagine this being like uh somebody that makes software for large vending machine companies to manage inventory.
You know, some something like that, right?
And it kind of over like category not big enough for venture.
The question is like will those companies like be super quick to adopt? Mhm.
Will they be super quick to adopt AI products themselves or they will they be using will they be like vibe coding? I don't know.
The question is you potentially get this sort of like um like explosion of like web developers that just were like thousands, millions of people globally that are going to I'm going to go to business owners and I'm going to make them a website, right?
And you could see something like that happening with like vibe coders like freelance vibe coders.
That's literally his first point is massive amounts of talent arbitrage.
Uh people who with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses.
So there'll probably be a lot of people that understand these tools and then can go into a midsize enterprise and say, "Hey, we're paying so much for this old piece of software."
Or they'll go into that company and say, "Hey, we can improve it and keep our customers.
We can go back into growth mode economically and maybe this thing doesn't need to die.
Maybe it maybe with just a little bit of extra work we can make it great again and we can get bigger."
Uh I want Tyler's response, but first I want to tell you about MongoDB.
Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers.
MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Tyler.
Um yeah, I I I think there's some distinction like you mentioned of the of the software companies.
It's like Snowflake or MongoDB. Mhm.
Like people aren't vibe coding their own vector databases. >> Yeah. Uh it's like a tool.
It's not like the full solution. >> Yeah, yeah.
I I would be very surprised if those like are the the chief uh you know, if those are hurt a lot by by vibe coding. Yeah, no I know. I I I agree.
Um also, I mean, anything with regulatory, anything with uh with proprietary data in in in involved.
There there's just a lot of different motes that companies build up.
And I think that even companies that seem simple where they it feels like something you could vibe code, but you know, they've been aware of mote building for 20 years.
And they've been doing it.
And you might not know that oh, they actually have some really solid relationship with this legal decision and this thing.
And they they can navigate this for you.
And it feels just like a SaaS app, but there's something else going on behind the scenes.
I think that that creates more durability. Yep.
Um Andreessen has 2026 group chat consensus.
One, extraordinary capabilities progress from Anthropic and Google.
Uh leaving out >> Leaving out Open AI. What's going on there? Uh two, sovereign.
I mean, he he he's he's he was an angel on Anthropic. He's he's got his team.
Uh sovereign nations as largest customers of open source models.
Three, compute scarcity at unimaginable levels.
Four, violent public backlash against perceived AI job losses. Hopefully no violence.
Um but I the perceived AI job losses is notable.
I saw there there was a pretty viral video that popped up on my X uh this morning.
And it was like a montage of like big tech layoffs.
And they were positioning it like it was all AI job loss.
And so I think that is going to that's the story right now.
On one hand, it's it's CEOs and management teams saying, "Hey, maybe I should do more with less."
In some cases, it's I'm doing more with less because of AI.
But in a lot of cases, there's just like you can just exercise willpower, right?
This was the Twitter story.
Which was like, "Hey, let's do the same let's provide the same platform with 75% less people." Yeah, yeah, no. I agree. Railway.
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Um Tomas says 11 predictions for 2026.
We got a bunch of prediction posts here.
Every year I make a list of predictions and score last year's predictions. 2025 was a good year. He scored 7. 85 out of 10.
Uh here is a here are his predictions for 2026.
Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time.
Woah, that's a bold >> know that he's saying all businesses.
He's saying I think he's saying some business.
>> Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average.
Yet demand keeps growing.
We saw a blacked out Uber which Waymo which was iconic.
I want to get to that one. Murdered out Waymo.
It was a real murdered out Waymo. >> have been AI. I don't know. We got to dig into it.
Uh vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack.
2026 becomes a record year for liquidity.
Uh I saw something interesting where so he's predicting SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks IPOs with SpaceX and OpenAI ranking among the 10 largest offerings ever. The pent-up demand.
Uh and so a lot of people are saying like this will drive a lot of liquidity into new companies.
I mean, doesn't seem like new companies are having trouble raising right now, but in in theory, you know, if you're a venture capital firm and you return you know, 50 billion dollars to your LPs, they probably want to sign up for the next fund.
And the next fund probably get gets bigger.
And we've seen a couple charts where it looks like venture dollars are declining in in the number of funds are declining, but you could see sort of LPs become a little bit more cash rich where they over the last 5 years they've been really really allocating towards venture.
They're finally going to get their payoff if they're in the right funds.
And now that they have liquidity, maybe they go and do something else with it.
Maybe they go fund new managers.
Maybe they go double down on the growth funds that have been providing them returns so far. >> they they buy land. Maybe they buy land.
There is >> Maybe they're into land maxing.
AI models execute tasks autonomously for longer than a work day.
According to Meter, AI task duration doubles every 7 months.
Two two current frontier models reliably create complete tasks taking people about an hour.
Extrapolating this trend by late 2026, AI agents will autonomously execute 8-hour work streams. That will be crazy.
You will be able to just say, "Hey, go spend a full day on this project. Come back to me."
And it will come back to you when it's done.
It Now, it will come back to you before 8 hours, right?
It's Yeah, so so uh the equivalent work time.
Yeah, I think there was this um there was good blog post that came out I think a couple days after the break started.
It was like critiquing the the Meter evals.
Um and the main thing was like uh if you actually look at what the eval is doing um for the I think it was I think it was for for Opus the the the headline was like it can do 4 and 1/2 hours or four or something. Yeah.
Um and and so the way you do that is like you give it tasks that take people on average 4 hours. >> Yeah.
But it's pretty hard to find tasks that that do that, right?
So if you look at it, they only had like 14 actual tasks that gave that benchmark.
So it's a very small sample size.
So it's it's it's pretty hard to you know, reliably see if if is that actually true or At the same Are you laughing at the chat?
Bobby says did you guys hear about OpenAI's quote pen?
And Gold Rock says, "Is it a vape pen you can gamble on from?"
That's That's the most That's the most 2026 pen. I wouldn't be surprised.
I There are a lot of vape pens that have full-on uh LED screens and and microcontrollers.
So people will like run Doom on them or run Tetris on them and vibe code on them and stuff.
There's a lot of fun fun stuff there.
Uh let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI.
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software That's part of cursor. Uh This is wild.
Well, uh if you want a vape pen, maybe you should try and pay with it with pre-tax dollars using TrueMed. We have Justin Myers.
He's going to tell us that you can't do that.
I'm going to tell him I absolutely can. >> Just start stop me. And I will.
I will be buying a vape pen on this We were we Justin, welcome back to the show. Great to see you. Happy New Year.
John wants to vape Chinese peptides. >> No, no.
So I don't I actually don't, but I do want to I want you to tell me how I can use TrueMed to build the ultimate looks maxing stack.
I want to pay for with my looks maxing stack pre-tax >> What are you What are you What's your stack?
You've clearly been Since you've been on the show, you've you've gone >> cheeks are red.
I can see you've been bone smashing before this.
That's incredible looks so guys.
Your midface ratio is completely different than the last time we saw you.
Something's clearly going on. TrueMed clearly helping.
Anyway, how are you doing? What's new?
Uh I'm I'm doing phenomenally. Uh doing so well.
And you know, one of the things that that I've been using from a health standpoint is obviously bone broth.
And all of the health benefits that come with that. >> washes the other.
Wait, so so you literally smashed the bones to make the bone broth, correct?
So you've been in bone smashing for a decade now?
His family actually made their money in bone smashing.
They they It is a bone smashing company.
Might be the best pure play bone smashing company there is.
Uh I We we were decades ahead of clavicular and nasal bone you were.
Yeah, we need a looks max index. For sure. For sure.
Uh Cattle & Fire can be the when when you guys go public, like we'll put it in there. Yeah.
Anyway, uh just reset the story for us. What's the news?
You picked the worst possible day to announce it, but but give it to us. >> best.
You guys burst through the there wasn't a lot of >> sort of a quiet day, but yeah, yeah, take us through it. >> Very quiet day. Take it through it.
>> mean so so we we finally announced that we raised $34 million for TrueMed as part of the series A. So Hit it.
I love I love how it shakes shakes the whole camera. It's so good. It's a great gong.
2026 is going to be a big year for you guys. >> 2026 gong hit. Anyway, so $34 million.
Wait, wait, wait, so so when did the deal happen?
What what was the thesis around launching it the announcement when you did?
Yeah, so it happened like earlier last year in the first half of last year, but we basically had a bunch of different things happening at the company level.
We wanted to tie it up with a bunch of different announcements.
We grew three times, which was fully baked by the end, which which is great. Yeah.
And so kind of like packaged everything up and decided to announce and kind of mention that, you know, that this this thing that we're doing in this movement that we're building around incentivizing people to invest in prevention and invest in their health while they they still have it is a big thing and it's a thing that tech and other people are paying attention to and waking up to.
Yeah, what's when do you announce it later in the year?
And and and what has the elevator pitch changed to consumers or the the companies that you're working with?
Like how are you positioning the actual value prop of TrueMed like getting people on board?
Yeah, I mean so so to brands like Peloton, Eight Sleep, Lifetime, those are our partners. Yeah. Laura. Exactly, Eight Sleep.
Uh For many of these brands like they they're they realize that they are selling a product that often times is expensive.
And so if someone can use pre-tax funds and save 25 to 50%, you know, if you're like in the max tax bracket and living California, you can save 50%. Mhm.
>> Buying a getting an Eight Sleep or a Peloton at 50% off is like quite a material thing.
And so we have we have merchant partners where we're doing 15, 20% of their total sales are going through TrueMed. Mhm.
And for the individual, you know, if if you're someone with an HSA or FSA account, historically these accounts have been used under this idea of like wait until you get sick, get cancer, need surgeries, need like pharmaceuticals late in life, and then you have a tax advantage account that can pay for everything once you're sick.
And you know, the IRS has been clear like the average American is sick today.
We should be spending these these dollars on things that studies show are effective at treating or preventing different diseases.
And so that's what TrueMed enables.
>> And what's the status of the of like HSA?
It's usually like an option and you have to pick a specific health care plan to be eligible. Is that right? Like like HSAs booming?
Are people adopting them?
Like what's the actual flow to get one and start using >> out my HSA this year because because of TrueMed Yes. >> on our TBPN plan. Yes.
Yeah, I mean HSAs are growing quite a lot.
They grew around 11% last year.
I think over the last 3 years that they that's been about right like 10 to 15% growth.
Our thesis though is that, you know, you ask the average person like you Jordy before TrueMed came along like what is an HSA? Do you have one?
Why should you care about it?
The average person just has no idea.
Like they just do not care.
It's considered almost like a boomer savings account.
And so one of our hypotheses is that these accounts historically have been high friction and you can't use them on anything that you actually want to prevent disease.
Like who cares about buying Band-Aids tax free? Sure.
And so our hypothesis is like if you can buy something, pay for a lifetime membership, pay for Eight Sleep, pay for these different things that you know, assuming that you qualify, that many many more people will actually sign up and fund these accounts.
And like I think that over the next decade there could be a trillion dollars in HSA and FSA accounts even without any regulatory changes or any anything like that.
Uh could is it possible to pull a PT and put startup equity in an HSA?
Uh Can I can I can I throw a few shares in?
>> availability like trade in the HSA?
Is that a thing people can do?
That that's definitely a thing people can do.
It's not something that TrueMed necessarily supports yet, but it's a thing people can do.
I mean I don't know if like there's a an HSA PT out there yet, but Uh why do you do do you think we can move so so uh TrueMed is a company that uh to me is shockingly political.
Like some people hear about what TrueMed does and they get angry.
They're like, "No, you should only be able to spend your HSA funds once you're deathly ill.
You shouldn't be able to use an extra you shouldn't be able to use it to buy something that helps you exercise that even though we know exercise extends your lifespan.
So it's like it's just like crazy crazy that we're in a place that um you know, spending spending HSA funds is like political and people are angry about it.
Do you have any uh do you have optimism around that changing over time?
Is is this just kind of the nature so much of health is just deeply political?
Um Yeah, I mean honestly one of the one of the biggest disappointments that I've had in the last couple years is seeing health become political.
Like somehow you have a former, you know, Democratic candidate for president that is now part of the Trump administration who's talking about health and it like means it's a it's a right-wing issue somehow.
I think that there's always going to be people that look at this like within the industry, you know, I came as an outsider from the industry started Kettle & Fire before this.
And within the industry it's still like controversial somewhat whether like bug spray should be HSA or FSA eligible.
Like the industry is just very very behind and very stuck in the ways of and under the assumptions that the average American is healthy and HSA and FSA accounts are there and exist to help people pay for health care when they're sick on the rare occasion that people are sick.
That was true like 22 years ago when these accounts were were started when you know, when Congress basically created these accounts.
I just think those default assumptions are no longer true.
Like you look around and the average American today is sick.
Like you know, 70% of Americans are are overweight or obese.
93% have at least a metabolic marker of of dysfunction.
Like we are an incredibly sick country among the sickest countries in the world.
And in my view HSAs and FSAs are one of the best tools that we have in our admittedly very broken health care system to try and direct funds towards prevention and towards root cause interventions that can actually make people healthier and treat and prevent many of the chronic conditions people struggle with.
Uh Is there is there a lot of volume happening on TrueMed that's going towards uh like Wegovy and people paying out of pocket for weight loss treatment products or is that is that separate?
>> No, so so as of right now we don't support GLP-1s.
Like what what true you know, I would say that the health care industry as a whole, the payment rails are relatively good at allowing people to pay for pharmaceuticals.
Like if you want to pay for pharmaceuticals, you can use an HSA today.
>> But aren't a lot of people paying for GLP-1s out of pocket?
Or is it Yeah, they can, but but HSA for many people is considered out of pocket as well.
And cuz it's like they they can direct where they where and how they spend these funds.
They're their own funds just they're tax free. Yeah.
Uh and so what what we are basically doing is we are trying to make it legible and bring online a bunch of effective lifestyle interventions, exercise, sleep, supplements, things like that that the traditional health care system like right now doesn't really know how to think about and people don't really know how to pay for it.
So is there like a big road map for you on new verticals that you want to bring online?
Is there a process for like actually getting something approved to work with TrueMed?
Like did you start with Eight Sleep and then you added Peloton and it was like a different process or is there just one bucket and you can throw whatever you need into it and you just sign the companies as they come up?
Yeah, so we we basically we have a medical advisory board and a medical team and we basically look at when an when an intervention comes to us, when a brand or a merchant comes to us and they say, "Hey, we want to work with TrueMed." Mhm.
We basically look at a couple things.
Like what what do the studies say about how effective a certain intervention is? Mhm.
Uh based on that, like what conditions will that intervention be effective for?
You know, like you can't get exercise to treat like a toe fungus or something like that.
Like that would be a bad intervention.
Like a a doctor would never prescribe that.
And so what we are basically looking for is something like exercise.
What are the conditions that exercise as an intervention can treat, reverse, or alleviate? That's the IRS standard.
And assuming that there's a a good amount of data, research supports that intervention, and then we talk to our clinical team and we decide can we support or or not a specific intervention.
And so we have a bunch of things exercise, sleep, supplements, and the like that we support today.
A big thing that I want to unlock this year is food.
Like if if you look at the data, change like medically tailored meals have incredible efficacy, incredible ROI, but they're very complicated to you know, it's very complicated and the IRS frankly has like a heart attack when they hear people are using HSA or FSA to to spend on food because like Yeah. On Raising Cane's. Yeah. Chicken finger dream.
I have a my chicken finger dream is chicken fingers via my TrueMed account. Yeah.
Now, uh now you're you're talking about like actual like, you know, properly portioned >> mean there's been there's been like a whole history of companies that have tried to do sort of like portion control, meal prep.
There's been a number of different kids.
Obviously there's varying levels of efficacy, but in theory that's a really great intervention.
I mean it just seems so obvious.
Like you go to any health and wellness influencer and before they tell you about the six different types of magnesium or something like they're going to lay down the law which is just sleep, diet, and exercise. Yeah.
Sleep, diet, and exercise.
And so it feels like those three should be on TrueMed first before, you know, the even the creatine gets on there or something and the supplements.
But but obviously like food it feels like it's a challenge.
So you're working on that.
So is that is that a goal for 2026 or 100%.
I would say that is one of our big goals for this year especially as like tens of millions of Americans are going to be on GLP-1s, things like eating more nutritionally dense food, getting more protein, like these things really, really matter or even things like GLP-1s to to work over any long period of time.
>> Yeah, and and my nutrition, too, right?
Is that place where people people miss out if they're on GLP-1s?
Uh how are you How big's the team? Uh we're 51 people now. 51 people.
And like what's your kind of like personal ethos as a CEO around building a company like this as you know, every single day we have more and more AI progress.
Are you pushing the team to to to Are you pushing everybody on the team to to like, you know, use the tools as as effectively as they can?
Like where are you getting the most leverage, all that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I mean, we're we're certainly pushing the engineering team to to use things like Cloud Code and whatnot all the time.
I think that where we are getting the most leverage and where we have started to focus is leveraging a lot of these tools specifically on the like prototyping side of things.
Like we recently stood up a team within TrueMed that is basically me and like two other people where we're calling it like the venture bets team.
It's basically the team that just like moves fast, tries things, prototypes stuff, and sees if it works or not.
And the goal there is basically to unlock a new line of revenue, you know, over the next 12 to 18 months.
And for that, we are basically doing using almost entirely AI tooling to spin up let you know, landing pages, mini products, like all these sorts of things that are not exactly built to like scale, they're not built for, you know, six nines uptime or anything like this, but just with the pure goal of like get as many shots on goal and many as many iterations as possible.
And so that that's how personally we're we're starting to use it a lot.
I feel like Do you identify with the label like fintech?
Is that a fair category or do you think of yourself as like a different category?
>> Yeah, he'll say he's finance tech. >> Finance tech.
Yeah, I I would say definitely we're a fintech company right now.
>> yeah, that's fair, right?
Um the question I ask is because Do you like Do you have any like Are you at war with people that are trying to do fraud on the platform?
I feel like that's like a permanent background noise if you're a fintech company, but I don't know if you operate at like an abstraction layer where that's kind of like oh, you're it's not a headache for you.
Is it a headache or Mo- most pay- like a company that does payments online typically is incentivized It's set up in a way it's like business joins platform, moves money.
You want more businesses joining the platform, moving money.
I think that you guys are I'm sure people have tried stuff, but feel pretty insulated from that kind of like large scale I mean, it's not a payroll company.
So you can't just immediately do money laundering, but but is there is there like a like a fraud fighting team or how have you addressed that? Is it even a problem?
Yeah, so I mean, it it has been a small problem, but it's been a thing that like honestly Stripe's tools are pretty darn good.
And like we we build on top of Stripe, they're quite good.
And so it hasn't been the thing where we're like throwing personnel at it or anything like that.
But yeah, I mean, certainly a the most possible boring explanation of TrueMed is like we're a B2B SaaS company that does compliance for HSA and FSA.
You know, and like given that, like Uh New Year's resolutions. Do you have any?
Do you think they're effective for living a healthier life?
What do you think of New Year's resolutions?
I personally I find them great.
I I actually just had my first kid though, so I'm sort of like resolutions out the window.
Just just keep on keeping on.
>> 100% But we were talking we were talking a few days ago and you said it's amazing and super underrated, which is a which is wildly different than another person that we were talking about earlier on the show that said Am I missing something?
Yeah, yeah, similar name, similar name.
Um what about what about like big trends in 2026?
I feel like you have seen basically every health trend between two and six years early.
What do you think we're going to be talking about this year?
Well, let's get into the Let's get into I think the thing that that's been going the most most talked about.
Tied to that, but peptides >> Sure.
Okay, let's start with peptides.
So I I I did a I did a my first peptide cycle probably five years ago at this point.
I'm now at the point where so many people are trying so many different things and there's and I did this at the time I did this at the time I was like there's there's really no like large scale studies on this, but anecdotally I knew people that had done it and they'd done they'd they'd tried them for, you know, you you do it as a cycle.
Nobody even back then was saying take this and never stop taking it, right?
There were also some really big high profile key like the Hugh Jackman Wolverine.
Like everyone saw that and we're like oh, whatever that he did, that was good.
Peptides are just anabolic steroids.
I think that was BPC 157. I don't know. Anyone know? Anyone know? I don't think so.
No, that's the Wolverine peptide. I just mixed them up. I don't know.
It's Wolverine It's a Wolverine peptide because it helps like Oh, recovery. Okay, anyway.
But I but but my concern with peptides is like you basically I just look at them as like slightly toned down like anabolic steroids that are more targeted in in terms of what they do.
And so when you have like millions of people that are just trying to buying them from random sites online, they can be contaminated.
I have a lot of like a lot of red flags around that.
I'm not kind of diving in any deeper.
So peptides, Faustian bargain or not?
I I think that these are going to be incredible tools.
I think that the FDA is probably going to release much needed guidance around them this year.
Like there's just too many Americans that are buying cheap for research purposes only peptides right now.
You know, it's it's just gotten too big that the FDA has to do something.
Like I I personally know a bunch of people that swear by these things, the efficacy is there.
And you know, they're they're certainly like they're endogenous, like your body makes them in many cases.
I'm very bullish on them from an efficacy standpoint.
I have tons of questions about quality.
And I think for me, the thing that you just have to wonder on all these things is like one thing that our current FDA does a very good job of with pharmaceuticals is figuring out are there any sort of like side effects?
So like does pancreatitis risk go up 12% you know, when you take this thing over over a year period or whatever?
And like no one is looking at those sort of long tail effects of peptides.
Certainly not when you're looking at staying on these things, combining them with other peptides over, you know, some long period of time.
So I would say that I'm like bullish, but cautious, whereas I think most of the people in peptides right now are sort of like riffing it. Yeah.
It does It does feel like we're in a new era of just experimentation and just like I don't know.
Like couple decades ago like like a like a TRT or something was something that was like buried in a built bodybuilding forum and you had to know a guy.
And now it's like here's the website that was perfectly coded and will just deliver it to your door.
And it's like a completely different It's way It's way more like user experience focused and like just way less risk.
I mean, we've seen this with all sorts of substances and just activities where you know, we've we've productized them in in the way America does best and becomes a button.
And I mean, that that's totally true.
I also think to be fair, this is like the health stuff is the biggest problem in the country in my mind.
The average American is sick.
The average American has bad sleep. They have bad energy.
Like the demand for something that can promise you feel better, your joints feel better, you're sleeping, you're losing weight is like off the charts, has never been higher.
And so I think given that, like there's just infinite demand for products that can make someone feel better, give them more energy, lose weight, sleep better, whatever.
Which is why I'm just I I think peptides are going to be one of the biggest trends in the next five years.
Certainly they're going to come with side effects and downsides, but they're they're going to be here. Yeah, yeah.
Underrated story about American competition, the whole story of Novo like came up with all this stuff and then just got like kind of beat in the public markets by Americans just being like we're we're like the American biotech industry like really ripped it. Anyway, other trends?
Novo Haben and Serius I mean, basically.
I mean, they had that problem with like the they didn't file the IP rule or something in the What What's the What's the state of Austin?
We've had Sacks is is opening an office.
>> are getting out of California.
Make the pitch for Austin.
Yeah, give us give us an update on Austin.
Yeah, look, Austin's great.
I I think that Austin will do well to the extent that California decides to self-immolate.
And it seems like right now, California is like just pouring gas on the fire.
So you know, we'll we'll see if the wealth tax thing actually goes through or even gets a medium amount of popular support, then yeah, like there is going to be a huge exodus from Silicon Valley, from LA to other places all over the country.
Is it Austin or bust or are there tech people that are going to Dallas or Highland Park.
What about the I could see some allocators ended up in Highland Park in Dallas.
Highland Park's in Los Angeles.
No, no, Highland Park is a neighborhood in Dallas. Oh, it is? Okay.
I've only been to Dallas once.
It's I don't think anyone's going to Dallas.
Is it So if a tech person's leaving San Francisco, they're going to Austin?
I I I think it's basically Austin, maybe Boulder or Denver, maybe Miami, although I think the Miami thing was kind of not a real thing.
I personally personally I'm more of an Abilene guy. ABILENE? YEAH, I'M AN ALASKA GUY.
I I say get up there, it's nice and cold. They're dead out there. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, you're you're you're you're you're you're locked in.
But anyway, any any other are there any other predictions for just health trends or foods or anything that's like rising and falling?
Have we have we finally reached peak slop bowl?
Are we going in a different direction?
No, I'm going to go get a protein cup from from Chipotle later. Is that real?
Are the restaurants really like downsizing in reaction to GLP-1s or is that just like, you know, some random organic thing that's happening?
You you are seeing certain grocery chains, especially ones that sell a lot of junk food, are starting to downsize or see like junk food sales go down.
Mainly because people are less hungry and most of junk food is predicated on like people eating them infinitely while snacking or and so I I do think there's going to be a renewed focus on nutrient density, on protein, on things like this.
I think you have to imagine like a big trend that I'm I'm bullish on is these GLP-1s are going to be everywhere.
You know, we have the oral version of Ozempic coming this year.
There's there's going to be 50 million Americans on these things in the next 5 years.
I think there is going to be a backlash where people start to see what are the downsides, they start to, you know, get caught up in like micronutrient deficiencies and other sorts of things that just come from, you know, if even if you're eating a bad diet but you're eating less of it, you're still going to have health problems even if you may be, you know, less overweight or less obese than you were previously.
And I think we'll start to underwrite that more over the next couple years. Makes sense.
Well, it'll be interesting to track.
But >> Well, this is your second time on the show? >> Yeah.
Let's make it a Let's make it a monthly thing.
Yeah, next time you're in LA, bye.
There's a lot to talk about. And we love you. It's fantastic. >> you. Happy New Year. Love you guys. Thanks for the merch. Happy New Year. >> to you soon. Talk soon. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about 11 Labs.
Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents.
Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs.
Or in our case, Theme song. >> song.
>> Our theme song is generated by 11 Labs.
Uh Do you want to do some timeline?
How how long How long do you want to go?
Because we could close with this post, this very optimistic post from Elon Musk replying to Marc Andreessen.
Marc Andreessen says, "It's time to grow."
This is in response to 4.
3% year-over-year GDP growth in Q3.
Kind of crazy, didn't see that coming, says Caleb Hammer.
And Elon says, "Double-digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months.
If applied intelligence is in proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple-digit is possible in 5 years."
Let's pray for tip triple-digit GDP growth.
It would truly be a golden era.
A lot of bottlenecks to that, but let's hope it happens.
I like the sound of that, John.
Uh That's a good place to end.
>> that's a great place to end.
We'll cover Lulu's post tomorrow.
Lulu's actually coming on the show this week.
And also tomorrow, so Gabe, you you got exactly what you're what you're looking for.
And also we'll have to discuss the prediction about OpenAI buying Pinterest.
That's an interesting one to to to to kick around.
It's very funny because it was a It was just a prediction post from The Information, but people were reporting on it like it's a rumor or like it's a it's like like a fact or something.
But there's a lot to dig into there.
But anyway, thank you so much for watching.
>> so good to be back with all of you. Thank you for tuning in.
We seriously missed doing this.
As a couple of Irishmen, we yearn for labor, we learn to be on the mics, killing the RSS feed.
Uh And uh uh thank you thank you for being a part of this.
We're so excited for this year.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
And we hope you have a great Monday. Talk to you soon. >> Cheers. Goodbye. >> Bye.