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You're watching tvpm today is Monday, january 5th.

You're watching tvpm today is Monday, january 5, 2026 with.

You're watching tvpm today is Monday, january 5th.

Raise capital at the nice E. 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 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 sort of ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investor. $20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? You hit that app Lovin Gong. You hit that app Lovin 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 so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean it's a John sized gong. So John is 6, 8. 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, Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026. You're not gonna believe this, but Applovin's next in the stack. Prof. Advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business.

Take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investors. $20 billion. Deal. What should we do with that, John? You hit that app Lovin Gong. Hit that app Lovin 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 so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean, it's a John sized gong. So John is 6, 8. 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. Applov, we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2,020.

Extra hard into research because you want to be the first one to have that research breakthrough. So you need a lot of true researchers or you can read into it. It's like, hey, this is kind of an AI winter. 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 when Ilya comes up with something great, it's going to get copy pasted all over the industry because of the SF house parties and papers that get written and open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely siloed, but typically it doesn't. Anyway. Yeah, Ollie from Databricks at the end of the year was talking about how he's fantastic, gotta have him back on, but he was talking about putting people in different buckets. So there's a super intelligence, there's a superintelligence bucket. I think that when you look at like Zuck can say, we are trying to build super intelligence. That is a much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising and commerce. That is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around. Right. 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 anthropics, taking it, taking a different 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 just, I just like to see, I will be very excited to see, hopefully see them try to take what Manus 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. He's up 20k. And he says life is good. So what an amazing start to the new year. Congratulations. I also saw Sam Scheffer in the chat earlier. He launched a new product over the break called Timelines. It's like a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. Oh, that's fun. Excited to check this out and congrats to Sam. Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love nyse. Potentially the best tagline of all time. The best marketing copy. Want to change the world, raise capital at the nyse. 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 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 sort of ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investors. $20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? You hit that app Lovin Gong. Hit that app Lovin Gong. We have a new gong. Everyone look at. 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. Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026. You're not going to believe this, but Apploven's next in the stack. Profitable.

Type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investor. $20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? You hit that app, Lovin Gong. Hit that app Lovin 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. Fantast company. Yes. Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2,023.

Yes, 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 Venezuela debacle, right? Videos from there. I mean, there's. Oh, I saw. I saw Maduro, like, face swapped into. A lot of things. Yeah, I guess that would. So the, The. The video is higher definition, et cetera. 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. So the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimism because there's a lot of way. There's a lot of very. I think Dan talks in here about what is the line he says around young people, people 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 also talks about CCP humor, which was she saying the PM 2.5 back then was even worse than it is now. I used to joke that it was PM250. What is that? Like? He's just saying, like, PM25 is 2.5 is A. Is a measurement for air, like, air quality. Oh, oh, okay. Particles per million. Yeah. Yeah. It's like PM 250. Yeah. I have a few.

The IP rule or something. What, what's the, what's the state of Austin we've had? Oh yeah, Sachs is, is opening an office. Lots of people are getting out of California, make the pitch for Austin. Yeah, give us 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 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? 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 ending up in Highland Park. I don't know Highland Parks in Los Angeles. No, no, Highland park is the neighborhood in Dallas. Oh, it is. Okay. I've only been to Dallas once. I don't think anyone's going to Dallas. No one's going to Dallas. So if a tech person's leaving San Francisco, they're going to Austin. 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. Straight to the data center. Straight to the data center. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I'm an Alaska guy. I say get up there, it's nice and cold.

It's Wolverine. It's a Wolverine peptide because it helps. Oh, recovery. Okay. Anyway, maybe it was just gear, 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 terms of what they do. And so when you have millions of people that are just kind of buying them from random sites online, they can be contaminated. I have a lot of red flags around that. I'm not kind of diving in any deeper. So peptides, Faustian bargain or not, 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 just gotten too big that the FDA has to do something. Like, I personally know a bunch of people that swear by these things. The efficacy is there. And, you know, 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 one thing that our current FDA does a very good job of with pharmaceuticals is figuring out are there any sort of side effects. So does pancreatitis risk go up 12% when you take this thing over a year period, or whatever? And no one is looking at those long tail effects of peptides, but 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 ripping it. Purely bullish. Yeah, exactly. It does. It does feel like we're in a new era of just experimentation and just like, I don't know, like.

Monitor all those assets. 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 $50 million. And we have this tax where if you're worth 50 million or more, which Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax. I think like she's talked about doing like 8% above 50 million, something like that. And so yeah, you're actually, 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. It'd be very weird because a lot of startups want to get the valuation as high as possible for recruiting purposes and then you have like, for tax purposes. They want to minimize the valuation. There's already, it's never going to work. 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 like the last round. Because it's like completely changing. Yeah, it's, it's starting over. Start basically like starting over from zero. Or also there's scenario that he just shuts it down. Yeah, right. And so it's like 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. Yeah, but the government will not, the government will be like, oh, look at this reputable VC 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. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify and then let's move on to some outlooks for the future. Shopify is the commerce platform.

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 come the New York Post. Would be crazy. Yeah, I just think people need to realize, like, how far this can go. And I think that the political story 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 see how it ever stops. So I'm so blackpilled on it, I don't even want to talk about it anymore. Unfortunately, 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. Introduce billionaire tax print. Yep, Hyperinflate, hyperinflate. Everyone's a billion. You know, there's, like, countries where, like, 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 the 14th and 15th century.

I don't think that's going to. That's what's going on anyway. RO Economy. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing that this whole wealth tax debate was happening almost at the same time as the Somali daycare. Somali daycare, yeah. Which was very odd because it's. There'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. Which was funny. Which was funny because 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 Heart. Oh, yeah. I've never seen him wearing Rick Owen. Yeah. And then the guy. I've never seen him with an rm, a racing machine on the wrist. Right. And the Somali daycare founder was actually rocking chrome for a press conference. You know, on the question of like. Of, like, is the government effective at just reading.

You. Hit that app. Lovin Gong. Hit that app Lovin 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 so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean, it's a. John sized gong. So John is 6, 8. 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, Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for. You're not going to believe this, but Applovin is next in the state.

Posting on Reddit and chugging beers all day long. Tip me, tip me. Oh, well, I think, I think, I hope that 2026 is year of the buzzball. You're into buzz balls. I was. Buzzballs were post my time. I never had one. They were big. When I was in college and what I appreciate now, in college, people were ready for buzz balls. Like, you were trained, you were. No, you were trained in the sense of like if somebody threw a buzz ball at you, your arms are staying at the time. Same. Oh, wait, wait. Oh, this is a, this is like a prank. I, I, I'm, I'm completely unfamiliar with. Wow, you don't tell me. The culture of the buzz ball. The culture of the buzz ball. 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 so the idea is like, you're going to buy the thing that you're actually going to drink. You just pick up one of these. They have a few, it's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol. Right. That's pretty strong for single. Yeah, it's very strong. It's more than a single serving amount. Yeah, it's very strong. It's terrible. So it's like a punishment. Yeah. You would never drink one of these for fun. Sure. And you go back to whatever your house or apartment and you throw the ball at somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it. Got it. Normally if you throw something at somebody and they're just expecting it, they're catch it because they're like, what's going on? Of course. But in kind of at least the heyday of buzzball for me, you knew this was something that could, a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time, anytime. It could come out at 9am Right? 10am and so you're gonna keep your hands down and you're not gonna catch it. You'll sidestep it. Okay. Okay. But now what if it smashes into the tv? Are there buzzball disasters that happen? Results in a lot of destruction, but now people are not. I hit my dear friend Ben Taft. He's a venture capitalist. He's my neighbor. You hit him with a buzzball? Hit him with a buzzball. When? A couple days ago. Like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared. Fully unprepared. He just caught it. Well, I would be unprepared. I was like, now I'm unprepared. I feel bad that you caught this, Scoot. Chad says I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a Buzz Ball.

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. You have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method. This is parenting of parenting. The Dan Bilzerian method, especially. This works especially well for four year old boys. So you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining like an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four 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, you know, want to go look at guns or whatever else? Like, whatever Dan Bilzerian does. Want to learn poker, buddy? I'll be like, absolutely. I want to play cards. Four year old boys have the mind of Dan Bilzerian effectively. And so before you say, oh yeah. Honestly, it's even more expensive than that. I can't afford a fancy car like dan Bilzerian. A four year old cannot tell the difference between an SF90 and a Dodge Viper. Just get the Dodge Viper. Get a red car. Get a red car. They will be so stoked. My son wants to have a Blackwing themed birthday party and I'm like, dude, we're not doing a Cadillac CT5V Blackwing themed birthday party. It is a very weird thing. I got this car half jokingly. I know you love it because it goes vroom and it goes very fast and he's very excited about it. But truly, you have to return to 4 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 think the bigger picture is that Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch. And that's fine. My son is slightly, I think it's. Slightly deeper than that. I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life, 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. Because unless you're behind the wheel of a Dodge Viper, that's red. Yes, yes. But what I understand here is my reading of it is like, he doesn't feel sad. Like he doesn't. It's maybe a sense of stress. It's hard to enjoy just playing catch or going for A walk or. Or. Yeah. Cause he can't turn off his. Yeah. 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 our options are like, going outside. Like, I would go outside and we would walk around and like pick up slugs and like fucks, right? Because Dan Bilzerian. Dan Bilzerian, four year old mode. And 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 hitting it, you know, needing to slow down for like this couple speed bumps. Totally. When you're trying to go 100 miles an hour. And so, yeah, I think that's. I ultimately think 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 that I've noticed is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is. It's actually like if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend 10 minutes, you'll get that sort of endorphin rush and that's enjoyable. And then it kind of drops off from there. But the more there's increasing returns to. I mean, I've been playing Mario Kart with my son and he beat me for the first time.

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 GOP1s, or is that just, like, you know, some random organic thing that's happening? 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. Okay. Mainly because people are less hungry, and most of junk food is predicated on, like, people eating them infinitely while snacking, all that. And so 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 GOP ones are going to be everywhere. You know, we have the oral version of Ozempic coming this year. There's going to be 50 million Americans on these things in the next five years. I think there is going to be a backlash where people start to see what are the downsides. They start to get caught up in, like, micronutrient deficiencies in other sorts of things that just come from. 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 less overweight or less obese than you were previously. And I think we'll start to underwrite that more over the next couple of years. Makes sense. Well, it'll be interesting to track. Well, this is your second time on the show. Yeah.

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. I'm saying, I'm saying just buying grind. Oh. Oh. 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. Divide. He's not going to just dividend out cash. He's willing to take bets with it. He's invest all the labs, all the neo clouds. Yeah, right. I mean, I think he's like, almost. 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 at places. And I think to put this into perspective, this is like us saying investing in a nice camera, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's not the kind of like it's. We take like Jensen. Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early. Yeah, you would, you would do the same thing for a nice camera. But I don't. I. I guess the bigger question is, like, is Nvidia spread too thin and they don't even own a social Network? Every other Mag7 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 it feels like DJX Lepton, the cloud that was competing with some of their customers, feels like they sort of pulled back on that. It feels like they've remained 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 feels just like a very natural extension of what they already do, which is selling chips. It would be very different if we were seeing them like, oh, they're buying power assets and they're going to build their own data centers and they want to step on Oracle's toes and they want to step on Crusoe as tall as or anyone else's toes. So I don't know. But let's go into Gavin Baker and what he says about Nvidia buying Grok. He says Nvidia is.

To it. And you say, build this website and it just does it. It's actually remarkable for small hack people. Are throwing around the Claude thing. Fortunately, we picked up a goal post. Oh, yes. Yes. We have a camera view that we can put. Maybe if I go just pull it over. So we picked up a goal post. So as we continue to see AI progress, we can actually move this goal post ourselves physically here in the studio. Physically moving. 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. It has to be able to smell. 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 AI disagrees with me. I actually went to one of the models and I said, is a sommelier considered a white collar worker? And it said, no. And I think that's all just a psyop. I consider it white collar work. You often drink wine wearing a white 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 decant. I sent you that paper, though, that about the olfactory sense of training models to have olfactory senses. 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 goalposts once again, because that is the. That is the nature of the show. We continue to move the goalposts endlessly, but, you know, it doesn't move the goalposts. Gusto, our latest sponsor, it's the Unified.

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. 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 them. We need to check on them. If one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them. If you haven't heard from them. Wellness chat. I would be worried. What are you doing? Okay, let's. Just go hang out. Let's call your friends. Let's play some golf or something. Take him out. That's grass. Yep. Touch of grass. It's going to be rough for a while. Chamath is on a. On a tear and 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. That was way after. Okay. At least the first. I mean he. I mean, the haters will hate to see that he invested multiple back to. Back to backgrounds. I mean, with conviction, with authority. Really. Yeah. And got to give them credit. So Alex Heath over at Sources News has new details on the Nvidia Gro deal. The whole process took.

Rebuttals. But first, let me tell you about Restream One Livestream 30 Plus Destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com so first rebuttal on humor. Some of the tech people are funny. And I was noticing this. I was remembering this as we watched our Year in Review video that Jackson on our team put together. And in there, one of the clips is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as famously humorless because he's like trying to speak in many levels of. And it's this best Sam joke ever. Him coming on our show. Yeah, I mean, he was making the joke on the timeline. Yeah. But nobody got the joke. He was saying, I'd never buy a car for $250,000. Yeah, it was hilarious. So someone posted this like this, what was GT3RS or something. And they were like, would you buy this? It's for $250,000. And Paul Graham says, like, oh, what a waste of money. Like, I would never buy this. And Sam just said, I would never buy it either. And everyone was like, oh, like, he's so out of touch. He has a Koenigsegg. He has an F1. Like, he's ridiculous. Of course he would buy it. 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 multimillion 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 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. I think it was so much easier in the 20th century. It was easy mode being a politician or a CEO, because you could go into a room of business executives and said, okay, you currently spend. If you were running an AI company before the Internet, before everything was recorded and before everything hit every single distribution point, immediately you could go and say, like, hey, you currently spend, you know, a billion dollars a year on payroll. Yeah, I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%. There's going to. You're going to be able to conduct lots of layoffs. And then you could go on TV and say, like, AI is going to create an abundant future. And that. And the clips wouldn't kind of cross bomb everywhere. Or politicians could go talk to a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here. You just, I mean, we see this. On our show 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, 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 that, before you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TPP. Before you. Criticize just to get some context. Yes, there was oh, there was one more thing. I want to go with this Dan Long thing.

So again, so, yeah, I mean, I guess let's get in. Let's get it, I guess. What was your immediate reaction? The thing that I was excited about is this is Zuck buying a product that people love? Well, that's a debate, but I like your take. But Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He just went through a talent acquisition era. Yes, they're the biggest investor in scale. Right. But they didn't acquire the product still. And I think they're actually acquiring data. And so historically, Zuck has been saying beating the personal super intelligence drum. It's been very unclear what that means. Manus has been building high quality agents. They're sort of time and time again I talk to people that are just very excited about Manus. They're like, just use Manus. It's the year of the agent. Use it. You'll see the future. And so just given Zuck's history from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what they're like. One version of personal superintelligence 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 can, you could trigger an agent effectively. Like, go find this product. Like, you see a car that you like, go find this product. The elusive GT3RS GT3 vents. Yeah, basically like you see, make any image or video shoppable. And in fact, I would probably argue that LLMs in the chat form, where you have a bunch of information with a, you know, knowledge cut off, baked into a, into some big model llama 4 and it's vended through, you know, the Instagram search box that you chat with that just, it can never fully satisfy the vision of personal superintelligence. A personal assistant, something that actually can take actions for you. It feels like, it's incredible. It's amazing. Like, obviously for knowledge retrieval, it's great, but it was never going to fulfill the real vision there. So this does feel, this does feel like. I don't know. I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way. I wonder 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, you can Imagine that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystems. So if Meta trains an amazing image editing model, a nano banana, right? Direct nanobanana competitor, what's that going to look like? It's probably going to look like you take a photo, you put it in Instagram and then you say, hey, change the background, make the sky less gray. And it'll just do it really, really well. And that would exist purely in there. And maybe they open source it, maybe they put it out, but that's not the product. The product I was also thinking of, I guess one way that I am thinking about Manus in the context of what Zuck and the AI team at Meta are saying, which is personal super intelligence, right. They're talking about, they've talked about integrating AI into Ray Ban metas, right? So when I think when and if you're using Ray Ban metas, you can say, hey, Meta. And then you can give it a task or ask it a question or things like that. And so I expect that Manus 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 to help me prep for my final later. Right? And I can imagine, like effectively the same product experience that Manus has today will be integrated into like Meta AI. Yeah. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. It's the leading AI trust management platform. I agree with you.

To say about it. Anyway, let's go back since we're. Since you're back here. I thought, I thought it was. He talks about humor within tech and the ccp. Yeah, yeah. He. He gives a line from Sam Altman. That is, 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 mean, that is so good. 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. No, and I think this, this is 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 for AI. Yes, 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 slop is getting better. Right. You look at some of the videos coming out of the slop Venezuela debacle, right? I mean, there's. I saw Maduro, like face swapped into a lot of things. Yeah, I guess that would. So the video is higher definition, et cetera. But 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? So the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimism, you know, because there's a lot of ways, there's a lot of very. You know, I think Dan talks in here about what is the line he says around young people, you know, 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. And so, so anyways, I think that's real. He also talks about CCP humor, which was Xi saying the PM2.5 back.

Come on, get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike1. Strike 2. Activate. Go retriever mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. 5. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder. You're watching TVP. Today is Monday, January 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Gun. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We miss you guys. So many updates for you, but one that's not changing is that this show is still brought to you by Ramp. Time is money save. Both easy 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. That's right. Massive news, new graphics package. If you haven't noticed. We worked with John Palmer and Luke over at Area Technology. They updated the overlay, the logo, whole lot of stuff. The globe in there. Telling you we're taking you all over the world. That's right. News every day. That's right. 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 two weeks. It had been the longest, longest time. We'Ve gone without hanging out since we started the show. I mean, last break 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 very odd show. We did a show on the Eve of Christmas Eve. We did very. That felt really unnecessary. But at the same time, there was so much news over the last two weeks. There were a lot of moments where we wanted to be live. Yeah, I feel like there were three or four, maybe five really big stories where we could have had great shows, but. But there were a lot of days where it 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 still interesting. And we'll take you through some of those. But fortunately we have a ton of content and a ton of stories to get through because so many things have built up. The Grok deal, the Manus deal, Dan Wong's annual letter. There's so many different things that we're gonna take you through today. We have a very light lineup today. Just Justin Mares from True Med joining, but we have pull it up let's see the linear lineup. There we go. Which explains the run of show. So we're gonna be building this out for you. Try not to keep you guys in dark. You exactly what we're doing when. So you know when to tune in. But we should kick it off with Dan Wong's annual letter. His 2025 letter. He skipped 2024. Apparently, this sort of rocked the timeline. Dan came on his show during his book tour for his, you know, excellent book that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition. He uses this phrase AI. He doesn't like the phrase AI race. Yeah, he likes. He doesn't think it's something that you can win. A race has a defense, 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 I feel like he. And this echoes what Gurley has said. Too true. Obviously, at the time, he was coming out in defense of Manus and Benchmark's investment in Manus. Totally. 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 Manus is, you know, an American company, it's a Meta property. So, you know, and I mean, the Manus 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 there. But still, I mean, you have to imagine that a lot of the talent migrates and it's like a fully American controlled asset, essentially, now that it's controlled by America and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, let me tell you about Public still with us Investing, for those who take it seriously, Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries and more with amazing customer service. You can see we have a new ticker. Let's take it over to Tyler. Let's check in with Tyler. Oh, yeah. What are we checking in with Tyler for? The chat. Mrs. Tyler. Oh, they just missed Tyler. How you doing? Also, so we signed a massive contract extension with Tyler. 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. 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 gonna have a lot of fun this year. So the Dan Wong piece, we should read through some of it I wrote. It inspired me to think about what am I really looking for this year. We've seen sort of benchmark saturation. AI can kind of do everything. Now we'll talk about The Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code. Sort of sensational takeover of the timeline. So many people clearly 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 with their families and probably stepped out to the laptop and fired off some Claude code prompts and had really good experiences. 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 actually remarkable for small hack. People are thrown around the Claude KGI thing. Fortunately, we picked up a goal post. Oh, yes. Yes. We have a camera view that we can put. Maybe if I go. Just pull it. Pull it over. 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 the goalpost now. There you go. There you go. My new definition of AGI is it needs to be able to smell. It needs to be able to smell. It has to be able to smell. 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 certainly is. AI disagrees with me. I actually went to one of the models and I said, is a sommelier considered a white collar worker? And it said, no. And I think that's all just a psyop. 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 decant. I sent you that paper, though, that about the olfactory sense of training models to have olfactory senses. 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 goalposts once again, because that is the. That is the nature of the show. We continue to move the goalposts endlessly, but you know, it doesn't move the goalposts. Gusto, our latest sponsor. It's the unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr. Built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. We've both been using Gusto for a decade now. I went through YC with them or they were like right either right before me, I think they were 2011 or 2013 and yeah, amazing, amazing platform. For over a decade, 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. It's highly recommend continuous. So very, very excited to 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 this remarkable march of research. The models are getting better, all the benchmarks are getting completely dominated. Then we're seeing the massive hyperscaler build outs we were reflecting on. What does re industrialization mean? What does American dynamism mean? What does this idea of 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 we failed at a lot of that, obviously. But we've, we've succeeded at building multibillion dollar data centers. No, I guess, yes. I mean truly, truly. Media has been a cultural export of America for a very long time. Yeah, but, but yeah. So Dan's saying we're good, we're very good at making data centers. Haven't been so good on the energy side. Yes. And so, and so 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 with bottleneck was chips and then data centers and then just moving the energy around. But 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 from 2008 to 2021, America's annual growth in energy production was 0.1% annually. Really, really bad. Not good, but it is getting better. The EIA's December 2025 Short Term Energy Outlook projects generation growth of 22.4% in 2025 and 1.7% in 2026. That's like what, 20 times higher? That's great. But also that doesn't feel like oh, fast takeoff. 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 massive political backlash to rising energy prices. And and I think most importantly we've identified some of the characters that drive AI. We know Dario, we know Demis, we know Sam. We also have identified a lot of the people who are running the Neo clouds or doing 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 data centers. Blake Schwartz from Boom is sort of pivoting 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. Totally unclear yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO. Right? Sure, sure. I feel like when you think about who the Elon of Energy, it's somebody that can go and throw down on a three hour episode. Yes. But also Chase and the rest of the Neo cloud found are 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 crazy stats. So while we are growing at like 2.4%, 1.7%, China is consistently putting up 6% growth. So not great by comparison. China now accounts for one third 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 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 semi analysis. Dylan was sharing that Venezuela has a bunch of underutilized gas turbines. No way. He was showing satellite imagery. Did you see their Instagram? I don't know 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. Semi analysis? Yeah, semi analysis. Like the official semi analysis. Maybe they cracked the code. Maybe like the trough wants. It's a funny video of like all these guys in this, like bar, 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? Anyway, so what Dan says, he says, I think that. So he says, I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception. He says that China's obviously caught up in so many different technologies, drones and EVs. 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. Quickly, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it HR and finance support, giving employees, employees instant resolution for access requests and password requests and password resets. So there is one that I think he missed and maybe you put it in aviation, but I think space travel, like, they're way behind on rocketry. SpaceX, Airbus, they don't have 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 Delian'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's like, it just feels like something that could happen. And 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. Oh, so now updating their data now. Going to put this up there. Yeah, yeah. But 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, well, then the advantage kind of flips back to America. But 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 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 see 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 optimistic it can happen, but I feel like it's the new benchmark that I want to be tracking. Obviously, we were tracking 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, 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, sweet 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? 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? 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, at the start of the year, people were predicting that OpenAI 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 broadly stabilized since the infamous podcast. Right? Yes. Yeah, totally. Like, if you were long AI broadly in 2025, you did very well and you did not see some sort of collapse. Yeah. Tyler. Yeah, there's actually a cool chart that Axios put out about, like the 2025 news cycle, and it's like oh yeah, Distribution of like how often the search was. Yeah, I really like that chart. So you can look at the AI bubble and yeah, it did peak and we're like definitely not at the peak right now. We're way down. Tyler vindicated. Yeah, vindicated. 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 up max contract. Max contract. Let me tell you about LINEAR still with us. Meet the system for modern software development. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. So in the other section of the Danhorpe Wong Peace, he talks about competition. And I thought this was just an interesting element to read. He talks about Sputnik moments and we gotta read a little bit of this. So 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 hadn't thought about that. But at one point we were memeing like Sputnik moments for Sputnik moments. Remember? Do you remember? Yeah, that was super. That must have been like a year ago. Yeah, it was like a year ago or something. But you know when it becomes like a meme that we're like, everything's a Sputnik moment, like it really is overused. 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? So he says, I think the US continues to systematically underrate China's industrial progress for several reasons. 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 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 because I think he just moved from Yale to Stanford and 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, yes, 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 deeper than that. Yeah. I mean, this. 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. There was a paragraph here that stood out. He said, third, Western elites keep holding onto a distinction between innovation, which is mostly the remit of the west, and scaling, which they accept that China can do. Jan 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 may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas, but American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. And so again, there's some interesting commentary in here as well. I forget the exact section. Everybody should go read it. But he basically says 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 because AI will solve it. Yeah. 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 intellect, this horsepower, but it doesn't have any agency. 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 U.S. currently, like, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are actually declining. Declining. Yeah, yeah. Month over month. I mean, at the same time, there are a bunch of people in SF who make a somewhat convincing argument about like the software only singularity and bootstrapping kind of everything off of it. I agree it's a little bit more of a sci fi scenario, but there are somewhat. There are some good arguments on both sides. But he does make this point about manufacturing that even when 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? And he says, 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 he says, what does he say? Gigafactory. Is that in here? He says, 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 there's just a lot more to build off of there. So China's automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else. I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers, quote, most of what German Mittelslands 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 German. 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. Well, you know what's not cooked and chopped? Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI, the last section here. So 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, just economic incentive. And it's rewriting the war, the rules of the global order with caution because it's been a giant, giant benefit. We gotta try to get Dan on again. I'm curious to ask him get his read on everything that happened in Venezuela over the weekend, just given that the Chinese delegation was there on the ground meeting with him effectively the night before he was taking him. Crazy story. Wild weekend. Let me finish reading this. So Beijing has been preparing for a cold war without eagerness 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 superpower Dom. 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. Anyway, Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well, should we talk about Manus? Let's talk about Manus. Let's talk about Manus. This all started because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manuscript and Whenever. And I think Bill Gurley has the best voice in Venture. I agree. The best voice in Venture. Hands down. Who's got a better voice than Bill Gurley? It's amazing. He's got pipes. He's got pipes. He does have a good voice for podcasting too. It's great to hear. Well, he's going on a podcast tour. Yeah. And we're gonna get him. We're. I think we'll be a part of it. So Fantastic. Can expect to hear him on so. This all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, formerly Scale AI, he says, excited to announce that Manus AI has joined Meta to help us build Jack. Randall in the X chat. Did anyone check on Delian? Oh, yeah. That's funny because Jack worked with Delian. Yeah, I mean, it really is. Hey. Hey. Delian might be taking a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing, Delian totally vindicated. Also that and Patrick Hall. Allison was bulbous. Oh, yeah. So did Dalian capitulate? Did they. No, no. He gets to Play musical chairs. He's like, what? I never said anything about Manus. I don't know about that. It's fine, it's fine investment. It makes sense. Did I mention that Facebook was a founders fund backed company? Yeah, I worked in founders fund. Yeah, yeah. I mean there was so, I mean. It'S great to see the portfolio company acquire Manus. The moment in time that Benchmark invested in Manus. Yeah, it, well, it was a really crazy move. I was like, what's going on here? It was just, it was just very strange. It was, it was truly like, it was truly contrarian. It was very, 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, 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 Andrew folks are talking about it like, yeah, so here's the other thing. So AI 2027 was released in April of 2025. Yeah, Benchmark did Manus in April of 2025, same month. Yeah, yeah. And so obviously a lot of people process AI 2027 as like, cool. This is like sci fi kind of like, 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. And so to have a famed American venture capital firm, you know, backing a Chinese AI firm. Sorry, we gotta go back to Dan Wong. There's so many good things he talked about AI 2027. I want to read it. But first let me tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in figma, so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code backed prototypes and apps fast with figma. So Dan Wong 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 listened to the Dwarkash 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's not pulling anything up. No. I don't know. Okay, maybe. Maybe Dan's taking some creative. Oh, you have to, like, choose an ending. Okay. Oh, you have to find the corgi ending. That's key. We'll take the golden retriever ending. It's hard to know. Yes. Turn us into golden retrievers. We're ready. We're ready. Already did. Who's trying to be a wolf? I'm not trying to be on the wolf. The lone wolf Sigma crowd. I'm trying to be a golden retriever on performance enhancing drugs. 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 lined up for a golden retriever. 2026. It's a good time. It's hard to know what to make of this document. He's talking about AI 2027, he says, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction. 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. Sort of an interesting. I know why they put it in there because it's engaging, it's entertaining, and it makes for good banter. Anyway, he goes on to talk a lot about the dynamic of how Silicon Valley works, how New York finance works, how it's different. It's very interesting. We should read a little bit more of this since we have time today. You want to go back to Dan? I want to go back to Dan. We got a Dan addict over here. What did he say about finance? He said, like, they're wrong before breakfast or something. Finance. Let's see. One thing. Okay. One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diversity. 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 taking shots. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line. Most prominently this year as many tech voices embrace the right. So 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. Since you're back here. I thought it was. He talks about humor within tech and the ccp. He gives a line from Sam Altman. That is, 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 mean, that is so good. 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. No. And I think this, this is the, the key problem for the tech industry in 2026. Yeah. Is like how you need to paint a more. Like the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision. Yes. For AI. Yes. 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 that the, the slop is getting better. Right. You look at some of the videos coming out of this Venezuela debacle. Right. To videos from there. I mean, there's. Well, I saw, I saw Maduro, like. Face swapping to a lot of things. Yeah, I guess that would. So the, the video is higher definition, et cetera. 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. So the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimism, you know, because there's a lot of way. There's a lot of very optim. You know, I think Dan talks in here about what is the line he says around young people, you know, 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. And so anyways, I think that's real. He also talks about CCP humor, which was. He's saying the PM 2.5 back then was even worse than it is now. I used to joke that it was PM250. What is that? He's just saying like PM25 is 2.5 is a measurement for air quality. Oh, oh, okay. So he's saying particles per million. Yeah, yeah. It's like PM250. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me, I have a few rebuttals, but first let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com. so first rebuttal on humor. Some of the tech people are funny. And I was noticing this, I was remembering this as we watched our year in review video that Jackson on our team put together. And in there one of the clips is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as like famously humorless because he's trying to speak in many levels. And it's this thing. Best Sam joke ever. Him coming on our show. Yeah, I mean he was making the joke on the timeline. Yeah. But nobody got the joke. He was saying, I'd never buy a car for $250,000. Yeah, it was hilarious. So someone, someone posted this. This, like this was GT3RS or something. And they were like, would you buy this? It's for $250,000. And Paul Graham says, like, oh, what a waste of money. Like I would never buy this. And Sam just said, I would never buy it either. 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, 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 multimillion 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 in the right context, 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. I think it was so much easier, you know, in the 20th century. It was like, you know, it was easy mode being a politician or a CEO because you could go into a room of business executives and said, okay, you currently spend, like if you were running like an AI company before the Internet, before everything was recorded and before everything hit, you know, every single distribution point, immediately you could go and say like, hey, you currently spend, you know, a billion dollars a year on payroll. Yeah, I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%. Yeah, there's going to. You're going to be able to conduct lots of layoffs and then you could go on TV and say, like, AI is going to create an abundant, you know, future. And that in the, in the clips. Wouldn'T kind of cross everywhere. Politicians could go talk to a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here. You just didn't. I mean, we see this on our show 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 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 you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TPP to get context before you criticize. Just to get some context. Yes, there was, oh, there was one more thing. I want to go with this Dan Wong thing. He has a great line in here about, about feedback he got on his book. Obviously there's criticism and stuff, but he has this great quip. He says, I learned of Leo Roston'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 if you're. The negative comments usually come from a place of weakness, but that doesn't mean that there should be empathy. There's one more thing about the future. This reminds me of my one and a half year old who will bite my three year old because he's weak and so he has to take the cruel action of trying to chomp the three year old. Three year old's like, hey, look I'm a little mass monster over here. That's hilarious. 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 Manus, because you still go back to Manus. You still haven't given your take on Manus. But let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now, with AI so pumped to be partnered, so we will have to dive into these pieces in more depth at some point. But basically, I do think that even though Dan says that tech is very insular, it's. 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 is correct in some ways. There is some dissension and at least conversation back and forth, mainly between Dwarkash right now and Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson wrote a piece on AI and the human condition where he sort of reacts to Dorkash's piece with Philip Trammell. Trammell called capital in the 22nd century, and Dwarkesh is talking about capital accumulation, inequality, how things might need to be redistributed in the future. It's unclear exactly 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, at one point, they start talking about buying galaxies, which is sort of like a funny thought experiment. And at that point, if you were to just say, hey, we're going full communist with the G. 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 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 wasn't able to get more than 1.6 billionth of the galaxies out there. I don't know. It just feels like such a. Has anybody tried to kind of stake a claim? I know America, the moon's ours. It's not legally yet, but it is ours. It's somewhat inevitable. I mean, 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 start. You'll send some robots. But literally, this is a crazy thing. No other country has landed a man on the moon. I don't know why. What are you waiting for? Get somebody up there anyway. What are you saying about 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 you're not a. Say you're a communist. I want more. You want 2,000 galaxies. But. So I think that quote was actually referencing Leopold. Yeah, it was Leopold. And people were arguing whether Leopold was being serious. And he was. It's sick. It's a great quote. I love is sufficiently sci fi for me. I'm very, very excited about that quote. And it's thought provoking. It's truly thought provoking to think about 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. Unless, I don't know if the AGI 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, 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. I don't know. Just get a faster horse. It's the year of the fire horse. It is, yeah. What does that mean? Wait, I thought they 20, 26 Chinese year of the fire Horse. But are they adding superlatives to the animals? I thought it was just horse, snake, dragon. And then they rotated through those. You can get the. It's the year we upgraded animals. It's amazing. Fire horse. It's amazing. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Manus is acquired, I think. Okay, back to Manus. 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 Ramp Labs modeled it out. They, of course, Ramp Labs is AI agent for spreadsheet software. So you can give it a prompt and it will build the spreadsheet for you. Very, very cool. And they did a little analysis on the Meta acquisition of Manus AI they said the estimated price is 4 to 6 billion dollars based on AI M&A comps. It's the fastest to 100 million ARR in history. Just 8 months. Wow. And benchmark likely 8 to 12x in under a year. So. So again, they're sort of estimating here. I think people were kind of putting the deal between 2 and 3 billion. Yeah, is. Is what I had heard. Okay, so. So again. So, yeah, I mean, I guess let's get in. Let's get it. What was, I guess what was your immediate reaction? The thing that I was excited about is this is Zuck buying a product that people love. Well, that's a debate. But, but I like your take. But, but there. Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions. Yeah, that's what, that's what I'm saying. So. So he just went, he just went through a talent acquisition era. Yes, he, they, they. They're the, you know, biggest investor in scale. Yeah, but. But they didn't acquire the product. Yeah, yeah, still. And I think they're actually acquiring data from other. And so historically, Zuck has been saying, you know, drum, you know, beating the personal superintelligence drum. Yeah, yeah. It's been very unclear what that means. Manus has been building high quality agents. They're sort of time and time again, I talk to people that are just very excited about Manus. They're like, just use Manus. It's the year of the agent. Use it. You'll see the future. Sure. And so 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 superintelligence 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 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 GT3Rs. GT3 bet. Yeah. Yeah. Basically like you see a. Make any image or video shoppable. And in fact, I would probably argue that LLMs in the chat form, where you have a bunch of information with knowledge cut off, baked into some big model llama 4 and it's vended through the Instagram search box that you chat with, it can never fully satisfy the, the vision of personal superintelligence. A personal assistant, something that actually can take actions for you. It feels like. It's incredible. It's amazing. Obviously, for knowledge retrieval, it's great. But it was Never going to fulfill the real vision there. So this does feel like, I don't know, I would hope that they bake this in, in a really interesting way. I wonder 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, you can imagine that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystem. So if Meta trains an amazing image editing model, a nano banana, right? Direct nanobanana competitor, what's that going to look like? It's probably going to look like you take a photo, you put it in Instagram and then you send, hey, change the background, make the sky less gray. Right? And it'll just do it really, really well. And that would exist purely in there. And maybe they open source it, maybe put out, but that's not the product. The product I was also thinking of, I guess one way that I am thinking about Manus in the context of what Zuck and the AI team at Meta are saying, which is personal superintelligence, right? They're talking about, they've talked about integrating AI into Ray Ban metas, right? So when I think if you're using Ray Ban metas, you can say, hey Meta. And then you can give it a task or ask it a question or things like that. And so I expect that Manus 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 to help me prep for my final later, right? And I can imagine like effectively the same product experience that Manus has today will be integrated into like Meta AI. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. It's the leading AI trust management platform. 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 Microsoft to expand into Apple to expand into. Apple has a spreadsheet app, right? They have a word processor. Meta doesn't really have those. They did Meta for Meta work for a while, but they, it doesn't. This whole idea of like go to open Instagram to do your homework feels crazy to me. And the same thing with Open Instagram to build the slide deck, that feels crazy. Yeah, but, but everything that they're doing in AI, they're. They're piping through Meta AI, the new standalone app. So maybe they want. That's a Bunch of like, to me, I look at that as like experimental area that you can just put anything into it. But I was told by someone close to the action that apparently the Meta AI Trough. Meta Vibes. Meta Vibes, yeah, Meta Vibes. The usage is actually insane. Really? Yeah. No way. Trough. But I mean, it's terrible in the App Store, right? It cannot be ranked. Even Sora is not ranked. Well, like can you just look this up? I don't know. While we're looking that up, let me tell you about Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card. You see that ticker down in the bottom telling you the crypto prices? That's thanks to Phantom Legends. Let me try and find. 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, let me see what. It's not in the top 25. So. 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 denominated 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. Dwarkesh is a little bit more like. This is going to be extremely rough. So it requires, you know, aggressive, aggressive maneuvers and rethinking the entire social contract and, and potentially the entire economy. Ben Thompson is a little bit more like things can continue as they have been for the most part. At least that was one thing with Manus. This is maybe the first acquisition in the billions for a company with an Isle of Man domain. They're Manus im. You don't see a lot of multibillion dollar IM acquisitions. Isle of Man, Tyler. Is that where you're from? Isle of Chad. Did you get into looks maxing over the break? I've been bone smashing. It looks like you got into looks maxing, doesn't it? Doesn't his mid face ratio look different? I gotta fix my recessed maxilla. I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better he doesn't have the filter on. Wait, do you guys have the filter on? I think, yeah, I think they do. Have the filter on. They do. Because. Wait, Tyler, go like this. Do the double jaw server. They definitely have the filter. Definitely, Definitely. Well, speaking of Dwarakash, he's sponsored by Labelbox. We're sponsored by Labelbox. Label Box. We're delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. We love label Box. We're considering making a physical label box. And putting Tyler in. We will see. We don't want to leak it. We will figure out if we can figure out how to physically wanting to. Put Tyler in a box. I just like boxes. So Signal asks, can someone explain why Meta bought Manus? 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 know really, really well how to build good agents and maybe that's enough. Nick Dobo says best tool set on the market. They bought a Swiss army knife to hand any AI model wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder connectors. So yeah, they're just good at product. Give them credit. Eric Meher says head in the box. 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 metamate and 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 Meta. People are getting spicy. Do you see the Yann Lecun Financial Times deep dive? 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 Alex Wang coming in and becoming his boss effectively at the same time. It feels like you got leveled. Well, yeah, it is an odd, I mean it's a bold choice to, to put Yann Lecun on the bench. He's a, I think touring award winner. He's like one of the greatest AI researchers in history. Where'd he land on the Metis list? Tyler Yann Lecun. How did he do? But he's back with a $3 billion fundraise valuation. But the interesting thing is I think there's two ways that you can read into the Ilya Sutskever. We are in an age of research stories. Tyler, do you have Jan on the mask? Yeah, he actually wasn't on there. He wasn't on there. I think we were trying to rage bait him or something. No, yeah, he wasn't on there. Wow, we are so bad. But anyway, you can read Ilya's to. Be clear, you were trying to rage Bailey. We don't participate in rage bait. We don't have anything to do with the rankings. You can interpret the Ilya sutzkever age research concept as, hey, if you're a hyperscaler, you need a really, really solid research team to go extra hard into research because you want to be the first one to have that research breakthrough. So 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 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 when Ilya comes up with something great, it's going to get copy pasted all over the industry because of the SF house parties and papers that get written and open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely siloed, but typically it doesn't. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, Ollie from Databricks at the end of the year was talking about how he's great, he's fantastic, gotta 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, that is a much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising and commerce. That is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around. Around. Right. In some ways, OpenAI is doing the exact same thing. Right. There are different groups that are taking maybe anthropics, taking a different approach in terms of saying, yeah, we're actually trying to build super intelligence and we're doing it in a very opinionated way. But anyway, so I just like to see, I will be very excited to see, hopefully see them try to take what Manus 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. Congratulations. I also saw Sam Scheffer in the chat earlier. He launched a new product over the break called Timelines. It's like a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. Oh, that's fun. Excited to check this out and congrats to Sam. Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love nyse. Potentially the best tagline of all time, the best marketing copy. Want to change the world, raise capital at the nyse. 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 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 sort of ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investor. $20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? You hit that app. Lovin Gong. 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 so big, it's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean it's a John sized gong. So John is 6, 8. 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, Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026. You're not gonna believe this, but Applovin's next in the stack. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business. So there's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Premack, 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 hear that 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. 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 shamble. We need to check on them. We need to Check on them. If one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them. If you haven't heard from them, I would be worried. What are you doing? Okay, let's just go hang out. Let's call your friends. Some golf or something. Take them out. Touch grass. Touch of grass. It's going to be rough for a while. Chamath is on a, on a tear and 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. That was way after. Okay. At least the first. I mean he, I mean the haters will hate to see that he invested Malt back to background, back to backgrounds, I mean with conviction, with authority 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. Wong wired money early and wanted the deal to close before the new year. What a chat. What a chat. Send the $20 billion wire. Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs. It's good for my 20 billion. It. That is actually crazy. Yeah, I mean very interesting. GROK is, 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 dig into it. But I think that there is, you know, Grok has been. They've been on this like super crazy roller coaster. I think not a lot of people expected them to wind up at 20. 20 billion. A lot of people assume that the. Yeah, 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. But this was what, seven years before people in tech broadly knew what the TPU was. Totally. Yeah, Very, very early. Yeah. Crazy. But the. 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 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, it takes years. 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 make a bet on a certain architecture and there's other firms right now that are betting on like, we're going super long, the transformer architecture, we're going super long cerebras like wafer scale, where 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 have a ton of memory or something like that. So you make your decisions about what trade offs 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 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 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 the team is great, obviously, and I think Grok was probably getting comped. You were effectively looking at Grok v2 versus 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 that sponsors the winner of the constructor's championship. Grok sponsors McLaren? No way. Which they won. It was a good omen. Jensen saw that. He's like, I got a lot of cash, why not buy a winning. I mean the chip company that's sponsoring the winning team for sure, pretty compelling. Meanwhile, Red Bull loser, no chips. Works with Oracle. Oracle stock been down in the dump. Ridiculous. Just doing all F1 based analysis, sponsorship based analysis, analysis of markets. Anyways, continue. So, yeah, I mean I think as this. I heard an interesting. Take 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 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. The entire model just on one big chip, you could potentially put that in space much easier. But Grok made a specific bet and it's still, it's not like it totally panned out and it's like they're winning right now. Like TPU is the hot thing. But then there's, you know, Nvidia GB2 hundreds are still like flying off the shelves and there's all these debates about Blackwell and stuff and Nvidia is 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 all of the different chip architectures, all of the different chips. And I remember, didn't Jonathan tell us he doesn't Fab@TSMC? I believe he told us that and I'm pretty sure that's true. And so there is also. Where would he. Maybe either Samsung or GlobalFoundries, I believe. By the way, we gotta give a shout out to Ryan Seibert, LinkedIn chat. He says w stream best content on LinkedIn. Let's go. Ryan, thank you for watching one of our two. We typically will have like three viewers on LinkedIn. Thanks Restream. But yeah, thanks to 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 to social capital and Chama. 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 grind. 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. 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 mean, I think he's like almost. 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 at places. And I think to put this into perspective, this is like us saying investing in a nice camera, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's not the kind of like it's. We take like Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early. Yeah, you would do the same thing for a nice camera. But I don't. I guess the bigger question is like, is Nvidia spread too thin and they don't even own a social network. Every other, every other Mag 7 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 it feels like they did. DJx Lepton, the Cloud that was competing with some of their customers, feels like they sort of pulled back on that. It feels like they've remained 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. But 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 seeing them like, oh, they're buying power assets and they're gonna 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. So I don't know. But let's go into Gavin Baker and what he says about Nvidia buying Grok. He says Nvidia is buying Grok for two reasons. Reasons inference is disaggregating into pre fill and decode. SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. Rubin cpx, Rubin and the putative Rubin SRAM variant derived from Groq 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 pre fill 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 GROQ derived Rubin SRAM is optimized for ultra low latency agentic resources 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 Rubin will likely be used for pre fill. 2 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 have 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 were willing to pay for the speed SRAM more expensive per token due to much smaller batch sizes. It is now abundantly clear from Cerebras and Grok's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed. And so we've seen this with a lot of the meme of like you're sitting there waiting for a deep research report in ChatGPT, or you're firing off cloud code and then you're just waiting and you're scrolling or you're doing something else and there's just, there's a lot of like sitting around, waiting around. And now the really good developers are able to orchestrate six different cloud code instances all at once, but 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 using constantly and is doing like all of their job. And so would they pay 2,000amonth for something that's 10 times faster or even 2 times faster? In many cases, yes, if they're doing extremely economically valuable work. And so anything 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 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 because he came on for five minutes. It was one of those days when we had like, we had too many. People and we were like, this guy's. Like legend $8 billion. Like why did we. I'm glad we could ring the gong for you, but this feels disrespectful at this point. Anyway, let me tell you about Vibe Co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like Meta super pumped to partner with Vibe. We love advertising. I have some insight into their metrics and this is a company that you should potentially join if you love advertising. I would. I would be excited to go work there. So pumped to partner with them. Should we talk about DoorDash? DoorDash? 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. Okay, so the post is titled Holy effing. S not swearing really hurts the quality or you can 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 red Reddit. So it says I am a developer 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 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 8 months just watching the code get pushed. I hope they sue me, but I'm on a library wi fi with a burner. We're going to dig 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. So just watching the code getting pushed to 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. But reality. But the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I'm a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly Sprint planning meetings 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 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 299, 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 a B 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 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 does nothing to speed you up but like 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 299 because like if the default service is actually slower and 299 gets me 5 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 surprise. Really? Really. I'm feeling lucky. I mean no, it's just like the lowest cost version. Oh yeah, yeah, you might not get the pizza. Well that was like Lyft line, do you remember that? Or Uber pool those. Amazon does this for packages too. Oh yeah, you get a credit if. You like take it a. Yeah, yeah, you get like a Kindle store credit or something prime. It's kind of interesting but yeah. 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 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 for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10pm and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high down 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 get grinded into dust. That feels like that might not work. Like they 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, theoretically this could be happening. Then there is the benefit fee. You've probably seen that $101.50 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 you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have have a specific internal cost center for policy defense, and that fee feeds directly into it. That's so, that's so interesting. I feel like that's not really how. That's not really how money works. Right. 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. You know what this is? This is like, like, dude logic for being like, oh, oh, I got a $5,000 bonus. Like, this is watch money. I should buy a watch or something like that. Like, this money is for this thing. Right. It's like, oh, I got a bonus. I'm buying a car with this money. Instead of just being like, no, you have a pool of money that is completely fungible and liquid. And I would say so in restaurants. Yes. Around la, you'll see like an employee. Well being charge, which is like 1, you know, 1 to 3, 4, sometimes 5%, that is going. And I would assume that is going entirely to the employees. Right. Like, so there's two different things. The place we go for breakfast. Yeah. Has a charge. Yeah. That. That they advertise as going to the healthcare for 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. Yes. Well, so I can understand the general framing here. All of this is. I mean, so the key difference is like, is the money actually fungible or is it a function? Because in theory, tips go to the service workers. And if the restaurant has a grain 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 get that delivered to them. If you say, hey, the tips go. To the workers, just say, you haven't worked in a restaurant. What do you mean? Oh, because it pooled. Well, I mean, when I worked at a restaurant, we'd get the tips. I mean, most of the tips were daily. You get paid out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is a function of the business. It's directly aligned with the business progress. And so you would expect that if this delivery service, which everyone is alleging is doordash, 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. In reality, the money goes straight to this corporate slush fund, they say. So 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. If the algo predicts you are high tipper and you'll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base. If you tip 0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. 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, gotta feel bad for this person who if it's real, they just quit working at delivery app as a software and back end software engineering. Now they're drunk in a public library on a burner laptop. Are you allowed to be drunk in a library that 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? Or is it very premeditated? I don't know. It's. Yeah, no, I do. So. So I. I get extremely. I'm extremely frustrated. I will say this. Like. Like this feels like. This feels like fan. Yes. Really? What restaurant? In. In. In high school, I worked at a. I actually never. My first, My first job. First job outside of reffing soccer was picking up cigarette butts with my hands. Wow. For two hours in the morning. Yeah. And then I'd go at a restaurant and then I'd go work at a surf shop. Then I actually work my way up the restaurant picking up the cigarette butts, picking up Cigars. That was just pure cigarette butts. I was, I was like, I think I was. People could smoke indoors or something. It was, it was like a, it was a brewery. Okay. So people would sit outside, they'd sit. Outside late at night and so they would go into like a child in. This smoke filled environment. I'd go pick up the cigarette butts, my hands, I didn't even wear gloves. Very, very, very gross. Yeah. Disgusting. And so, so, so this feels like it's fan fiction. There's certainly some truth to it, which is. The truth is that 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 person. It's on its way. They're going to do everything they can, you ux wise to make it a delightful experience. And as somebody who keep coming back for. I appreciate the, I appreciate the art of tipping. There's an art to it. It's something I've always enjoyed doing because I'm always getting a service and I want to. And I at multiple times in my life worked 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. Totally. And so if you have this intermediary that's kind of messing with that and that's super frustrating. Again, I don't know exactly where this goes. Right. This is clearly a product that participants on both sides are happily, maybe not happily, but they are still like, you know, you can say you hate these platforms, but you're still using them 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, et cetera. 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 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 Tesla, sometimes it was, you know, oh, you get this version of the Escalade that's four years old, so it's already depreciated. And then you can do uber black and it's the highest ROI possible. But if someone's not doing that, then they could actually not be making money, which is very rough. But anyway, Tony rebutted this and said, this is not doordash and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated this kind of culture, 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 you charge for faster delivery but not make it faster? 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 awful claims in this post clearly hit a nerve. To be clear, this Reddit post is not about DoorDash. Given how differently we operate, we thought we'd take a moment to share what our approach is actually like. And, and there was a whole bunch of back and forth. Some people 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 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 what I would like to better, what I would like to better understand is how many people, what, what the actual churn is like on the, on the driver side of these businesses. Because, you know, people talk about, you know, this acceptance rate and who gets what jobs and things like that in a traditional environment, like in a restaurant. If you are like a server, let's say, and your manager is like, hey, you're in this kind of zone. You're in the zone of the restaurant. Any table that comes in here, you're handling today, 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. They're needy, but they don't order that much, and it's not going to be a big bill. That's. That manager would probably end up firing the person. Right. You have to 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 creates this scenario where you have to use bunch of weird incentives 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 gonna. I'm just gonna drive and go pick it up myself. And I'm sure some people would argue. That. That'S actually good. But anyway, the big question is, did. He tip his librarian? 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 at least hit the librarian with a buzz ball. For sure. For sure. This is a life. Life hack. If you have a 30. If you bring a 30 rack into the library, throw it down on the desk. Throw a buzz ball 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 chugging beers all day long, tip me. Tip me. Oh, well, I think, I think. I hope that 20, 26 is year of the buzz ball. You're into buzz balls. I was. Buzz balls were. Post my time. I never had one. They were big. When I was in college and what I appreciate now, in college, people were ready for buzz balls. Like, you were trained. 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, wait, wait. Oh, this is a. This is like a prank. I'm completely unfamiliar. Tell me the culture of the buzz ball. The culture of the buzz ball. So you get a buzz ball, obviously, like, near the checkout at any type of, like. Yes, I've seen. I've seen them I've seen them. And so the idea is like you're going to buy the thing that you're actually going to drink. Just pick up one of these. They have a few. It's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol. That's pretty strong for very. Yeah, it's very strong. It's more than a single serving though. Yeah, it's very strong. It's terrible. So it's like a punishment. You would never drink one of these for fun. Sure. And you go back to whatever your house or apartment and you throw the ball at somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it. Normally if you throw something at somebody and they're just expecting it, they're gonna catch it. They're like, what's going on? Of course. But in kind of at least the heyday of buzzball, for me, you knew this was something that could. A threat that could come out of nowhere at any time. It could come out at 9am Right? 10am and so you're gonna keep your hands down and you're not gonna catch it. It. You'll sidestep it. Okay, okay. But now what if it like smashes into the tv? Are there like buzzball disasters that happen? I'm sure there are results in a lot of destruction, but now people are not. I hit my dear friend Ben Taft. He's a venture capitalist, he's my neighbor. You hit him with a buzz? Hit him with a buzzball. When? A couple days ago. Like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared. Fully unprepared. He just. I feel bad that you caught this. Scoot in the chat. Says I already got the CEO of substack to drink a buzzball. This is good. More good scoot. This is good. This is good. Scoot. See. Is the culture of the buzzball alive and well on college campuses or do we. I'm not 21. I never had alcohol. Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, maybe we have to send you back for one non gap semester day on your 21st birthday to go experience college life and the life of the buzz ball. 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 multimurbo understanding. Okay, let's go to one of the more viral posts from the last few weeks from the holiday kick us off. Read this. Oh, you want me to read it? Yeah. You want me to read it? No, no. For your friends. No, no, no. Okay, I'm kidding. This is just One we can trade off. So Justin says, am 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 legal. 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 9am this morning, Saturday, January 3rd. It's a sunny warm day here in Austin and 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 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. What if this is going to be like a generational father son rivalry where. Some patricide going on coming from the park? Yeah, we don't know. Anyways, Justin continues. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure. It just seems wrong that I experienced 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 am even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest tree lined blocks. Give it up for tree lined blocks. Great places to read. I don't know how to make them anymore. 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. Well, a lot of people weighed in. 14 million views, 14 million views, 3,000. Reposts and 5,000 likes. I would ultimately say this is the worst like to view ratio, which means. That a lot of more replies than likes. Crazy, crazy stuff. Anyway, I like Justin. He's been on the show, came and talked to us about Nick Land. He's a very interesting thinker, very interesting writer. And one thing that part of what he talked about was how you can make it as an independent writer or creative. And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent. Underclass, but also outside of institutions. Like, he's not in an academic organization. He could be doing writing or in house somewhere at some tech company or something. I think he was talking to us a little bit about that. But he's been very, very independent. And that obviously creates the type of work that consumes all seeps into all sorts of cracks. Because there's no moment 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. You have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method. This is parenting of parenting, the Dan Bilzerian method. This works especially well for four year old boys. So you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining like an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four 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, 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. Four year old boy. Have the mind of Dan Bilzerian effectively. And so before you say, oh yeah. Honestly, it's even more expensive than that. I can't afford A fancy car like dan Bilzerian. A four year old cannot tell the difference between an SF90 and a Dodge Viper. Just get the Dodge Viper. Get a red car. Get a red car. They will be so stoked. My son wants to have a Blackwing themed birthday party. And I'm like, dude, we're not doing a Cadillac CT5V Blackwing theme themed birthday party. It is a very weird thing. I got this car half jokingly. I know you love it because it goes vroom and it goes very fast and he's very excited about it. But truly you have to return to 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 think the bigger picture is that like, like Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch and that's fine. Like my son is slightly, 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 your family, if you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting because it's. Unless you're behind the wheel of a Dodge Viper that's red. Yes, yes. But what I understand here is, is my reading of it is like he doesn't feel sad. Like he doesn't. He like it's maybe a sense of stress. Stress. It's hard to enjoy just playing catch or going for a walk or. Yeah. Cause he can't get off his own. 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 fucks. Right. Because Dan Bilzerian, Dan Bilzerian four year old mode. And I felt at peace. I was enjoying that in part because we worked so hard last year. I was like, you know, 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? Yeah, it felt like hitting, 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 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 great that I've noticed, is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is. It's actually like if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend 10 minutes, you'll get that sort of endorphin rush and that's enjoyable. And then it kind of drops off from there. But the more there's increasing returns to scale. Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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. I feel like it gets better and better. You can start gambling his allowance on Mario Kart. Introduce him to putting some money on the line. Maybe you should get an allowance every once in a while. He, like, acquires coins randomly somehow and like, he's very proud of that. But yeah, I do think that 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 my only experience. But a four year old boy with a father is like the most memetic 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 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 whenever we're in the car, like, he doesn't request, get ready to read. The Wall Street Journal. Get ready to read the Wall Street Journal, buddy. I actually am excited. I'm excited. 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. Yeah. And yeah, I do. I do a light filter so that. There'S no, like, yeah, part of that is almost leadership. I think my son loves dinosaur is probably. You know, if there was a Spotify. You took a class on dinosaurs. Yes. Y. No. But what I was going to say, if there was like a, if there was like a kid's book Spotify wrapped. Yeah. He'd be in the top.0001% dinosaur enjoyers. The problem is like I read, I read to him before bed every night, right? Yeah. 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. Give me some dinosaur book racks because we finish. So where I got to is, I'm like, like okay, like I. We gotta introduce, we gotta introduce more books because like if, if we're there, there are like kids oriented books even for like the four year old range. Yep. That are more. That are like interesting parables, stories, et cetera, that are just like timeless. 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, like he enjoys it, I enjoy it. It's just like you gotta be like switching it up and not at the same time. Like you wanna be leaning into their interests but not overly just doing whatever. Generate your own ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turn this semi analysis deep dive into a children's book so that I can read it to myself. About the TPUV 7. Something there, something there, something there. You gotta 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 LLMs 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. I have like two and none of them are particularly good. So anyway, there's a lesson. Breaking breaking news. Breaking news. We got some breaking news. What's breaking news? Department of Energy just announced that it awarded general matter 900 million for uranium. Wow. Hit that app. Lovin Gong, John. It shakes the camera. It shakes the camera. That's amazing. I think we gotta figure out how to hang the garage from the rafters. We do. Yeah, yeah. We're refining. We're refining. 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. What you got for me? Let's see. So the US awards 2.2.7 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 wording orders 2.7 to three companies to boost domestic uranium enrichment over the next 10 years in a broader effort to reduce U. S dependence on Russian supply. Yeah, 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 break it apart and we, you know, just buy it from them because they're like basically denuclearizing, I believe. Pretty, pretty. Yeah. So it's American centrifuge operating General Matter and Orano Federal Services secured the order. The department said if you want to sell to the government, maybe put Federal Services in your name. Well, I think it's, I think that might be. Not a startup. I think that might be owned by, by the government or something like that. Is it, or is it a private, Is it a private. It's private. Says it's a private company. But the contracts would require the companies to meet specific milestones to provide enrichment services for low enriched uranium and high, say 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 secure 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. Russia is currently the only country that makes haleu 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. United States were included in a law to ban uranium shipments from Russia fully by 2028. So big news. Very cool. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business's AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches in their tracks. Check out CrowdStrike. So the Dwarkesh piece, 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.

We have a new gong. Everyone look at this gong. It's bigger than ever. It's bigger than ever. We actually. It's so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean, it's a John sized gong. So John is 6, 8. 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 Applovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026. You're not going to believe this, but Applovin's next in the stack. Profitable advertising made easy with AX AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business. 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 hear that 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 in general they did every.

To Phantom Legends. Let me try and find 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, let me see what it's not in the top 25 so Ben Thompson recently wrote. It's also worth noting the relative popularity of human generated content versus AI generated content and Sora is down to 59 in the app Store and I count double digit human denominated 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. Dwarkesh is a little bit more like this is going to be extremely rough, so it requires, you know, aggressive, aggressive maneuvers 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. At least that was my one thing with.

So we picked up a gold post. So, you know, as we continue to see AI progress, we can actually move this goalpost ourselves physically here in the studio. Physically moving the goalpost now. There you go. There you go. My new definition of AGI is it needs to be able to smell. It needs to be able to smell.