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Requests and password resets. Lego launched a smart brick and.

Tell you more about what launched at ces. But first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. Our new. We have the Lambda lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not. CGL is here, here in the studio and we're very excited for Land Lightning round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through day.

Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio and we're very excited for Lightning round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic, we have a lot of folks.

And inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgl. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lightning Round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup, taking you through. Pull it up. There we go. Day.

Early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda Lightning Round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgl. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lambda Lightning Round. We have a lightning round with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff. We have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup.

Launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did. Actually. Did you had a vcr, like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970 when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Till that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda Lightning ra. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lightning Round. We have a Lightning Round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake. Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through. Pull it up. Alex Epstein. Jamie Siminoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production. Are going to cap it off with Lulu today. We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at Cesar.

Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda lightning round. We have a cloud. A physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio and. We'Re very excited for Lightning round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear up, taking you through. There we go. Alex Epstein, Jamie Simonoff, we're going to dive into the piece.

And finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. LEGO launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toy. This was the launch of the year contender and it's the first week of January. So let's pull it up. If you watch this, let's watch this. For a smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do? More dopamine for children. Let's go. I think this is good. I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I remember there were. We're excited to addict your children to Legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And yeah, LEGO Mindstorms. Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars, like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbopuffer person gonna need a rebuild. Simon we need to make this a smart LEGO puffer. Smart puffer. But yeah. So Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters, and more from the Verge. Tom. Love it. Coverage. Very cool. Boston Dynamics. And of course Boston Dynamics.

You're talking with founders, bringing up stories from, like, the fight game and different. Because I met, like, building a company kind of can feel at times like getting waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face, maybe an investor is rejecting you, a customer went with a competitor, et cetera, et cetera. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and chewing glass at this point. And I imagine some of those learnings carry over. Yeah, well, 100. You know, I say after boxing, everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches and you have to bob and weave. Sometimes after the first round, you go back to the corner. Boxing is a great analogy for life and your companies. You have to go back to the corner, talk to your coaches, reset, come out for the. For the next round, and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end. Not me against Anthony Joshua. My jaw is broken, but. But you're still yapping. He didn't take. People were wondering, can he talk on the show? And, you know, here. It's proof. Yeah, I have a little bit of a lisp right now because of it, but we're just pushing through. This is storage, actually. Yeah, this is the AI version of me. I tapped in. Yeah. Can you talk.

The fight game and, and different because I. Because I met. Like building a company kind of can feel at times like getting. Waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face, maybe an investor is rejecting you, a customer went with a competitor, etc. Etc. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and, and chewing glass at this point. And I imagine some of those learnings carry over. Yeah, well, 100%. You know, I say after boxing, everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches and you have to bob and weave. Sometimes after the first round, you go back to the corner. Boxing is a great analogy for life and your companies. You have to go back to the corner, talk to your coaches, reset, come out for the. For the next round, and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end. Not me against Anthony Joshua. My jaw is broken. But. But you're. Still yapping. He didn't take. People were wondering, can he talk on the show? And you know, here, it's proof. Yeah, I have a little bit of a list right now because of it, but we're just pushing through. This is storage, actually. Yeah, this is the AI version of me. I tapped in. Yeah. Can you talk. Maybe both of you could talk to me a little bit about focus. You're both in.

Involved in a ton of stuff, you know, boxing, content, investing, building companies. W At the same time. Yeah, W at the same time. I think of you as very insightful early on on the importance of daily work, daily repetition. The it's everyday bro is a meme but I actually think it's deeply insightful and the key to many successes. And I credit a lot of the growth that we've had here with becoming a daily show instead of just this show that is every once in a while and I'm wondering how you deal with focus and when is the time to go all in and do something every single day. Yeah. You have to figure out that org chart for yourself in terms of what do you know, feeds the rest of the ecosystem the most. And for me that's boxing. But I look to Elon Musk as an example, right. How he's build built some of the biggest companies in the world and he's managing all of these teams and he's devoted and you know, sleeps on the couch in the offices. You have to be that level of committed and it's a non stop working, hustling, you know, whatever it is that you have to do. But I think the importance of having a great team around you allows you to be able to do a lot of things. I have Jeff that boxing fuels the rest of the ecosystem, the content, the businesses, the attention, the all of these things, the networking, the connections. So then Jeff can put his priority as anti fund etc and it all turns into this great flywheel. But it's definitely just staying committed and working harder than you know, anyone else that's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that. Have you guys done any recent deals?

Exciting duo here. Guests, we have Jeff Lu and Jason. Let's bring them in. Joining tbpm. Here they are. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show. Good, how are you? Thanks for having us. We're good. Congratulations. Can you set the table for us on the most recent raise? How did it come together? What's the goal of the fundraiser? How are you describing the strategy of the fund these days? I mean, I'm happy to kick it off. I mean anti fund, we think that boomer VCs are boring and just like there are new AI companies and the next generation of American entrepreneurs like taking. Over. Just like the business ecosystem, I think the same opportunity exists for vc. What was the original Anti Fund like? How'd you come up with that name? What are you? Anti boomers? Yeah, a lot of, a lot of times we're both founders and we know how hard it is dealing with VCs and move slow and updates and not providing any value and they just become a nuisance. And I think we were very founder first and wanted to bring a value add. I think what we can bring is like distribution, marketing, all of these things. Expertise on social media, advertising. We worked with, obviously invested into OpenAI but then worked with the SORA team to help launch the product, brought in the content. So that's just like one really good example. But that's what we wanted to do is just be anti the establishment essentially and bring something new to the table that wasn't just money. We believe money is a commodity and that things beyond that are way more valuable and helping grow the companies. And I think the double click on that. I think as founders and as VCs you have to be anti establishment. I mean we are disrupting existing large players. If we don't want to take over existing large markets then you should not be in this business. So that should be what you expect as a founder, but you should expect that from your investors. If your investor is not as hungry as you, maybe choose other investors. What can you say on fund strategy? Ownership targets? My assumption is that you guys are multi stage, so you're kind of flexible. I imagine there's pre seed rounds that you'd be excited about leading but at the same time you don't mind participating in a later stage round where it's a breakout company and you can add fuel to the fire. Yeah, I think the way we think about it is that we've taken barbell, but we call it extreme barbell. We want to be the first check and technical founders and that's People just dropping out and where their first phone call will post. Put 100, 250k, just put them in the business or we identify and built really great relationship with like Sam Altman and Mark Chen of OpenAI. And we want to support what we think will be generational defining companies. And I think everything in the middle is very hard. And I think we know we're strong and where we could potentially, you know, weaker. Yeah. Tell me more about this Sora partnership or that project. Like, how did that come together? What was the reaction? I feel like, yeah, did you hesitate. At all about giving up your name and likeness? I mean, you and Sam Altman, you guys kind of jumped first and I think it went. It went surprisingly fine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, what was the reaction? Yeah, so they wanted to build a social media platform and we met at the inauguration with Sam Altman. We were like talking about how there needs to be a new social media platform, what does that look like, et cetera. And so we just started having idea brainstorms and it eventually turned into what, what SORA is and then just helping them on the functional, you know, me and my brother's expertise of however many years we've been making content, all the little dials, triggers. Change this button, change that button, make this easier. Boom, boom, boom. This is what fans are looking for. Super detailed stuff. But then once it finally came to, to launch, yeah, it was it. I gave my name, image and likeness and I knew it was gonna get crazy. I, I wasn't hesitant and it just caught like fire. And obviously we saw the results and what happened and it was a pretty phenomenal experience in marketing and like showcasing what the Internet loves these days. Yeah. One of our portfolio companies, archive.com tracked a billion impressions in six days of Jake Sora. So many makes sense. What advice are you giving to folks who want to become creators in 2026? It feels a completely different era from the vine days. At the same time, there's some lessons that never change. But how are you seeing it? Yeah, I would say authenticity is everything. I think showing your whole entire life is the key. If you're a new and up and coming creator, like the struggles, what you're going through, tell. Tell your audience about financially what you're doing or what you're having to do. Talk to them about your ups, your downs, share with them your. Your life story. And then you just have to be posting and posting. And I think a lot of people aren't good at editing, like simple stuff, captions, music video, Timing how long is the video. So it is very difficult. And you're competing with every single platform as a content creator. You're competing as a content creator. I'm technically competing against Netflix. Why are they gonna watch, you know, some Jake Paul Instagram videos versus going on onto Netflix? And so you have to realize that you're actually playing one of the hardest games. And people think it's easy, but it's actually a very, very technical thing. And you have to have a certain skill set to be able to do it. And you have to be entertaining. You have to be providing something that's a niche that no one has ever seen before. We, we have the Paul brothers, we have the speeds, we have Mr. Beast doing his videos. We have whistling Diesel blowing up trucks. So what are you doing? Yeah, John has talked about this. You used to be able to get a million views by just having a Ferrari. Now you blow it up. The games change. It went from have the car or rent the car to give the car away, where you take the tax deduction to now you must destroy it, which. Is how do you so. So 2025, there was a lot of founders doing, like, rage bait marketing. Uh, this style of, like, using rage bait in content was popularized on YouTube and various social media platforms. I would say, Jake, you've done this very, very effectively at times of being under knowing, I'm going to put out this video. It's going to make a lot of people mad, but a lot of people are going to enjoy it too, and they're going to become fans. And I'm okay to alienate some people. Do you. How. How have you kind of like, evolved like that even? Like, what is your framework? What is the right amount of rage to generate in an audience and because you really need to thread the needle. Yeah. So the way I look at entertainment is invoking emotion. You want to invoke fear, sadness, happiness, joy. That's good. Not just fear and sadness. But, yeah, you need all of them. You need all the full spec. That's what I'm committed to. And I don't care who likes it or not, that's what I'm doing. Emotion. I posted a video where, like, I was acting like I was depressed, like, traveling around the world in, like, my jet and on vacation. I was like, what is life? I was like, what is life even about? And I was trolling and, like, my friends text me like, yo, bro, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, bro. But the video got like 30 million views because everyone was like, oh, this is like. I'm kind of sad too. Yeah. What is life even about? And just different random things like that. So just be committed as an entertainer to invoking emotion. And you can't care about the result of what anyone thinks because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something. That's the key. Someone asked me to ask you all time, all time record for bench press. I've done 315, like three times. There we go. That's. What. What do you find yourself when you're talking with founders bringing up stories like the fight game and different because I met like building a company kind of can feel at times like getting. Waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face. Maybe an investor is rejecting you, a customer went with a competitor, et cetera, et cetera. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and chewing glass at this point. And I imagine some of those learnings carry over. Yeah, 100%. You know, I say after boxing, everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches and you have to bob and weave. Sometimes after the first round, you go back to the corner. Boxing is a great analogy for life and your companies. You have to go back to the corner, talk to your coaches, reset, come out for the. For the next round, and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end. Not me against Anthony Joshua. My jaw is broken. But. But you're still yapping. He didn't take your spirit. People were wondering, can he talk on the show? And you know, here it's proof. Yeah. I have a little bit of a lisp right now because of it, but we're just pushing through. This is storage, actually. Yeah. This is the AI version of me. I tapped in. Yeah. Can you talk. Maybe both of you could talk to me a little bit about focus. You're both involved in a ton of stuff. You know, boxing, content, investing, building companies. At the same time. Yeah, w. At the same time. I think of you as very insightful early on on the importance of daily work, daily repetition. The. It's every day bro. Is a meme. But I actually think it's deeply insightful and the key to many successes. And I credit a lot of the growth that we've had here with becoming a daily show instead of just this show that is every once in a while. And I'm wondering how you deal with focus and when is the time to go all in and do something every single day. Yeah. You have to figure out that org chart for yourself in terms of what do you know, feeds the rest of the ecosystem the most and for me that's boxing. But I look to Elon Musk as an example, right. How he's built some of the biggest companies in the world and he's managing all of these teams and he's devoted and you know, sleeps on the couch in the offices. You have to be that level of committed and it's a non stop working hustling, you know, whatever it is that you, you have to do. But I, I think the importance of having a great team around you allows you to be able to do a lot of things. I had Jeff that boxing fuels the rest of the ecosystem, the content, the businesses, the attention, the all of these things, the networking, the connection. Then Jeff can put his priority as anti fund etc and it all turns into this great flywheel. But it's definitely just staying committed and working harder than you know, anyone else that's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that. Have you guys, have you guys done any recent deals? The most recent things that we're excited. I was going to say you're getting happy dad. It just happened to crack open a half. Yes, we are. Yes. We're happy investors and happy dad boys are homies and are great. It's a great operating team. Plus I think that influencer led CPG play I think is yeah challenging but like the very, very best operators are the best celebrities we like to partner with. So another example of that is Khloe Kardashian's cloud popcorn and obviously our own businesses. W. Yeah. What's your guys's framework for or for investing in celebrity brands? Because people have the sense that oh they see celebrity brands that work and they just assume that all. They don't see the graveyard. They don't see the Travis Scott with his canned cocktail brand that looked like it had a lot of potential but didn't go anywhere. And there's a bunch of other examples like that. I'm curious like what you guys think the formula is. Is a creator limited to you know, one brand over a 10 year period? Do you see multi brand strategy emerging? What do you think? Yeah, I think it's, I mean similar, I'd say similar assessment is a normal investment, right. 90% of startups fail. So I think we just like look at that statistical norm and just expect and even for a celebrity letter not to just have that statistical pattern. But then I think after that it looks at. But what you do have is that you have an unfair distribution advantage and you need to make sure that the market in which that distribution focuses actually makes sense. Right. Like I think Happy dad is a great example where Milk Boys to me is like the frat bro older of Internet. I don't know, they're like 30 now, so they're unknown. But to me that is a very good founder market product fit. Right. And I think if celebrity or not, you just look at that thing as an asset. Just like there's a technical advantage. Why are OpenAI researchers just like raising a ton of money out the gate? Because there is an assumption that they have some technical ability to have to find product market fit. So it's the same thing with a celebrity. It's just very distribution oriented and I think it's maybe a little bit less quantitative, it's maybe more taste driven. I think that's where I think Jake I value and I think Logan as well. Where they have seen over, you know, 10, 15 years of being famous, how many people that have come and gone as famous people. I think it's super rare to be top of field and relevant across multiple platforms for such a long time. So I think those are patterns we pull up. What about the launch of W? I thought it was interesting because you didn't do what I thought you would do, which is direct to consumer purely just sell just to the audience. You came out of the gate with a big retail partnership and I think maybe some influencers or just celebrity type people, they Forget that the CEOs of big retail establishments might be in their audience too. They might be able to get that introduction to Walmart sooner or Target sooner. And I was wondering how deliberate that strategy was. As you reflect on that strategy, would you recommend it to someone else in that position? Yeah, 100%. I think playing across the board also is key. But we wanted to go retail first and we saw the success of that with my brother's brand, with prime and the accessibility of, you know, all of our fans walking through these stores on a daily basis, I would say a lot of my fan base is a Walmart shopper and etc. So yeah, being able to have those content points digitally but also in person and people seeing the things in stores and yeah, being able to have retail D2C all of that I think is, is super important. But we decided to go with the retail first strategy and it's worked out great. Part of, I think the way that you guys have maintained such relevancy is Just reinventing yourself. Obviously, you reinventing going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about. Fighters have notoriously short careers. I mean, I'm sure you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock up another 100 million pay per view. But I imagine at some point, Maybe in your 40s, you'll reinvent yourself again. Do you think about. Are you thinking five, ten years out around how you want to reinvent yourself again, or are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and nothing else matters? No, yeah, definitely no. I naturally will lead myself into politics without a doubt. Like, it's within me. I'm passionate about it. I follow it very closely behind the scenes, and I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and to state my opinion on things, but I don't know what that exactly looks like. Are you thinking like Aizar or president? What? Comptroller of a local city? I just want to help the. The world, and I know it's needed, especially in the generations moving forward. And that's, you know, something that Charlie Kirk was doing. I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed and it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world, and that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things. But I know I can do it at an even greater level. And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting. Well, Chat's saying Vance Paul, 2028, so. Let'S go. Well, thank you. Awesome. Well, great. Great to have you both on. Congratulations. Sure you'll be back on soon. And yeah, congrats on the new fund and the recent fight and the portfolio. They got everything in there. Yeah, you guys pretty much got. So it's been very cool to watch. Fantastic. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility.

Options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, all with great customer service. Our next guest is the founder of Ring at Amazon. Jamie Siminoff is at ces. We're going to have him break down how CES is going. Jamie, sorry for keeping you waiting. Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. It's great to meet you. How are you doing? Doing great. I would love to hear how is ces? I imagine you've been going a long time. I've actually never been. It feels like a playground for me. I'd love to go sometime, but how is it this year? How does it compare to other. What are you introducing there? It's pretty. Overall, CES, pretty fun. I think this is like my 15th or 17th year or something like that, so. It's been a long time. Yeah. I started building the booth myself and driving in here in a U Haul truck, and I've graduated now to a booth that built by professionals. Wait, how did you build the first booth? Is this like, plywood or are you scraps? Scraps in a cave. I actually took the Shark Tank set when I was on Shark Tank, and I took the Shark Tank set and we put it in a U Haul truck, brought it to ces. It turns out that you can't use power tools as a non union person at ces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, we, we were like, violently, like, threatened. I couldn't. I couldn't afford the union labor, so I'm like, guys, you're gonna have to, like, pull me out of here in handcuffs. Like, I have to get this booth done. That's crazy. Yeah. We would literally build, build the booth, and it got bigger and bigger. You know, we've graduated. Okay, tell me the story of Shark Tank, and I want to know if you could play it back with everything you know now, do you think you could have convinced the sharks to invest. Everything? I know? Sure. I would have told them I'm going to build the world's largest home security company and sell it for $1 billion. You want to invest, but you could. Have told them that. You think they would have gone for that? I should have told them, don't worry, I'll let you invest in a 7 million valuation. It's going to sell for a billion. You're totally fine. Yeah. One of the greatest misses. But it is, like, to be fair to them, at the time, like, I didn't know what that was going to do. You know, we were doorbot, we were figuring it out. Like, a lot of you know, like a lot of startups and things, we didn't necessarily pivot, but we pivoted inside of our own sort of mission many times to get to where we are today. Yeah. And how do you describe the scope of the company? I mean, you teased it, you said it's the world's largest home security company, but what's the shape of that? What's the footprint? What does your organization look like? Take me through sort of a day in life. Yeah. So, I mean, because I'm at Amazon, there's some things we reported. So we're over 100 million cameras out there. Profitable business. Hit that gong. Hit that app. Loving gong, John. There we go. It's a camera shaking hit as usual. Congratulations. Thank you. I mean, did you ever think you'd be at that scale or what was the initial introduction? No, I remember when I launched this thing, Nest. I think when Nest sold to Google, it was reported, I don't know if it's true, but they were doing like 30,000 like units, either a month or a quarter. Sure. And I remember thinking to myself, man, if I ever got to 30, you know, it's like, if I ever got that big, you know, holy. And yeah, we're now, I mean, it's like, you know, literally 100 million plus cameras out there, global. And it's. Yeah, for me, the mission to make neighborhoods safer. The impact we've had there has been substantial and that's, I, I truly am proud of like, I really try to focus on those things and then the output. Let it happen. Let people reward us for purchasing a camera because they think it's going to make their home or neighborhood safer? Yeah, yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Can you take me through sort of how you are thinking about the product suite, the, the, the feature sets, like how you're positioning the, the overall portfolio and then some of the announcements today. Yeah, so I mean, from a macro side, I look at AI as ia. So we're the intelligent assistant. And so our job is now where, you know, when I launched Ring emotionalert was like mind blowing. Like, dude, you got a motion alert from your front door to your phone. Like that's crazy. Now you hear them too often. And so our job is to use AI to basically curate for you as an individual unique to your home, what you want to see when you should be interacting with it and really take down the number of alerts and increase the efficacy of them. So that's like from a macro, that's what we're doing. How Are you thinking about the trade off of like cloud based artificial intelligence? Obviously, processing a ton of video constantly, that feels like something that needs to be done on a server. At the same time there's privacy, so people might want it done on device, but that creates power constraints and all sorts of things. I mean, also I feel like being at Amazon's great because I feel like most people trust Amazon to be secure because AWS and all this stuff. But have you tussled with where the AI lives and the benefits and costs and trade offs there? So for us it's layers. You try to determine it's a human or motion event at the camera level. So you're not just flooding to your point, like you're not flooding the AI or the servers, the cloud with the stuff because it's very expensive. I mean it's using a lot of power, using a lot of processing. So it's like trying to have like these different layers. But you know, where we like to end is the cloud. We like to have the cloud as the place that's doing the final processing. AI is moving so fast that in our area, I think anything you put at the edge is going to age like fish on a hot day. And so we're trying to be very careful not to put too much intelligence at the edge because that intelligence, it decays so quickly that by the time you actually ship that product, it's maybe no longer intelligent. And I want my team to be able to write on and, you know, build code and put out features that are literally the best in the world at that moment. And the cloud really is the only place to do it right now for that final sort of where. Where are you most excited for various models to improve? Like do we need capability advancement or do you feel like there's a capability overhang where there's enough product that it's more about implementation? It's such good question because there's so many places where we're putting models and different models and custom models and there's so much coming out. But I would say where you're going with it, I think we are starting to now. I think that the AI is ahead of what we can sort of like chew and sort of digest our food with. I think it's actually getting farther along than we can put the features around it, the UI around it and have customers understand it. So I do think it's actually starting to get almost faster than we are in that. And it's up to us like now to try to figure out like how to get. Because again, no one, our customers don't buy technology. They buy something that makes their home feel safer, makes their home better, gives them more attachment to their home. They're not buying the best AI, they're buying the best service for their home. And so it's our job to sort of not sell them technology, but sell them obviously technology in the background, but sell them the features and the services. So. But I do think I have not been able to find lately. And it's amazing how quickly this is happening. Every idea I have, it's like the AI is ahead of the idea, whereas before the team would be like, well, it's not really there yet. You can't do that. You don't understand. And now it seems like it's really just going so much faster than even I can sort of think. Is that re engaging you as a leader? I mean, it's been over a decade. I feel like there's a lot of times when post acquisition you're at a large company, it can be exhausting. Maybe you want to go fish all day or something. I don't know if you fish. But the, but, but the moment it feels like it's been re engaging a lot of business leaders. Have you had that effect over the last year? Totally. Like, there's so much we can do. We can build it so fast, get it out. I mean, we launched today. I was, I live in Pacific Palisade, so I live in the fire zone. Yeah. And you know, it's like. Yeah. As you know, like it was a crazy thing. Yeah. So I was able to go from like living there, seeing what happened there, and then building a feature that we launched today, which I think will hopefully be a way to assist in future fires, which we did with watch duty, where now you'll get an alert as a ring customer if you're in a fire zone. We had over 10,000 cameras in the Palisades area. And so now you would get an alert that says, would you like to join into watch duty and give them data? And now we'll have an accurate up to the minute map from AI looking for embers, looking for smoke and seeing where the fire is jumping. And so now we can give real time information to everyone and hopefully. Yeah, I want to talk, I want to talk a little bit. Yeah, kind of a little bit about kind of some more sci fi stuff I'm curious to kind of get your opinion on. So John and I. John's in Pasadena, I'm in Malibu. So this time last year, John Like, I didn't have electricity, cell service, anything like that. John was like, previously burned down. Yeah, my house burned down in 2018, was fully rebuilt, and six months after I bought it, I was like, oh. There'S a reason it burned down. No, but it burned down because like an ember had floated from a far away fire and embers floated to like six houses in my neighborhood and all them just burned down. And luckily the majority of the homes were fine. And I was just thinking, like, there's gotta be better. As we, you know, head into the kind of robotics era, there has to be better. You know, detection is one thing, but then actual response feels like an inevitable next step over time. When if it's literally a single ember that can, you know, be the reason that a multimillion dollar property burns to the ground. We should be able to detect that quickly and put it out without having, you know, a bunch of heroes in a truck drive, you know, 10 miles and come put it out with water. Right. So how are you thinking about kind of like actual response? And is that even something that Ring would do? Or do you think there's other startups that should leverage your guys's detection? So this is where we worked with watch duty. So our fire watch, which is our system that we go into where AI is now watching your camera, you've put it in this mode and said like, yes, I want to share this. That then pipes right into watch duty. Watch duty is what's happening. The command center has watch duty up. Residents have watch duty on their app. So that is the centralized place where the map is forming on the fire. And my hope is that, and being in the fire myself, I saw that a bush is smoldering next to a house and I could go put it out with my feet. People are like, how'd you put out the fire? And I'm like, I literally would stamp on it until it was out, put some dirt on it. Now if that had kept going, you know, I don't know the exact incident, but like, yes, that's what happens. Like that keeps going, then it burns a house down and that house starts on fire and puts out more embers. And so if we, if you could see that on a camera and, and say, oh wow, like there's this thing has jumped over to this area that's a quarter mile away and there's smoldering next to this house, you can put it out so much easier and deploy those resources. So I think that's why what's great about this one Is we're bringing the information in and then it's going to watch duty, which is already being used by all of the people that are deploying the resources today. Yeah. Are you excited about robots and drones as responders to various home security wildfires? You have Boston Dynamics, sorry, Amazon has. A drone that flies around your house, but is that a ring project or is that. I built that. You built that? No way. Tell us about that. How does that go? And then specifically. So Boston Dynamics has been showing off their new humanoids. I've been wanting somebody to build a humanoid home security product forever. I'd love to have a. Just a guy. I mean, deterrent. It's having, you know, various criminals, knowing that most homes now have, you know, video. I mean, just those signs that you put in the. In the. In the ground, American protected by, like, that helps a little bit. Yeah. I would love to know more about drones and robotics. So there's different, like different layers to drones. I mean, so you have companies like Axon out there that are doing police drones and, like, literally are, you know, going miles. So for both fire, you know, responding to something, there's that layer, and then I think there's going to be layers down all the way to where we were, which is like, I'd say the complete other side, which is inside the home. So having, like a small drone inside the home that can fly around, see what's going on for security, I'm very bullish on the whole robotic space in general. I think AI has also, you know, what was so hard for us years ago when we were building this thing is now, I don't want to say it's easy, but wow, is it different? Like, like, there's a real tailwind behind us. And so hopefully, I mean, you guys are. You guys are in L. A. Maybe I'll bring something by the studio in a few months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love that. Yeah. But more specifically is the idea of a humanoid pacing around your property is. Is that. Is. Is. Is that a reasonable deterrent? Is there. Have you built one? Is. So, so here. The reason I say it is because, like, when people are like, oh, you have a robot that's going to do your laundry, it's like, well, I have a wonderful woman who does my laundry and I like employing this person. And if you give me an $80,000 a year robot or $80,000 robot, that's going to depreciate and it's going to do a worse job, I'm like, I'm happy with the human at least for you know, the next few years, right. Whereas hiring somebody to stand in your backyard all night long, all night long. That'S a brutal job. That's like 150k a year. I don't know. For somebody that's actually like worth worth. And it's also, it's a, it's, there's all these studies of security guards that they like their, their effectiveness goes down like literally like, like algorithm, it's like it just falls off. And you think about it, it's like just because you get so bored, right? Like you're sitting doing the same thing every day, nothing's happening. So it's like the effectiveness of a security guard is actually like a human security guard is very tough to be because you're not, it's not normal that you're actually doing something on the security side. So I do think robotics, I think at the higher end places, enterprise, maybe there will be humanoid security. We always look at it from high volume, low cost. Like I'm always on like the high volume, low cost residential side is where we start. And so you know, what can we build to bring robotics into and around the home in the neighborhood that's affordable at high, high volumes. I don't think, I don't think that's going to be a humanoid for a long time. That said, if a humanoid costs $500 or something at some point and you could do it of course, like it's. Great, that's going to be great. I was saying to John, the teleoperation potential here which is like, hey, ring detect something. I have somebody, somebody could be anywhere in the world, suddenly they can pop into this embodied form fact actually be a physical deterrent because I mean so many people in, I mean LA talk to anybody that lives. I mean the Palisades had like prior to the fire, an insane break in epidemic. I have friends who would have multiple break ins in their home per year. Super like elite operators that would come in, use metal detectors, figure out where your safes were, pull them out, throw them out in a truck. It'd be like five minutes, everything's gone. So there needs like video is not enough for true deterrence. Like there's going to have to be. Physical and we have stuff like virtual security guard that is you can set it in like you know, for my house when I go to sleep, I set virtual security guard on. If someone comes on the property, they're notified, goes to a human. So like there's response. So I think that's I do think you're correct though in how you're looking at it, which is like it's not just technology. Like the idea that like just technology is going to solve everything is not correct. I think we can use our IA like our intelligent assistant to bring people into the scene when they need to be on a limited basis. And when you do that, I think that's how like for example you're talking about the Palisades, like how you would reduce that crime or even try to zero out that crime, which I do believe we can do over the next few years with deploying the AI as well as merging it with other human responses. How is the enterprise side or the B2B side of the business evolved? What's the shape of it when. What trade offs have you made to. To focus on particular niches or verticals? I'm interested to hear because obviously this technology applies everywhere. Yeah. So we really started focusing residential. That pulled us into small medium business. We're in over half a million small medium businesses use us. We don't even know exactly all of them. Let's go. Yeah, of course they treat it like homes. They buy it as a prosumer effectively. Yeah, exactly. So we don't like know exactly how many but. But we think it's you know, it's definitely north of half a million. Yeah. And you know, just like it's like how the iPhone sort of slowly got into or not even that slowly but got into the enterprise. Oh yeah, like the iPhone like you know, Apple didn't have a bunch of salespeople go out and sell enterprise iPhone. Yeah, it's you know this. The CEO brought the iPhone in that they had and said I don't want this other anymore. Not using. I just, I. That's exactly right. And so I think we've kind of gone slowly up the stack. Today we actually launched a whole line of new cameras that are multi 4K lens, like really higher end. We call it the elite line. And I do think that will sort of get us just kind of similar to the iPhone getting into enterprise. I think it'll pull us in and we'll kind of see how that goes. We also now have an app store that people can build custom applications because historically again pre AI a camera did security. Like that was all it could do in sort of reasonable cost efficient way. Now if you think about like a coffee shop, if you have ring cameras all over your coffee shop, why isn't it telling you that a table was dirty and someone wanted to sit? Why isn't it telling you about the line? Why isn't it telling you about which team is the fastest? Why is it like we're seeing it like it's all there? And so being able to allow the long tail to be built by entrepreneurs just like any marketplace or any app store, I do think we're going to unlock a lot of value for enterprise and small medium business that way. So I'm really excited. We actually just launched that today too. We launched a bunch of stuff today. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine that being really good. Have you been focused more on job sites than like large enterprise, like software campuses, that type of security? That feels like maybe a separate problem, but I could imagine you getting there at some point. Yeah, job sites have been great. We have a lot of solar powered cameras. So people use them, they put them on. You'll see them on a pole. You'll just take one up. We have cameras with lights, so that's also good on job sites. Like someone walks onto the job site at night, light goes on cameras there. We have a talk down so you can say like you're being recorded. So there's a lot. Like we had the virtual security guard. Sure. We launched today one of the trailers. So if you see those trailers that are out in the parking lots. Yeah. There's usually solar panel on top and a bunch of cameras, that type of thing. I've seen those. Yeah. So we launched one that's more of, I'd say like a product. Lower costs in that market. Again, high volume, low cost. Yeah. So we're going to. I wouldn't be surprised in the next couple of years. We sort of really have a big dent in the enterprise, but we're not going to do it through the front door. We're not going to sort of not responding to RFPs. We're not going to have an enterprise salesforce. We're going to just, you know, come in like the iPhone, like, let's let it come in. I feel like, I feel like you could spin that up in a heartbeat at Amazon, but. But it makes sense for the overall strategy. One, one last question and we'll let you get back to Cesar. How do you think about camera sensor technology in security cameras and door cameras? I was looking specifically at like a wildlife, like a squirrel cam for my son who's four and a half and I was. But I'm also like a camera nerd. We use like, you know, Sony FX3s and full frame cinema lenses here. And I was like, I sort of want like a 4k, not just 4k but like full frame cinema lens hardened just to find my squirrels. And it's like a ridiculous thing. I don't know that that's a real product, but how do you think about the learning curve and just the diffusion of just better camera sensors, better lenses into these commodity consumer products over time? Yeah. So there's definitely a diminishing return. You can go to like a 20K sensor and it's like not going to for again, very special applications. Yes. But for a normal home it's not going to give you any more value. I do think 4k is a giant leap. We now have a whole 4k line with our elite line we have now multi 4k lenses that are lens down to the pixels. So it's really pixel. What you really want to look at is pixel density. It's actually not 4K 2K. It's what is the pixel density that the camera delivers then? That's also the AI can only process what it sees. The camera can only be as smart as what it sees. I do think the current line of 4K cameras we have right now for most residential use cases are as good as you're going to want at the price point. And then we'll just kind of let just like everything in technology as 8K sensors come down as bandwidth goes up, we'll kind of keep adding that. But I do think we're right now kind of right at the edge of that curve of price. You know, price to sort of quality what you need. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordan, anything else? No. This is super fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun. Appreciate you making the time. Great to meet you. Happy customer. Overnight success. Thank you for. Yeah, exactly. Overnight success. Exactly. It's amazing. It's amazing. Well, enjoy the rest of ces. Have a great restream. You guys come back on soon and. We'Ll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Quickly, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream go to restream.com we have an extension.

And finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. LEGO launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toy. This was the launch of the year contender and it's the first week of January. So let's pull it up. If you watch this, let's watch this. For a smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do? More dopamine for children. Let's go. I think this is good. I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I remember there were. We're excited to addict your children to Legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid and yeah, LEGO Mindstorms. Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars, like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbopuffer person gonna need a rebuild. Simon, we need to make this a smart LEGO puffer. Smart puffer. But yeah. So Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more from the Verge. Tom. Love it. Coverage. Very cool. Boston. And of course Boston Dynamics, demo champions of the world. Yeah, they got to Everton.

He said. What's that? I mean, a white belt title certainly. Yeah, the title of the essay is you Will be okay, he said. Seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring and knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks. As a general planner, you should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability x of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the 1x fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non trivial probability of total nuclear war and they still went about their lives. Even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes, it is best to follow some common sense best practices. But then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades. My own expectation is that, as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time. Rather, just like we call recessions after we are already in them, we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones, would be needed for at least several decades, if not more. Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again this like this. You have two months to escape the permanent two years. It's really, you know. Even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to become rich in two months is going to make you do Things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head. And still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon. Maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire. But think on three five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of, of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just, I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically and physically. However, I expect that, like the Industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is, I was thinking here, people have been kind of asking like, hey, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs? You know, people are like, I actually like, I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that. I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Do we really need to automate this? Continuing Us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty. And yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2000s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill. You've had that thrill in the tenderloin back in the day. Yeah, for sure. On a YC budget. I'm just thinking if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just, it's so over. For the gravediggers. Yep. For the morticians, the coroners. Anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately cooked. They're out of a job, they'll have to find something new to do. But I'm optimistic that they will find a new new new job. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon AI.

Delivering access. It's amazing. But there's a lot of tech leaders who aren't making that case effectively. What do you think? You know the David Foster Wallace anecdote that he said with the two young fish are swimming and they come across an older fish, and the older fish says, morning, boys. How's the water today? And they said, what's water? AI feels like water to fish now. It's like everywhere all the time. And so when I see companies try to use having AI as a selling point, it's like bragging that you have cloud storage, right? Like, yes. And I think there's a lot. We're now in the cloud. With connected solutions. It feels not only just tired and worn out. What is it that Dave Chappelle said about Afghanistan? It's bombed out and depleted. There's just no more value to come from using the list of AI buzzwords. People are fatigued. So just skip to what is the thing that it actually does and then prove to me that it actually does do that. And then you're good. And then as for the broader messaging. Yeah, it feels like tech is right now is a heel. Right. It's like, yeah, we're gonna automate a bunch of work and.

Know that it'll happen, but it's what I hope will happen. And it's what I would encourage founders to try to make happen, which is so much is happening all the time. So I looked up the literal technical definition of white noise, and it's basically just maximum intensity at every frequency altogether, so that it's mushed into this nothingness. And that feels like the information environment that we're in. And the only way to break through the white noise is you don't actually compete on being loud. And competing on temporary intensity is not it. But one normal volume or quieter note that is sustained for a long period of time actually does cut through. The other thing that cuts through is super personalized and super local things where someone could only be talking to you. Like if you're at a cocktail party. Have you heard of the cocktail party effect? If you're at a cocktail party? I wouldn't be at a cocktail party. You're at a secret podcaster CrossFit retreat in the ocean before the Venezuela raid, and there's just noise and you can't hear anything. But if somebody says David Sanra by David Senra, featuring David Sanra, then you would hear that. Because this is like the secret frequency for you. Yeah, people love hearing it on him. Yeah. But people also love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express, articulated in words that they wish they could have thought of. This is going to be a random thought that kind of affirms what you just said. I just.

Like Jake Paul. And you want people to kind of try to punch you, want to see you get punched. That's one thing. But I don't think the tech industry actually wants the entire world to hate it. No. Well, there's a tension between what you want to say to attract talent and then what you want to say to not be hated and maybe get customers. And these people live in different worlds. So the customers and please don't hate me category of people are not in this tech bubble, whereas the engineers and technical people you want to attract very much are. And so sometimes companies feel like. I get this question a lot. Like, how do we talk to both audiences at the same time? And sometimes what they'll do is they'll say, okay, well, talent matters most of all. We're just going to talk about how awesome and technical this is and how much money we're all going to make and how many jobs it'll replace, and then that lives forever. And now they have to go encounter normal people and their reputation and the. Old interviews are going to get pulled up, right? Like, how often do the lab leaders have a comment that they made about, like, at some, like, at a less wrong, like, convention, like, seven years ago comes up today and it's like, wait, you're trying to sell me AI? You told you were telling people seven years ago that it was going to kill everyone. How do I square these things? Yeah, the famous quote is Sam Altman. Something to the effect of AI might kill everyone, but in the meantime create a lot of profitable businesses. It's like you're clearly trying to talk to two different audiences in that same sentence. One is like, I'm taking AI Doom seriously, which is good. But in one community gets that and likes that. And then another is like, hey, there's economic opportunity here for businesses and startups. And he's kind of put his YC hat on for that one. And it's like two different messages in one sentence. So what? No go. What people miss is that there is overlap in the Venn diagram. So it's, it's not just over here and over here. Like, there is actually some overlap, even if it's just a sliver. So, for example, the concept of what makes my own life better, and it's made my life better so much that I want this for other people too. That appeals to talent, that appeals to normal people or something that is like, okay, in this world where a lot of things are ephemeral or fake or are not making our lives better, I want to make something that is high quality and enduring that I'm proud to one day tell my grandkids about. That's a great message for talent. They don't want to build the next little toy that goes away in six months after raising a bunch of venture money. They want to build the thing that is like an enduring. An enduring artifact of human ingenuity, and that's the thing that people also want to experience. I think Bezos has the best line of this. He's like, we're trying to build something that we can be proud to tell our grandkids about. If you look at what you're doing through that lens, would it be your grandson's on your lap 20, 30 years from now? Would I be proud Granddad did this shit? We were on the phone, you mentioned about being anti ephemeral as something else that you think.

Tonight. I guess everybody else knows. But doxing undisclosed location. And he's just been lining people up. I was like, I want some fucking smart, driven other maniac in front of me every single day. Like, I want to do this every single day. I can't do it every single day. Lulu's been insane with connecting me with all these people she sent me. We were together with Gabby in New York at the Cognition event. And you had the funniest thing. You're like, david, you have groupies, but your groupies are 90 year old billionaires. No, middle aged, not 90, middle aged billionaire men. And so she's been incredible about connecting with those people. And then I'll get on the phone with them and like.

Tonight. I guess everybody else knows but doxing undisclosed location and he's just been lining people up. I was like, I want some fucking smart driven other maniac in front of me every single day. Like I want to do this every single day. I can't do it every single day. Lulu's been insane with connecting me with all these people she sent me. We were together with Gabby in New York at the Cognition event. And you had the funniest thing. You're like, David, you have groupies, but your groupies are 90 year old billionaires. No, middle aged, not 90, middle aged billionaire men. And so she's been incredible about connecting with those people. And then I'll get on the phone with them and like immediately you just click and we can talk forever. So yeah, of course. You just learned so much. And then I'm high as a kite. I don't do any drugs.

Even something that ring would do, or do you think there's other startups that should leverage your guys's detection? So this is where I'm. We were. We worked with watch duty. So our. Our fire watch, which is our system that we go into where AI is now watching your camera, you've put it in this mode and said like, yes, I want to share this. That then pipes right into watch duty. Watch duty is what's happening. The command center has watch duty. Up residents have watch duty on their app. So that is the centralized place where the map is forming on the fire. And my hope is that, and being in the fire myself, I saw that, like a bush is smoldering next to a house, and I could go put it out with my feet. You know, people are like, how'd you put out the fire? And I'm like, I literally would stamp on it until it was out, put some dirt on it. Like now, if that had kept going, you know, I don't know the exact incident, but, like, yes, that's what happens. Like, that keeps going, then it burns the house down. And that house starts a fire and puts out more embers. And so if you could see that on a camera and say, oh, wow, this thing has jumped over to this area that's a quarter mile away and there's smoldering next to this house, you can put it out so much easier and deploy those resources. So I think that's why what's great about this one is we're bringing the information in and then it's going to watch duty, which is already being used by all of the people that are deploying the resources today. Yeah. Are you excited about robots and drones?

Demand and that puts the market prices up. In particular what's called capacity markets which you see particularly in regions like pjm, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, that whole region like those prices go up. So there's just this, all this false narrative. So what people need to recognize is the reason prices are going up is because of prohibitions on reliable power and. Preferences for unreliable power and then artificial force electrification. Like they need to understand that they the data centers. One thing people need to understand is new demand does not inherently increase electricity prices. In fact usually what it does is it decreases electricity prices because you have the same amount, you have relatively the same amount of capital spending spread out over more different entities. You'll have different, you know, Burgum, Interior Secretary, former governor like he and Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy have been pointing. Out, hey, North Dakota is looking really. Good price wise and they've had massive increases in data centers. Because they've been investing more in energy? Well, no, no, because the data centers there's on any grid you have the peak usage and then you have the regular usage and you very rarely hit peak. So when you have more demand you're actually spreading out the cost among more. So one of the questions with AI that's interesting is what's the flexibility of the demand profile going to be? Because the more flexible it is, the less you need to increase the peak. Which is, which is good to increase the peak. But that's the most expensive thing to do. The more you can use off peak. The more you're actually lowering prices. And this is already happening a little bit where sometimes if you prompt an image generator.

Electricity production and specifically it's what's called dispatchable or reliable electricity production. So on demand, we could talk about how AI fits into that. But in general, I think there are four things that have screwed that up. And one is the near criminalization of nuclear power. The issue with that is that's a hard one to unwind quickly. So if you, if you look at. There's a lot. There's this attempt at a nuclear renaissance and I'm working as hard as anyone trying to, to try to make that happen. But we don't yet, we're not yet having any kind of rapid build of new nuclear infrastructure. Since the establishment of the Nuclear regulatory commission in 1975. We only started building any reactors from. We only started conceiving and completing reactors in 2023 for the Vogel plants right in South Carolina. And they were. When did they actually, you're saying they didn't. There was nothing that went from conception to completion from 1975. So they got completed in 2023. 2023, but with, you know, 10x cost overruns. So we have now there was already some progress before this administration. We had what's called the advance act, which was a significant improvement, tried to redirect the nrc. They're definitely much better people at the NRC now, so they're headed in a much, much better direction. Congress, both Republicans and Democrats are aligned, but we're just talking about something that we have lost arguably 50 years of potential progress because we had something in the late 60s where nuclear was by many estimates the cheapest form of electricity and the safest in terms of reliable electricity. It was already true with that technology and we saw that. Cheapest, safest, cleanest. Yeah, yeah, obviously. I mean, the talking point that I hear about the NRC is that we haven't approved any new nuclear reactor designs, but we also haven't just been copy pasting the ones that work. So it's like twofold problems. And this, the nuclear industry is fascinating in terms of communication because their usual thing is just we have to change everyone's opinion about perception about nuclear and then we can do stuff which I think the public is more pro nuclear than they think, even historically right now it is, I think what we have to do. What you're looking at, which is say, wait a second, we could already produce these large nuclear plants and get this incredible result. Why don't we fix that problem first? Because we actually know how to do these things. There are all these exciting companies doing new things. But part of the reason is these communications people have an aversion toward traditional nuclear because they. It has these negative associations. But you have to. You have to kill those associations. You have to kill. The idea that this was uniquely dangerous. No, it was uniquely safe, like Chernobyl has nothing to do with what we would ever do in the United States. That was like a half weapon, half reactor. And even that damage doesn't compare to the damage done by a lot of other things in the Soviet Union. As one economist put it, soviet toasters probably did more damage. That's crazy. I don't know if that's a stat, but that's. No, no, no. It's like what we need to do is we need to fix the.

Who are now being added, whose now focus is on generating more dispatchable power. I love that there's lots of things you can do. I mean, there's interesting things you can do with batteries. Like, you can. This I'm in agreement on Elon with, Like, you can build batteries and you can charge them off peak. People think you need solar and wind to go with batteries. But actually, the easiest way to deal with batteries, and the way most batteries get charged today is you have a reliable source of energy and you charge it off peak. You can run your nuclear power plant at night and charge batteries, and then for a few hours you'll have those batteries to meet peak demand. You can also, what's called up rate natural gas plants. So a lot of the natural gas plants in the country were built a generation or two ago, and they might get 30% less capacity than a new natural gas plant. But you can without dealing with the fundamental supply chain issues. In many cases, you can actually add capacity to hundreds and hundreds of existing gas plants. So there's a lot of industrial potential. There's a friendly administration. What we have fundamentally, though, is ultimately, the administration doesn't properly make any law. It enforces the law, it administers the law. And so what we need as much as possible is to do things congressionally. So subsidies were one piece of it. The.

Is super important. But we decided to go with the retail first strategy, and it's worked out great. Part of. I think the way that you guys have maintained such relevancy is just reinventing yourself. Obviously, you reinventing, going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about. Fighters have notoriously short careers. I mean, I'm sure you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock up another 100 million pay per view. But I imagine at some point, maybe, maybe in your 40s, you know, you'll reinvent yourself again. Do you think about. Are you thinking five, ten years out around how you want to reinvent yourself again? Are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and nothing else matters? No, yeah, definitely no. I naturally will lead myself into politics without a doubt. Like, it's within me. I'm passionate about it. I follow it very closely behind the scenes, and I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and to state my opinion on things. But I don't know what that exactly looks like. Are you thinking like aizar or president? What. What, Comptroller of a local city? I just want to help the. The world, and I know it's needed, especially in the generations moving forward. And that's, you know, something that Charlie Kirk was doing. I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed, and it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world, and that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things. But I know I can do it at an even greater level. And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting. Well, chat's saying Vance Paul, 2028. So let's go. Well, thank you.

And people seeing the things in stores and yeah, being able to have retail dtc, all of that, I think is super important. But we decided to go with the retail first strategy and it's worked out great. Part of, I think the way that you guys have maintained such relevancy is just reinventing yourself. Obviously, you reinventing going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about. Fighters have notoriously short careers. I mean, I'm sure you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock up, lock up another 100 million pay per view. But I imagine at some point, maybe, Maybe in your 40s, you'll reinvent yourself again. Do you think about. Are you thinking five, ten years out around how you want to reinvent yourself again, or are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and nothing else matters? No, yeah, definitely no. I naturally will lead myself into politics, without a doubt. Like, it's within me. I'm passionate about it. I, I follow it very closely behind the scenes, and I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and to state my opinion on things, but I don't know what that exactly looks like. Are you thinking like aizar or president? What, Comptroller of a local city? I just want to help the. The world, and I know it's needed, especially in the generations moving forward. And that's, you know, something that Charlie Kirk was doing. I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed and it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world, and that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things. But I know I can do it at an even greater level. And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting. Well, chat saying Vance Paul 2028, let's go. Well, thank you. Awesome. Well, great to have you both on. Congratulations. Sure you'll be back on soon.

From the vine days. At the same time, there's some lessons that never change. But how are you seeing it? Yeah, I would say authenticity is everything. I think showing your whole entire life is the key. If you're a new and upand cominging creator, like the struggles, what you're going through, tell. Tell your audience about financially what you're doing or what you're having to do. Talk to them about your ups, your downs, share with them your. Your life story. And then you just have to be posting and posting. And I think a lot of people aren't good at editing, like, simple stuff. Captions, music video timing, how long is the video? So it is very difficult. And you're competing with every single platform as a content creator. You're competing as a content creator. I'm technically competing against Netflix. Why are they gonna watch, you know, some Jake Paul Instagram videos versus going on onto Netflix? And so you have to realize that you're actually playing one of the hardest games. And people think it's easy, but it's actually a very, very technical thing. And you have to have a certain skill set to be able to do it. And you have to be entertaining. You have to be providing something that's a niche that no one has ever seen before. We have the Paul brothers. We have the speeds. We have Mr. Beast doing his videos. We have Whistling Diesel blowing up trucks and cars. So what are you doing? Yeah, John has talked about this. You used to be able to get a million views by just having a Ferrari. Now you blow it up. The games change. It went from have the car or rent the car to give the car away, where you take the tax deduction.

Defining companies. And I think everything in the middle is very hard. And I think we know where we're strong and where we may potentially, you know, weaker. Yeah. Tell me more about this Sora partnership or that project. Like, how did that come together? What was the reaction? I feel like, yeah, did you hesitate at all about giving up your name and likeness? I mean, you and Sam Altman, you guys kind of jumped first, and I think it went surprisingly fine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, what was the reaction? Yeah, so they wanted to build a social media platform, and we met at the inauguration with Sam Altman. We were, like, talking about how there needs to be a new social media platform, what does that look like, etc. And so we just started having idea brainstorms, and it eventually turned into what. What SORA is, and then just helping them on the functionality. You know, me and my brother's expertise of however many years we've been making content, all the little dials, triggers. Change this button, change that button, make this easier. Boom, bo, boom, boom. This is what fans are looking for. Super detailed stuff. But then once it finally came to. To launch. Yeah, it was. I gave my name, image, and likeness, and I knew it was gonna get crazy. I. I wasn't hesitant, and it just caught like fire. And obviously we saw the. The results and what happened, and it was a pretty phenomenal experience in marketing and, like, showcasing what the Internet loves these days. Yeah. One of our portfolio companies, archive.com tracked a billion impressions in six days of Jake Sora. So many. Well, what advice are you giving to folks who want to become creators in 2020?

Result of what anyone thinks. Because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something. That's the key. Someone asked me to ask you all time, all time record for bench press. I've done three, 15, like three times. There we go. There we go. Do you find yourself when you're talking with founders, bringing up stories from like.

Than I'm giving it credit for probably just remembering bugs from years ago. And I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple tv. It's a great product. I love the Apple tv. Plug it into tv works really well. Are you talking about the Apple tv, the physical device on the Apple tv? Physical device, yes. We're going. Here is an app called Apple tv and they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple tv, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix or hbo, you can go there, but by default it now ships with the home button goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there. And it's a great universal interface, at least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said, we're not participating. We want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that, like, no amount of vibe coding. It's not a coding issue. It's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition, and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better, like profits for both companies. And it's a rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of like, clawed code that can solve for that. So my take now has evolved to be that, why don't you move the goal post? I will move the goal post. Move the goal post. I gotta move the goalpost. Because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app. And then it will be AGI, then it will be AGI, because it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back, back when they started the show. Business model problems are enduring. And Ben Thompson makes the case that there are human conditions. There are human.

Can be anywhere, anytime, and, oh, yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's a very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers. Cause it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for like three hours, stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you run out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now, right? I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole shunk, shunk. And he'd write. He'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president? Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, ugh, it won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light true? It's true. Yeah. Yeah. I was on. I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane that's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. It's. I'm in an airplane, 2008, YouTube on a TV. And they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes, Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes, and then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air? Incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You9 contributing 0 that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God, Wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on afternoon that wouldn't land. All right, pause it, pause it. Yeah, I did this reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers, the apps you use to spend savings.

Has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank when it was open for, like, three hours, you had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole chunk. Chunk. And he'd write. He'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, it won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light truth? I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane, 2018. And then it breaks down and they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He knew. Existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on. Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You9 contributing 0 that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God, wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on after we land. Yeah, all right, pause it, pause it. Yeah, I did. I. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me. You tell.

That's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that. Have you guys done any recent deals? The most recent things that we're excited. I was going to say. What are you getting? Happy dad. They just happened to crack open a happy dad. Yes, we are. Yes, we're happy ambassadors and happy dads. The milk boys are homies and brothers are great. It's a great operating team. Plus I think that influencer led CPG play I think is. Yeah. Challenging. But like the very, very best operators are the best celebrities we like to partner with. So another example of that is Khloe Kardashian's Cloud Popcorn and obviously our own businesses. W. Yeah. What's your guys's framework for or for investing in celebrity brands? Because people have the sense that. Oh. That they see celebrity brands that work and they just assume that all.

His life even about and just different random things like that. So just be committed as an entertainer to invoking emotion. And you can't care about the result of what anyone thinks because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something. That's the key. Someone asked me to ask you all time, all time record for bench press. I've done three, 15, like three times. There we go. What, what do you find your. When you're talking with founders bringing up stories from like the fight game and different because I met like building a company kind of can feel at times like getting waking up.

Experts, triple lanes. Let's just. Wrong. Right. Market clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. Are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike1, Strike 2, Activate. Go, go. The retriever mode. Here. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe. Cool. I see multiple journalists on the horizon and. Founder. You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 6, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress. Of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money, save both corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today. Breakfast. Calvin, Very good Omen to the start of 2026 to run into some. Some folks at Ramp. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in la. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but you'll hear about it. They. Where they weren't is they're not at CES because Ramp is not a consumer electronics project yet. Yet. You could see them get into the AI hardware. Maybe they should launch tv. You shouldn't count anyone out. They should launch a tv. I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You. You know Razer Computer? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gaming company. They have an AI companion now. They launched at ces, so you should never count anyone out. Yeah, it really is like the festival of creativity for, like, weird AI projects. Weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It has a little bit of, like, hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed. Right. Is it hacker? It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spin off. What do you think? I think it's. It's. I think at this point it's like fairly Boomer coded. It's very Boomer coded, but it's also. I would describe it as somewhat novelty. So. So I think I was talking to a buddy who texted me yesterday morning, said, are you at CES this week? Yeah. He seemed desperate to hang out. And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it and it's. In some ways it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual for people in tech to say, like, you just had this nice holiday and going to force you to go to Vegas and schmooze for five days. Get ready to go to Vegas. Get ready to schmooze. It sounds exhausting. I've actually never been to ces, but they do you know what they call ces? They still got it in Terms of the branding, they're coming in strong. What is it? CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I mean, I think it still is. It probably still is. Yeah. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. Talk about the smart brick. Okay. For sure, from Lego, but why don't we go into your. To your op ed? Yeah. So I call it the death of the tech conference, because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is, like, CES launched so long ago. 1967. Isn't that like. I would have said like 85, maybe 92. Right, 67. What were the. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did, actually. Did you had a vcr, like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie that launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Phillips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Until that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS on it. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. I'm gonna tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. Our new. We have the Lambda Lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not CGI. Here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Land Lightning Round. We have a lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Simonoff. We have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through. There we go. Alex Epstein. Jamie Simonoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production. Are going to cap it off with Lulu. Today. We got It. We got a. We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console 1975. The CD player launched in 1981 at CES. The Commodore 64, 1982. The DVD, 1996. The Xbox in 2001. And we really got to play this video of how the Xbox launched, because it will. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm going to talk about, my thesis of why the tech conference is dying. But he launches and, you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibreals and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video with Dwayne unveiling the Xbox. Look at this. This is the product that will be out later this year. And there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal, but the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy into. It's a box. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is showmanship. This is the Xbox. This is the Xbox for the first time. Let me now unbox. Fail Xbox. Do you ever have one of these. With the controller in the plexiglass? Very cool. Yeah, Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there. Driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the controller in their hands. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big they had to make a smaller one because it just went like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of control people or something. Were they testing on you? No. There's this whole meme that it was like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something that I seem to remember this, I don't. Know, loaded as you move from level to level. What you're seeing on the front, the eject, the on off button, and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two. The PlayStation, I think just had two at the time. And maybe the N64 had four, but this is like a big jump forward. And then Dwayne comes out. Yeah. 2. 46. While they are skipping ahead, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality Data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds that are so state. Of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that everything in this box is the final design. Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that, like OpenAI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit there was. The whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out the Rock. Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks Rock. And it really. Thanks, Rock. Thanks, Rock. The celebrity cameo. My box is completely forgotten Art. We don't know how to do this anymore. Time, WWF Champion. All right, pause for a second because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a. A effect. I don't know about a list, but maybe like an aging out, like somebody that was iconic. Yes, yes. Actor, an athlete, etc. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video. Yeah. Just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product. That would be genius. Yeah. I mean, you see a lot of these. There was that. There was that. That drink company that. That did this. Do you remember they had some celebrity, like read every. I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Orca. Orca, yeah, Orca. Yeah, we remember it today. And a lot of. A lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage, good editing, a bunch of things to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately. And they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just also. It's just way more thumb stopping. Like you're just gonna be scrolling and be like, oh, what is the Rock doing there? Promoting your product. Obviously not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive. And who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to do it. Anyway, CES, when it launched, I thought this was impressive. 1967. No, like, no precedent. There's not really a tech community. It's sort of new. 17,000 people show up. 200 companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot. It's grown. Not even 10x. I mean, this was this year or in 2024. They had 130,000 attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not, you know, it started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot. But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, Wi, Fi, IoT, all that stuff was like sort of annoying. Maybe the AI stu stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in, in all sorts of different hardware things at the same time. I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI and I was just shuddering thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating like a Frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing. Samsung had a big announcement last year. Perplexity integration. Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. And again, I just think anytime you're in a situation where you could ask your TV for information, it's probably easier to ask your phone. Yeah, usually. Yeah. And so I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing. We'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting, but I wanted to go into the history of how the tech conference, the tech conference that's not linked to a single company, sort of died. And a lot of it goes back to the iPhone. Actually the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics show like it is the consumer electronics juggernaut. It should have been launched. Most important consumer product ever of the 21st century. Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9, 2007. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by idg. This International Data Group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications. That guy started a magazine. International Data Group. Fantastic. We don't know how to make names. Yeah, it's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And, and he kind of scaled this business. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from, from Apple, but Apple was obviously the cornerstone draw to the event. So they'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just like a phone case didn't make sense at that time, but you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals. But launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as ces, it allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, lighting, the pacing. He was famously like fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly. He wanted certain demos to happen after. And he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at ces. And the big thing is that at ces, journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So with TVs, we know like 4K, 8K 3D, not 3D, OLED or refresh rate or number of ports, price point. So they create these charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best. Weird. Nokia 5, it was more performant. Yeah, it beat it on basically everything at the time. He didn't want to go spec to spec. He didn't, he didn't. So The Nokia had 3G already. It had GPS, it allowed for copy pasting of text. It had a front facing camera, it. Had a 5 megapixel rear camera. Until we can copy and paste, we don't have that power. No, no. The number of features that the Nokia N95 is crazy. It could record videos. The iPhone couldn't record videos. It had a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't think anyone really wants. But it had a bunch of features that if it was just. If you just created a table of iPhone vs Nokia N95, the Nokia beat it on 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible and the iPhone sort of had the first good touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web browser, but it didn't even have third party apps, the Nokia did. And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia, we're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld, they're not allowed to be here. Best marketer of all time, clearly. And everyone copied him so very, very quickly. Every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later, started doing WWDC and their own self hosted events, self distributed events. Obviously technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper, you can livestream, you can go to restream and you can get your event everywhere. So you have Google I O, Microsoft build Meta Connect, Samsung unpacked. Like when Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray Ban displays. He didn't do it at ces. He didn't wait for ces. He was just like, I'm going to have my own event. He did it at his own event. He created his own news cycle and it was like he had full control over that. And so everyone's followed Jobs playbook and it's been remarkably successful. I don't think it's been a mission. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there and Nvidia unveiled Vera Rubin, their new. Which looks incredible. Yeah, but also it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even Nvidia has their own conferences now. But my main takeaway is just like in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore. And truthful, they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the vcr and the cd player and the xbox that's over 25 years old now at this point. Although the Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment, but that is of old at this point. And so still there's plenty to get from a show from ces. It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as like a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch an Apple keynote just to know, hey, should I buy the new iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute. Or you go because you're in the industry, your CEO has gotten into it. Get ready to drink buddy in Vegas. Get ready to go. Seriously? Seriously. Anyway, let Me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at ces. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write up of ces. Coverage is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course they highlighted Nvidia, the faster artificial intelligence chips. Vera Rubin the CPU GPU combination. Mercedes Benz Nvidia has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes Benz, set to hit US roads in the first three months of this year. The tire of my Mercedes Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work. You've been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the beginning of the show. And what's happened, We've had three tires blown out on LA roads. I do think I was complaining about. I'm not sure if it was on air or off air, but at least in the last 48 hours I was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads. And of course this morning at 5:35am the tire did not survive a pothole anyways. Ridiculous going forward. Amd. The Journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet. Shares fell more than 2%. However Uber ride hailing company plus EV maker Lucid and Neuro have begun on road testing for their planned Robotaxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped five and a half percent. So CES at least announcements are still moving. Yeah, moving the market. There's some other cool stuff. I mean Dell's in here, they're reviving the XPS computer line. But they also launched a massive 52 inch monitor or something like that. A 6k monitor. I feel like that could be pretty sick. If you need. If you're monitoring situations, get like six of these. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Lego launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toys. This was, this was the launch, launch of the year contender and it's already, it's the first week of January. So let's pull it up. If you watch this, let's watch this. For a smart minifigure and you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do? Well, you. More dopamine for children. Let's go. Let's go. I think this is good. I, I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I, I remember there were. We're excited to addict your children to Legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And yeah, they go, mindstorm, Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbo Puffer is going to need a rebuild. Simon, we need to make this a smart LEGO Puffer. Smart Puffer asap. But yeah. So Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more from the Verge. Love it coverage. Very cool. And of course, Boston Dynamics, demo champions of the world. Yeah, they gotta get these robots some 11 labs voices, 11 labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology actually is a real call to action. Let your robots talk. Yeah, with 11 labs it definitely needs it as a feature, but soy or. So Boston Dynamics is starting the year strong. They seem to be upset. That figure is valued at roughly one Ford Motor company and they're not happy about it. So they're, they're launching. They had a new video of various Boston Dynamics. They should be in de facto Hyundai. Yeah. Here they've been doing this for so. Long. But I don't know. It looks good. How tall is it? 2.3 meters. Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have been really, really small, just kind of like smaller. Is this, is this not cgi? I can't even tell at this point. This looks like. Wow. Oh, that was a cool move. The way that it can move. That was a cool move. The way that it stands up is wild too. There's standing up. It looks like a spider. And then. Yeah, very disconcerting. But that one is crazy. Oh, we saw this from one of the Chinese humanoid. Do you think that this maybe one of their first use cases, could be gloving? Oh, yeah, that's really trendy. I've been seeing that. Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something. You see that one? But yeah, you saw that. Tyler, you need to start gloving. Yeah. When a founder. Anytime a founder raises more than $100 million, you got to say, can I glove for you? What is that from like EDM culture or something? I don't know. That's very funny. What else is in. Yeah. The Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty interesting. All the way up to 104. 104. 6Ft 2 inches tall. 104. Feels like that's got a great build. Honestly, 6 to 198 pounds can work at negative 4. What's its mid face ratio? How's it upper maxilla? It's a circle. It's a circle. Okay, well, perfect. That's a perfect ratio, I guess. Yeah. So apparently Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities. 66 pounds sustained weight capacity. Most people can lift more than that. Come on, we gotta get those numbers up. But yeah, this will be interesting. I wonder what the future of this company's traded hands so many times. It's owned by Hyundai right now. They gotta spin it out. They gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again. They got to launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they want to change the world, they got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Great idea. Should we talk about Jamie Dimon? Let's do it. In the New York Times Today, Jamie Dimon's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers. Is this gong worthy? This is Gongworthy first gong. The Trump admin is lifting regulations. Deal making is heating up for Jamie Dimon. Being JPMorgan Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists. Wait, what talisman? What are you talking about? At just the right time, in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, Mr. Diamond's underlings have crammed in tiny type a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JP Morgan Chase is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date Back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again, like cryptocurrency. And President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti bribery rules. Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker. But there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and a. As the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows once imperiled real estate loans look steadier thanks to the rebound in. In office work, stocks are levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020 and gold and silver have soared. All of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming. In other words, as analysts at Keefe yet and woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big, big bank stocks rose 29% in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the US stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrow, narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained, but performed considerably, considerably less well. So again, I mean a big part of this is banks have just been, you know, obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as, as the p. As the private credit chat. That's true. That's actually true. Yeah. So they're just sitting sort of the. Same thing with like crypto. It's like, like, you know, if there's going to be a. If you're going to have a competitor that's like way less regulated. That is a very. That's a huge. And why would I work with JP Morgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial just reinventing financial. Yeah, yeah, like the whole debanking or not debanking, bankless movement and stuff. Like, I don't know that it's been. A huge headwind, but no, I think, I think the combination of M and A and private credit that they have just been, you Know private credit is just much more loosely regulated. A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly 770 million for Jamie Dimon. For the chief executives of Citi whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slash tens of thousands of jobs in a years long restructuring and Goldman Sachs shared. Tyler. Tyler. Displacement. You're going to be. No, because we're up 60. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Because the way that you reacted there looked a little suspicious obviously for the labor displacement. But this is not AI driven. Of course. Yeah. So anyways they're counting some unrealized gains here of course. But anyways, big, big year for, for Jamie Dimon. Should we pop over to Tuna? Yeah. What's in Tuna says you're first. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents, baby. That's right. Tuna says your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographics. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah, pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy. I've been getting, I mean speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one. I bought one too. Give me a review. What'd you think? Haven't played it yet? No. So, so here's the challenge. Yeah. We had less help around the house. Sure. Over the last two weeks and Bored is designed for I think kids like, I think it's like six and up. Like it's not, it's not like a under five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just going to have you know like a one or three year old just like you know, messing with it. It's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it. Hopefully this week. You guys should play live during the show right here. We should, yeah. The, the review from the four and a half year old was a. He loved it. What'd you play? We stuck to the more simple games I think also they're still rolling out some of the games so it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags and some of the pieces that they ship to you. The games haven't actually finished. They haven't finished coding them I guess. And so they're not live, but we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this like sort of triangle block on the screen and then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these like asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was interesting. It was like, it was intuitive enough that the four year old could pick it up and actually get some points. But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. So there was like I, I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a, that it's possible to get 4000 points even though we're averaging like 2500 points now if I really max this out. And we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling is actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there were. I love how you don't, you don't every like every game, anything like that. You're just like, I need to max it out. Oh, for sure. I need to max it out. Like even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing out the score. Yeah. I told this in Metaconnect. At one point I had the highest score in Robo Recall in the world. Okay. So apparently. So Mike on our team says my 3 year old nephew loves the weird alien dog game. Is that the one? Apparently this is. Apparently it is suited for three year olds and I need to get into it. Is the weird alien dog one where it comes in the house, you have to wash it off. That's the one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that one's really fun. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like you're supposed to check on it every day and it comes in from the house, it's all dirty. So you wash it off, you soap it up, scrub it and you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can and you put the watering can on the screen of the board and when you do it sort of showers the pet and then it washes it off. Yeah. So I think that mechanic was really fun too. For board to sell a million units, they need like a super, super viral individual game. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's gonna, it won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. Yeah, they need a breakout. This is a hits Business. Right. So they need. They need, like, catan. Yeah. Like people are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done. And the mechanics, you could play them again. There's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that also there just aren't that many pieces. Like, there's. Most of the games have like six pieces, there's 10 pieces. And so if you had resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally, like, counted, which might be nice, actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it actually gets overwhelming and annoying. I don't know. But let me tell you about Vibe Co, because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming tv, because Vibe Co is where DTC brands. You mean bored these startups? Oh, yeah, bored. AI companies advertise on streaming tv, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta, that should be their next place to advertise. I like it. And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographics and pay more attention to the personal ads they need to let them flow. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says, a week ago, Dwarkesh and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality. As the Financial Times kindly put it, that was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in, buckle up. Welcome to the dive bar. Yeah, but it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all. And just like seeing another person, another reason to tax the rich. That's funny, I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they like Dorkash. Right? And they're like, oh, cool, new door cash thing. I'm a fan. But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly also. I mean, this was a I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole like Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like the whole wealth tax thing that was going on in California. And they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in the Zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very it's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says he's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone. Or at least tried to. He says, and before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security, the leading AI trust management platform. Please so they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods and services are gross complements for capital provided ones. Quote in our utility functions what Nordhaus 2021 might call on the demand side. And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people can what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. Funnily enough, on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is underappreciated, but then makes a case for why I think on balance, it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame just give me a month. But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post exploring the cases against long run gross common complementarity on the on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because 1 Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board. Already 2 Nord House and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board, so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side. So that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non IT goods for capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine. Of course we're, we're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways. And I think it is a very far future. But it is one interesting to think about. Maybe, maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize. People haven't read it, kind of keep fact. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So key factors, they talk about privatization of returns. So like very, very hard to get exposure to xai right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home. Right. And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation. Right. So if you have a home, I think they said if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get like you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe, maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just like land somewhere else in the US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international sort of catch up which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital, they would turn that and they would cheaply create work. Yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then they talk about wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging out effectively. So we'll see. We'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought, I thought this post from Tomas Bar Tour was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says both Darkesh and his critics imagine an absurd world. Think of the future. They argue about political economy doesn't change rapidly even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be the thousands of times will be thousands of times faster, not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world. Even if it isn't, if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different. So we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy, question mark. What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy? In an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children. What sort of children? Copies of your brain state? Are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes. And even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created, things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates, if not the air you breathe? But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, the ccp? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by Wealth? To OpenAI stockholders, to Sama, to the Coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on? To the coding agent who implements it. Tax policy, question mark. Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions? How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure. Given how easy humans are to scam, there's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind. If you own check notes a whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now. Wow, isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies? That's bad. Space opera treat the future with the respect it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any. The institutions just break. The way that the world currently works breaks. The thing with. I was thinking about if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares in this sort of fast takeoff scenario is this, you know, to maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares, right? But is A super intelligence going to say, oh, yes, I would like to buy some OpenAI shares. Right. Or would they just corners of the. Market buys them all or just rebuild, you know, effectively just rebuild, you know, so. So this. I think it's in any type of these. In any type of, like, fast takeoff scenario. How do you. Actually, it's hard to have, I think the. I love, you know, reading. I love reading this essay. I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to. Any scenario you can imagine, there are 50. There's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply. Yeah, yeah. I Wonder, the. The 22nd century thing, you keep coming back to this idea of fast takeoff. And it feels like even in some sort of slow progress, if you just extrapolate the default trend lines and nothing really changes, you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting interpretation of this, saying that he said, this gets at what I found the most frustrating. What was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view, the core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition. It just happened to be negative. And he basically said that you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still bothered by wealth inequality because in this scenario, there's abundance and there's enough. Like, robots can just create everything. So you have, like, unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective. But you're still bothered by the fact that, like, that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies. Yeah, it's not right. And that. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced. And that's. And it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart. And so you. Takes you a million years to get there. And it's like. And maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we. If we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens, like, you know, a million light years away? Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we actually. We're actually sitting on. On an entire planet of diamond and we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth, Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay. There's those aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like, how much is wealth inequality a direct focus on, like, the keeping up with the Joneses, like, the neighbor effect, the direct mimetics of the person that you see as your is your equal. But I don't know. But Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans, and they don't see any value in that. And so because he's making the point that he quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of late Night with Conan, and he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. You've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technical. Yeah, let me send it to the team. Let's see if we can drop this. So he says, Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted. Smartphones, Internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to. In just the last 72 hours, I have chafed at slow airplane WI fi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe. He went to Taiwan and back and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery. It is also terrible until I remember I have access to everything, anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime. And, oh, yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Hold on, let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots. Clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a roast. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why don't. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank when it was open for, like, three hours, you had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. Right? I can't do any more things now. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole shunk chunk and he'd write. He'd have to call the president to see if you owe any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah. Cause now we live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone. They're like, ugh. It won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light. Trip. I was on. I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane, 2008. And then it breaks down and they apologize. Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes, Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flight and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit There. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You non contributing zero that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh my God, Wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on after all right, pause it, pause it. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. 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, Great stuff, John. Couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and then they stop sleeping well. And with my 3 year old, we hired a, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my 3 year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, you know, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer, blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. Like it's a lifesaver. But with one and a half year old, a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just like breaks down. Exactly. Like what's happening, gets the answer. And it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours, the problem was totally solved. Back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule. Basically one shotted it and I was just thinking how OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, we're going to solve this. You're going to have a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people hammer him because it's like, well then, and we're doing sora and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that, but it's actually like AI is actually already delivering on, on this sort of. Do you remember the Fallon clip that, where that went viral where, where Fallon asks him like, are you. Do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? He was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like, it is, it is helpful and yeah, it is. It is a weird thing, but it. It's this. When technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of, like, back in 1965, planes used to be so nice, and now you're stuffed in the back like cattle. You know these photos where they're like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers, and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger flights, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total, across everything is the same number.

Five code. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Uav online. Glaze. Double glaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five. Cook. Is. Match. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll, right? Market clearing order inbo. Come on, get up. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go, go. The retriever it. Market clearing order inbound. 5. Put it. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 6, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress. Of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both. Save boats, save corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today at breakfast. Very good omen to the start of 2026 to run into some. Some folks at Ramp. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in la. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some. Point, but you'll hear about it. They. Where they weren't is they're not at CES because Ramp is not a consumer electronics project yet. You could see them get into the AI hardware. Maybe they should launch a tv. You shouldn't count anyone out. They should launch a tv. I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You know, Razor? The Razer computer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gaming company. They have an AI companion now. They launched at ces, so you should never count anyone out. Yeah, it really is like the festival of creativity for, like, weird AI projects, weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It has a little bit of, like, hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed. Right. Is it hacker? It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spin off. What do you think? I think it's. It's. I think at this point it's like, fairly Boomer coded. It's very Boomer coded, but it's also. I would describe it as somewhat novelty. So. So I think I was talking to a buddy who texted me yesterday morning, said, are you at CES this week? Yeah. He seemed desperate to hang out. And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it, and in some ways it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual for people in tech to say, like, you just had this nice holiday and now we're going to force you to go to Vegas and schmooze for a week, for five. Days, get ready to Go to Vegas. Get ready to schmooze. It sounds exhausting. I've actually never been to ces, but do you know what they call ces? They still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming and strong. What is it? CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I mean, I think it still is. It probably still is. Okay. Yeah. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. Talk about the smart brick. Okay. For sure, from Lego, but why don't we go into your. To your op ed? Yeah. So I call it the death of the Tech Conference, because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is, like, CES launched so long ago. 1967. Isn't that like. I would have said like 85, maybe 92. Right, 67. What were the. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did. I actually did. You had a vcr, like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Until that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS on it. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. Our new. We have the Lambda Lightning Round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgl. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lightning Round. We have a Lightning Round today with a but of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through There we go. Alex Epstein, Jamie Simonoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production. Are going to cap it off with Lulu today. We got it. We got a. We had a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console 1975. The CD player launched in 1981 at CES. The Commodore 64, 1982. The DVD at 1996. The Xbox in 2001. And we really gotta play this video of how the Xbox launched, because it will. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm gonna talk about. My thesis of, like, why the tech conference is dying, but he launches. And, you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibe reels and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts, and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video with Dwayne unveiling the Xbox. Look at this. This is the product that will be out later this year. And there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal, but the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy into. It's a box. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is showmanship. This is the X. This is the Xbox for the first time. Let me now unveil Xbox. Do you ever have one of these with the controller? Yeah, in the plexiglass. Very cool. Yeah, Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there. Driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the control in their hands. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big, they had to make a smaller one because it just went, like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. Were they testing on you? No. There's this whole meme that it was, like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something like that. I seem to remember this. I don't know. Loaded. As you move from level to level. Now what you're seeing on the front, the eject the on off button and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two. The PlayStation, I think just had two at the time. And maybe the N64 had four, but this is like a big jump forward. And then Dwayne comes out. Yeah. 2:46. While they are skipping ahead, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality Data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds that are so state. Of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that everything in this box is the final design. Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that, like OpenAI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit there was. The whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out the Rock. Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really. Thanks, Rock. Thanks, Rock. The celebrity cameo tech launch is completely forgotten Art. We don't know how to do this anymore. Time, WWF Champion. All right, pause for a second because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a. A effect. I don't know about a list, but maybe like an aging out, like somebody that was iconic. Yes, yes. Actor, an athlete, etc. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video, just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product. That would be genius. Yeah, I mean, you see a lot of these. There was that. That drink company that. That did this. Do you remember they had some celebrity, like, read every. I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Orca. Orca, yeah, Orca. Yeah, we remember it today. And a lot of. A lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage. Good editing, a bunch of things to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately. And they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just also. It's just way, way more thumbstopping. Like you're just gonna be scrolling and be like, oh, what is the Rock doing there? Promoting your product. Obviously not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive. And who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to do it. Anyway, CES, when it launched, I thought this was impressive. 1967, no, like, no precedent. There's not really a tech community. It's sort of new 17,000 people show up. 200 companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot. It's grown. Not even 10x. I mean, this was this year or in 2024. They had 130,000 attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not, you know, it started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot. But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, Wi, Fi, IoT, all that stuff was like, sort of annoying. Maybe the A stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in, in all sorts of different hardware things at the same time. I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI. And I was just shuddering thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because, like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating like a frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing. Samsung had had a big announcement last year. Perplexity integration. Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. And again, I just think anytime you're in a situation where you could ask your TV for information, it's probably easier to ask your phone. Yeah, usually. Usually, yeah. And so I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing. We'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting, but I wanted to go into the history of how the tech conference, the tech conference that's not linked to a single company sort of died. And a lot of it goes back to the iPhone. Actually, the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics show like it is the consumer electronics juggernaut. It should have been the most important consumer product ever of the 21st century. Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9, 2007. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by idg. This International Data Group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications. That guy started a magazine, International Data Group. Fantastic. We don't know how to make names like that. Yeah, he's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And he kind of scaled this business. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from. From Apple. But Apple was like obviously the cornerstone draw to the event. So they'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just like, you know, a phone case, didn't make sense at that time. But like you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals. But launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as ces, it allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing. He was famously like fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly. He wanted certain demos to happen after. And he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at ces. And the big thing is that at ces, journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So with TVs we know like 4K, 8K, 3D, not 3D, OLED or refresh rate or number of ports, price point. So they create these like charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best. Weird name. It was more performant. Yeah. It beat it on basically everything at the time. He didn't want to go spec to spec. He didn't, he didn't. So The Nokia had 3G already. It had GPS, it allowed for copy pasting of text. It had a front facing camera, it. Had a 5 megapixel rear camera. Until we can copy and paste, we don't have that power. No, no. The number of features of the Nokia N95 is crazy. It could record videos, the iPhone couldn't record videos. It had a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't think anyone really wants. But it had a bunch of features that if it was just. If you just created a table of iPhone vs Nokia N95, the Nokia beat it on 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible. And the iPhone sort of had the first good touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web Browser, but it didn't even have third party apps, the Nokia did. And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld, they're not allowed to be here. Best marketer of all time, clearly. And everyone copied him so very, very quickly. Every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later, started doing WWDC and their own self hosted events, self distributed events. Obviously technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper, you can livestream, you can go to Restream and you can. Get. Your event everywhere. So you have Google I O, Microsoft build Meta Connect, Samsung unpacked when Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray Ban displays. He didn't do it at ces. He didn't wait for ces. He was just like, I'm going to have my own event. He did it at his own event. He created his own news cycle and it was like he had full control over that. And so everyone's followed Jobs playbook and it's been remarkably successful. I don't think it's been a mission. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there and Nvidia unveiled Vera Rubin, their new. Which looks incredible. Yeah. But also it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even Nvidia has their own conferences now. But my main takeaway is just like in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore. And truthful, they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the vcr and the cd player and the xbox. That's over 25 years old now at this point. Although the Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment, but that is of old at this point. And still there's plenty to get from a show from ces. It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch an Apple keynote just to know, hey, should I buy the new iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea. Or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute. You go because you're in the industry. Your CEO has gotten it. Get ready to drink buddy in Vegas. Get ready to go. Seriously? Seriously. Anyway, let me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at ces. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write up of ces. Coverage is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course they highlighted Nvidia, the faster artificial intelligence chips. Vera Rubin the CPU GPU combination. Mercedes Benz Nvidia has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes Benz, set to hit US roads in the first three months of this. The tire of my Mercedes Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work. You've been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the beginning of the show. And what's happened? I've had three tires blown out on LA roads. I do think I was complaining about. I'm not sure if it was on air or off here, but at least in the last 48 hours I was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads. And of course this morning at 5:35am the tire did not survive a pothole. Anyways. Ridiculous going forward. Amd. The Journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet. Shares fell more than 2%. However. Uber ride hailing company plus EV maker Lucid and Neuro have begun on road testing for their planned Robotaxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped five and a half percent. So CES at least announcements are still moving. Yeah, moving the market. There's some other cool stuff. I mean Dell's in here, they're reviving the XPS computer line. But they also launched a massive 52 inch monitor or something like that. A 6k monitor. I feel like that could be pretty sick. If you need. If you're monitoring situations, get like six, six of these. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. LEGO launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toys. This was the launch of the year. Contender and it's the first week of January, so let's pull it up. If you watch this, let's watch this. A smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending. On where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do? Well, you. More dopamine for children. Let's go. Let's go. I think this is good. I, I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I, I remember there were, we're excited. To addict your children to legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid and yeah, Lego Mindstorms. Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars, like line following. You could draw a line on the ground. They could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbo Puffer is going to need a rebuild. Simon, we need to make this a smart LEGO Puffer. Smart Puffer asap. But yeah. So lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more from the Verge. Love it coverage. Very cool. And of course, Boston Dynamics, demo champions of the world. Yeah, they gotta give us these robots. Some 11 labs voices, 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology. Interaction actually is a real call to action. Let your robots talk. Yeah, with 11 labs, it definitely needs it as a feature. So Boston Dynamics is starting the year strong. They seem to be upset. That figure is valued at roughly one Ford Motor company and they're not happy about it. So they're, they're launching, they had a new video of various Boston Dynamics. They should be the de facto Hyundai. Yeah. Here they've been doing this for so long, but I don't know. It looks good. How tall is it? 2.3 meters. Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have Been really, really small. Just kind of like smaller. Is this. Is this not cgi? I can't even tell at this point. This looks like. Wow. Oh, that was a cool move. The way that it can move. That was a cool move. The way that it stands up is wild too. There's standing up. It looks like a spider. And then. Yeah, yeah. Very disconcerting. But that one is crazy. Oh, we saw this from one of the Chinese humanoid. Do you think that this maybe one of their first use cases could be gloving? Oh, yeah, that's really trendy. I've been seeing that. Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something. You see that one? But yeah, you saw that. Tyler, you need to start gloving. Yeah. Anytime a founder raises more than $100 million, you got to say, can I glove for you? What is that from like EDM culture or something? I don't know. That's very funny. Sorry. What else is in this? Yeah. The Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty interesting. All the way up to 104. 104. 6Ft 2 inches tall. 104. Feels like that's got a great build. Honestly, 6 to 198 pounds can work at negative 4. With its mid face ratio. How's this upper maxilla? It's a circle. It's a circle. Okay, well, perfect. That's a perfect ratio, I guess. Yeah. So apparently Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities. 66 pounds sustained weight capacity. Most people can lift more than that. Come on, we gotta get those numbers up. But yeah, this will be interesting. I wonder what the future of this company's traded hands so many times. It's owned by Hyundai right now. They gotta spin it out, they gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again. They got to launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they want to change the world, they got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Great idea. Should we talk about Jamie Dimon? Let's do it. In the New York Times Today, Jamie Dimon's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers. Is this gong worthy here? This is gong worthy. Let's do it first. Gong. The Trump admin is lifting regulations and deal making is heating up for Jamie Dimon. Being JP Morgan, Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever for nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists. Wait, what talisman? What are you talking about? At just the right time, in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, Mr. Dimon's underlings have crammed in tiny types a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JP Morgan Chase is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date Back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again like cryptocurrency. And President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti bribery rules. Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker. But there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and a. As the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows once imperiled. Real estate loans look steadier thanks to the rebound in. In office work, stocks are levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020 and gold and silver have soared. All of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming. Let's hear the profit machine. In other words. As analysts at Keefe Brew yet and woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big, big bank stocks rose 29% in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the US stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts also gained, but performed considerably considerably less well. So again, I mean a big part of this is banks have just been obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as the private credit chat. That's true. That's actually true. So they're just sitting sort of the. Same thing with crypto. It's like, like, you know, if there's going to be a, if you're going to have a competitor that's like way less regulated. That is a very. That's a huge. And why would I work with JP Morgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial just reinventing financial. Yeah, yeah, like the whole debanking or not debanking bankless movement and stuff like. I don't know that it's been a huge headwind. But no, I think, I think the absolute, that combination of M and A and private credit that they have just been private credit is just much more loosely regulated. A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly 770 million for Jamie Dimon. For the chief executives of Citi, whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slash, tens of thousands of jobs and a years long restructuring and Goldman Sachs shares. Tyler displacement. You're going to be. No, because they were up 60. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because the way that you reacted there. Looked a little suspicious obviously for the labor displacement. But this is not AI driven, of course. Yeah. So anyways, they're counting some unrealized gains here, of course. But anyways, big, big year for Jamie Dimon. Should we pop over to Tuna? Yeah. What's in Tuna says you're. But first, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents, baby. That's right. Tuna says your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographics. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah, pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy is. I've been getting, I mean speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one. I bought one too. Give me a review. What'd you think? Haven't played it yet? No. So here's the challenge. We had less help around the house over the last two weeks. And Bored is designed for, I think kids like, I think it's like six and up. It's not like a under five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just gonna have like a one or three year old just like you know, messing with it. It's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it. Hopefully this week. You guys should play live during the show right here. We should, yeah. The review from the four and a half year old was a. He loved it. Why'd you play? We stuck to the more simple games I think also they're still rolling out some of the games so it ships and you get a number of pieces in Bags and some of the pieces that they ship to you. The games haven't actually finished. They haven't finished coding them, I guess, and so they're not live. But we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this like sort of triangle block on the screen and then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these like asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was, it was interesting. It was like, it was intuitive enough that the four year old could pick it up and actually get some points. But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. So there was like I, I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a, that it's possible to get 4,000 points even though we're averaging like 2,500 points now if I really max this out. And we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling is actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there were. I love how you don't, you don't every, like every game, anything like that. You're just like, I need to max it out. Oh, for sure. I need to max it out. Even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing out the score. Yeah. I told Paz this in Metaconnect. At one point I had the highest score in Robo Recall. Okay. So apparently. So Mike on our team says my 3 year old nephew loves the weird alien dog game. Is that the one? Apparently this is, apparently it is suited for three year olds and I need. To get into it is the weird alien dog one where it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that one's really funny. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like you're supposed to check on it every day. And it comes in from the house, it's all dirty. So you wash it off, you soap it up, scrub it. And you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can and you put the watering can on the screen of the board and when you do it sort of showers the pet and then washes it off. Yeah. So I think that mechanic was really fun too. For board to sell a million units, they need like a super, super viral individual game. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's gonna it won't be enough to have, like, a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. Yeah. They need a breakout. This is a hits business. Right. So they need. They need, like, ton. Yeah. Like, people are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done. And the mechanics, you could play them again. There's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that also there just aren't that many pieces. Like, there's. Most of the games have, like six pieces, there's 10 pieces. And so if you had resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally, like, counted, which might be nice, actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it's like, it actually gets overwhelming and annoying. I don't know. But let me tell you about Vibe Co, because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming tv, because Vibe Co is where DTC brands these startups. Oh, yeah. Bored AI companies advertise on streaming tv, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. That should be their next place to advertise. I like it. And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographic and pay more attention to the personal ads they need to let them flow. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says, a week ago, Dwarkesh and him, Phil posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality, as the Financial Times kindly put it. But that was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in, buckle up. Welcome to the dive bar. Yeah, but it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all. And just like seeing another person, another reason to tax the rich. That's funny, I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they like Dwarkash. Right. And they're like, oh, cool, new Dwarakash thing. I'm a fan, but there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly also. I mean, this was a I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole like Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like the whole wealth tax thing that was going on in California. And they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in the Zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very it's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says he's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone. Or at least tried to, he says, and before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. The leading AI trust management platform is so they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods and services are gross complements for capital provided ones. Quote in our utility functions what Nordhaus 2021 might call on the demand side. And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people can what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. Funnily enough, on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is underappreciated, but then makes a case for why I think on balance, it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame just give me a month. But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post, exploring the case against long run gross complementarity on the on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because 1 Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board. Already 2 Nord House and related Discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably Yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non IT goods for capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine. Of course we're, we're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways. And I think it is a very far future. But it is one interesting to think about. Maybe, maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize. People haven't read it kind of key fact. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So key factors. They talk about privatization of returns. So like, like very, very hard to get exposure to xai right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home. Right. And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation. Right. So if you have a home, I think they said if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get like you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe, maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just like land somewhere else in the US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international sort of catch up which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital, they would turn that and they would create cheap labor to work. Yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then they talk about wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging out effectively. So we'll see, we'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought, I thought this post from Tomas Bartur was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says both Dwarkesh and his critics imagine an absurd world. Think of the future. They argue about political economy doesn't change rapidly even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be the thousands of times will be thousands of times faster. Not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world. Even if it isn't. If it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their minds that things are allowed to be different. So we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy, question mark. What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy? In an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children? What sort of children? Copies of your brain state are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created, things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe? But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving? Exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, The ccp? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by Wealth? To OpenAI stockholders? To Sama? To the Coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on? To the coding agent who implements it? Tax policy, question mark Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions? How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure. Given how easy humans are to scam, there's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own check notes. A whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now. Wow. Isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies? That's bad space opera Treat the future with the respect it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally like. Like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any. The institutions just break. The way that the world currently works breaks. I was thinking about with if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares in this sort of fast takeoff scenario is this. Maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares. Right. But is a super intelligence going to say, oh, yes, I would like to buy some OpenAI shares. Right. Or would they just corners of the. Market buys them all or just rebuild, Effectively just rebuild? I think it's in any type of fast takeoff scenario. How do you actually. It's hard to have, I think the. I love, you know, reading. I love reading this essay. I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to. Any scenario you can imagine there are 50. There's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply. Yeah, yeah. I wonder. The. The 22nd century thing, you keep coming back to this idea of fast takeoff. And it feels like even in some sort of slow progress, if you just extrapolate the default trend lines and nothing really changes, you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting interpretation of this, saying that he said, this gets at what I found the most frustrating. What was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view, the core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition. It just happened to be negative. And he basically said that, like, you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still, like, bothered by wealth inequality because in this scenario, there's abundance and there's enough, like, robots can just create everything. So you have, like, unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective. But you're still bothered by the fact that, like, that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies. Yeah, it's not right. And that. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced. And that's. And it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart. And so it takes you a million years to get there. And it's like. And maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we. If we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens, like, you know, a million light years away? Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we're actually sitting on an entire planet of diamond and we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay. There's those aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like, how much is it. How much is wealth inequality? A direct focus on, like, the keeping up with the Joneses, like, the neighbor effect, the direct mimetics of, like, the person that you see as your. Your equal. But I don't know. But Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans, and they don't see any value in that. And so because he's making the point that he quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of late Night with Conan, and he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. You've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological. Yeah, let me send it to the team. Let's see if we can drop this. So he says, Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted. Smartphones, Internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to. In just the last 72 hours, I have chafed at slow airplane wi fi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe. He went to Taiwan and back and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery. It is all so terrible until I remember I have access to everything, Anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime. And, oh, yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this. Louis ck. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots. Clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a robot, we had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. Do you realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone? And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why don't. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for like, three hours. You had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah. That was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole shunk chunk and he'd write credit. You'd have to call the president to see if you owe him. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah. Cause now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone and they're like, ugh. It won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light true? I was on. I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. It's. I'm in an airplane, 2008. And then it breaks down and they apologize. Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes, Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flight and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You non contributing zero that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh my God, Wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on after we land. Yeah. All right, pause it, pause it. Yeah. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. 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, great stuff. John. A couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not, has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and then they stop sleeping well. And with my 3 year old, we hired a, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my 3 year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, you know, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer and blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. It's a lifesaver. But with one and a half year old a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just breaks down exactly what's happening, gets the answer and it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours, the problem was totally solved. Back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule. Basically one shotted it. Then I was just thinking how OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, we're going to solve this. You're going to have a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people hammer him because it's like, well then. And we're doing SORA and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that. But it's actually like AI is actually already delivering on this sort of. Do you remember the Fallon clip that, where that went viral where, where Fallon asks him like, are you, do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? He was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like, it is, it is helpful and yeah, it is. It is a weird thing, but it's, it's this. When technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of like back in 1965 planes used to be so nice and now you're stuffed in the back like cattle. You know these photos where like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger flights, like, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total, across everything is the same number, almost exactly the same number as total first class flights in 2025. And so basically anyone who could fly in 1965 is now flying first class. And then you added, there's 10 times as many non first class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like, like you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class. Different product. But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class because it was really expensive, it got cheaper, but all the rich people stayed in first class. And then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people. And that just continues. But it's this weird thing because that doesn't feel satisfying because you see the people up in front of class and you're like, I want to be up there. Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out. 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 prototypes. John, you always have this critique of the coding models and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone because the United app is so bad. Yes, yes, yes. You always have this. Yes, yes, yes. And then so there's this post, it's in the timeline. It's someone, they say, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is. Oh, no way. Yeah, because it works well and they're just like glazing it. Yeah, I talked to Roon about this as well, because I brought that up when I was talking to him and he was like kind of stomped. And then I talked to him again and he was like, actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. So I think that you're right and it's A good point that the software, the quality of the software is incredible. And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably, it's probably better than I'm giving it credit for. Probably just remembering bugs from years ago, and I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple tv. It's a great product. I love the Apple tv. Plug it into your tv. Works really well. Are you talking about the Apple tv. The physical device on the Apple tv physical device, yes. We're going. Here is an app called Apple tv and they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple tv, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix, Netflix or hbo, you can go there, but by default it now ships with the home button, goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there, and it's a great universal interface, at least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said, we're not participating, we want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that, like no amount of vibe coding. It's not a coding issue. It's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better, like profits for both companies. And it's the rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of, like, Claude code that can solve for that. So. So my take now has evolved to. Be that, why don't you move the goalposts? I will move the goalposts. Move the goalposts. Because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app. And then it will be AGI, then it will be AGI. Because it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure business model problems have an opportunity to move the goalposts back. When they started the show Business model problems are enduring and Ben Thompson makes the case that there are human conditions. There are human elements that will be enduring. Even in a post Software Only Singularity. I had some There was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at fai. Oh he said. I was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP, economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI given. I believe we'll get fully automated AI R&D by 2029, he said. Here's my response via quick email reply. Re GDP I think we'll get a higher trend TFP level growth rate as past general purpose technologies. This will be a new higher growth regime, 5 to 10% but not hyperbolic exponential growth. So not with the Elon triple digit. Yeah. So real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal and regulatory regimes, supply chains Human in the loop we will still see a digifoom software singularity, but this will feel more disinflationary than anything that is mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated, but a lot will still remain given human rents, social relationships, celebrity status and demand side factors. People liking other people. Science. Big question for me this year anthropic is they have created the drop in software engineer with cloud code. It's clearly working and it's changing that industry today. Their goal for 2026 is clearly the drop in replacement what is the cloud code for every other industry. And it'll be very interesting to see if we see if we see Progress in AI SDRs because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships like getting to know people. And it's been a much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some, you know. Oh you know, you checked in this code, it worked. So you're. So you get paid. Yeah. It's not just hitting the right keystrokes in the right order. Yeah. Any good SDR will tell you like it's not actually about the email that you send. That's just one piece of the puzzle anyway. So he says science and R and D will speed up dramatically, but these also will have delayed GDP effects given production cycles and the fact that a lot of fast diffusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life that is GLP1s without necessarily boosting GDP. I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid late 2000s before entering another even higher growth regime greater than 10% as robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes. Fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output. This is also when you start to see the bommel effects start forcing adoption in areas that may otherwise be resistant. For example, we get Robocop and Robo nurses because the human cops and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff but thought that was just kind of relevant from a timeline standpoint when you're trying to understand capital in the 22nd century. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. To close out what Ben Thompson is talking about here, he says when he was a child growing up up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world. But my perspective, but from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder, and it even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me. Social media, or more accurately, user generated content feeds which are increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic. All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets, or on beaches or at fancy restaurants, living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment. Never mind that this means that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomprehensible to the richest person in the world 50 years ago. To put it another way, what Louis CK identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis. But the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire quadrillionaire aliens. We'Re all, they're all gonna be miserable. It's gonna be brutal. It's just like, oh, there's an alien out there with a, with a two mile long yacht and a, and a plane that holds 700. Their yacht is actually an asteroid. Yeah, he has so much chrome hearts. Yeah, and, and he has piles of chrome hearts everywhere. He never wears the same pair of chrome jeans twice. Never. Never. One more post from Boaz Barak. He's over at probably mispronouncing his name. He's over at OpenAI. He wrote a post on Less Wrong on New Year's Eve. Yeah, he said. What's that? I mean, a white belt title certainly. Yeah, the title of the essay is you Will be okay, he said. Seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring and knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks. As a general planner, you should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability x of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the 1x fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non trivial probability of total nuclear war and they still went about their lives. Even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes, it is best to follow some common sense best practices. But then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long and as as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades. My own expectation is that, as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time. Rather, just like we call recessions after we are already in them, we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones would be needed for at least several decades. If not more. Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this, like this. You have two months to escape the permanent two years. It's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to be, trying to become rich in two months is gonna make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head. And still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon. Maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire. But think on three five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, People have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically and physically. However, I expect that, like the Industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is, I was thinking here, people have been kind of asking like, hey, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs? You know, people are like, I actually like, I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that. I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Do we really need to automate this? Continuing us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty. And yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2000s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill you've had that thrill in the Tenderloin back in the day on a YC budget. I'm just thinking if they, if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just, it's so over. For the gravediggers. Yep. For the morticians, the coroners, Anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately. Cooked. They're out of a job, they'll have to find something new to do. But I'm optimistic that they will find a new job. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy With Axon, I get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Speaking of da use. Do you think OpenAI is going to buy Pinterest? Where is this coming from? Came from the information. They made a list of predictions that. We went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. This was just one of them. But it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document. It was just a prediction. But do you think that that would make sense, this idea that, you know, Sora was sort of, you know, supposed to be a social network? It's. Sa. Avenue in 2025. Okay. I just, I just don't, I just don't know what the release. I just don't know what they're really buying here. But the CEO's name is Bill Reddy. So the nominative determinism would be that he's ready to do a deal. Ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from 1 to 2%. And the founder, Ben Silberman and Silver's been mooning and they have similar names. So maybe Pinterest will moon. This is the level of analysis you can only get here, folks. Let's go through this Rittenhouse research post about OpenAI's business. But first let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Sam Altman December 18th right before the break. He says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI strategic position, its plan to build memory into ChatGPT, which is already ongoing. It's enterprise play compute AI devices and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse Research breaks it down and says the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI Enterprise is growing faster than consumer companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts. So apparently, apparently right, right when. Right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down. No way. Okay. Technology is like nap. Actually, you're not. OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity. Enterprises coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens which OpenAI can't provide. Yet rapid growth in inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line. If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their $1.4 trillion of commitments. Have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. 1.4 trillion of commitments takes place over a number of years. We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always, always penciled in because there was a gradient from like, this is a press release, this is a handshake deal, this is still being papered, this is contingent on milestones or there's some flexibility here. But it, but it kind of got all lumped together and mentally people were just putting it on OpenAI's balance sheet as liability, when in fact there was some flexibility there all along. While the 1.4 trillion of spending commitments is of course absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview. That's great. What a comeback. I mean, people were really, really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG2. It feels like his appearance on the big technology podcast is sort of a return to form resetting of the narrative. And he clearly like thought about how to peel back the onion of the 1.4 trillion commitment. So Rittenhouse closes by saying if you assume they raise $75 billion in one last private round, 25% haircut to the rumored 100 billion and another 75 billion in an IPO, that's so much money, the model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive. So they can do it, they can get out and there is enough. So I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. He said he found the pod a little too spoon fed and not very info dense. Interesting. I don't know, I'll have to give it a listen. But first I will have to tell you about linear. LINEAR is the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. The product planning tool behind OpenAI. Oh yeah. Should we take it over to Jocko? Yeah, Jocko. Jocko. One of the greatest podcast capitalists maybe, right? Apparently. I didn't even know he had this brand origin. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So many products made gear. Apparently somebody is a, somebody in the government is a, is a Jocko supporter because they threw Maduro in some origin. Looking sharp. Got him out of the Nike tech. It's called Origin built by Freedom Hoodie on Maduro. We got to get Maduro on some TVPN merch. I think we absolutely do not have to do that. Yeah, that's ridiculous. But yeah, silence into these photos. There's a whole bunch of. I guess he was transferred and he made the COVID cover of the Wall Street Journal again. It was interesting. Says I am. He says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty. I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got him themselves. We, of course, I feel like we. Deserve a small slice for promoting the reward. We did, we did, we did do a promoted post for the capture Maduro back in Q1 of last year. But. But yeah, I, I ultimately think. The. Delta gets all the credit. Maybe the dea, they do. Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in U.S. federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by US Forces over the weekend. I am innocent, he said. I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delsey Rodriguez, was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delsey Rodriguez is picked by Maduro. So should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much he'll be cooperating with the United States. Security officers were out in force in crocus, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests in Manhattan Monday. Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a US Court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial. So Chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of. Of Ronaldo, not because of somebody's got F1 sponsorship. Yeah, maybe. Maybe the Lewis Hamilton. The Lewis Hamilton helmet sponsorship. Honestly, massive props to perplexity. That is a remarkable one because apparently the, the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves or something like that. And so when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has a perplexity logo right on his helmet that I guess he was able to sell directly and it didn't go through. Through the team or something. So he gets to keep all of that money or something. That's a crazy. It seemed like an interesting, interesting. He had some leverage there. I wonder. The chat is going off saying good, you know the jocko. Oh yeah. Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror from the clink? Got captured by U.S. delta Force. Good, good. Wearing his origin. Arrested. Arrested on drug trafficking charges. Good. More inspiration to grind harder. Time to lock in. More. More. It's an opportunity to learn about the U.S. legal system. You're going to learn a lot. Anyway, Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to Fin AI. We have a surprise guest joining us. Casey Newton from Platformer dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing? Casey, welcome. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Long time. First time. Nice to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on on short notice. What a moment. So great to have you. Absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. I was riveted reading it. Thank you so much for the hard work. Going to the Scoop hall of Fame. Scoop hall of Fame.

Do you know what they call ces? They still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming in strong. What is it? CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I think it still is. It probably still is. Okay. Yeah. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. Talk about the smart brick. Okay. For sure. From Lego, but why don't we go into your op ed? Yeah. So I call it the death of the tech conference, because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is, like, CES launched so long ago. 1967. Isn't that like. I would have said like 85, maybe 92. Right, 67. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did. You have a vcr. I actually did. You had a vcr, like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970 when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Till that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda Lightning ra. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lightning Round. We have a Lightning Round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through. Pull it up. Alex Epstein, Jamie Siminoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production are. Going to cap it off with Lulu today. We got it. We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console 1975. The CD player launched in 1981 at CES, the Commodore 64, 1982, the DVD 1996, the Xbox in 2001. And we really gotta play this video of how the Xbox launched, because it will. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm going to talk about. My thesis of like why the tech conference is dying. But he launches and you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibreals and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2 and 20,000.

Than I'm giving it credit for probably just remembering bugs from years ago. And I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple tv. It's a great product. I love the Apple tv. Plug it into tv works really well. Are you talking about the Apple tv, the physical device on the Apple tv? Physical device, yes. We're going. Here is an app called Apple tv and they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple tv, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix or hbo, you can go there, but by default it now ships with the home button goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there. And it's a great universal interface, at least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said, we're not participating. We want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that, like, no amount of vibe coding. It's not a coding issue. It's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition, and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better, like profits for both companies. And it's a rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of like, clawed code that can solve for that. So my take now has evolved to be that, why don't you move the goal post? I will move the goal post. Move the goal post. I gotta move the goalpost. Because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app. And then it will be AGI, then it will be AGI, because it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back, back when they started the show. Business model problems are enduring. And Ben Thompson makes the case that there are human conditions. There are human.

All right, pause it, pause it. Yeah. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. 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, Great stuff, John. A couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not been sleeping super well. Toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and then they stop sleeping well. And with my 3 year old, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my 3 year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer and blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. It's a lifesaver. But with one and a half year old a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just breaks down exactly what's happening, gets the answer, and it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours, the problem was totally solved. Back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, basically one shot at it. And I was just thinking how OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, we're going to solve this. You're going to have a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people hammer him because it's like, well, then we're doing Sora and we're doing adult entertainment and things like that. But AI is actually already delivering on this sort of. Well, do you remember the Fallon clip that went viral where, where Fallon asks him, do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? He was like, honestly, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It is helpful. And yeah, it is a weird thing, but.

Has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank when it was open for, like, three hours, you had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole chunk. Chunk. And he'd write. He'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, it won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light truth? I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane, 2018. And then it breaks down and they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He knew. Existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on. Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You9 contributing 0 that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God, wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on after we land. Yeah, all right, pause it, pause it. Yeah, I did. I. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me. You tell.

Market clearing order inbound. Five pull. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Foreign. You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 6, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress. Of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both. Save both. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today at breakfast. And Calvin, very good omen to the start of 2026 to run into some. Some folks at Ramp. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in la. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but you'll hear about it. Where they weren't is they're not at CES because Ramp is not a consumer electronics project yet. Could see them get into the AI hardware. Tv. Maybe they should launch a tv. They shouldn't count anyone out. They should launch a tv. I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You know Razer. Razer Computer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gaming company. They have an AI companion now. They launched at ces. You should never count anyone out. Yeah, it really is like the festival of creativity for, like, weird AI projects. Weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It has a little bit of, like, hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed. Right. Is it hacker? It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spinoff. What do you think? I think at this point, it's, like, fairly boomer coded. It's very boomer coded, but it's also. I would describe it as somewhat. So I think I was talking to a buddy who texted me yesterday morning, said, are you at CES this week? He seemed desperate to hang out. And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it, and in some ways it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual for people in tech to say, you just had this nice holiday, and now we're gonna force you to go to Vegas and schmooze for five days. Get ready to go to Vegas. Get ready to schmooze. It sounds exhausting. I've actually never been to ces, but do you know what they call ces? They still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming in strong. What is it? CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I think it still is. It probably still is. Okay, there's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. I want to talk about the smart brick. Okay. For sure. From Lego, but why don't we go into your op ed? Yeah. So I call it the Death of the Tech Conference because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is, like, CES launched so long ago. 1967. Isn't that like. I would have said, like 85, maybe 92. Right, 67. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know. You don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did. You have a VR? I actually did. You had a vcr like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Until that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS on it. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda Lightning ra. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio. And we're very excited for Lightning Round. We have a Lightning Round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake. Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through. Alex Epstein, Jamie Simonoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production. Are going to cap it off with Lulu today. We got it. We got a. We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console, 1975. The CD player launched in 1981 at CES. The Commodore 64. 1982, the DVD. 1996, the Xbox in 2001. And we really got to play this video of how the Xbox launched, because it will. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm going to talk about. My thesis of, like, why the tech conference is dying. But he launches. And, you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibreals and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video with Dwayne unveiling the Xbox. Look at this. This is the product that will be out later this year. And there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal. But the box itself is another thing. That we put a lot of energy. It's a box. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is showmanship. This is the Xbox. This is the Xbox for the first time. Let me now unveil this box. Do you ever have one of these. With the controller in and the plexiglass? Very cool. Yeah. Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there. Driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the controller in their hands to try it out. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big they had to make a smaller one because they just went like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. Were they testing on you? No. There's this whole meme that it was like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something that I seem to remember this, I don't. Know, loaded as you move from level to level. What you're seeing on the front, the eject, the on off button and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two. The PlayStation, I think just had two at the time. And maybe the N64 had four, but this was like a big jump forward. And then Dwayne comes out. Yeah. 246. While they are skipping ahead, let me tell you about Label box. Delivering you the highest quality Data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds that are so state. Of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that everything in this box is the final design. Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that, like OpenAI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit there was the. Whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out the Rock. Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really. The celebrity cameo launch is completely forgotten art. We don't know how to do this anymore. WWF Champion. All right, pause for a second, because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a, a, a effect. I don't know about a list, but maybe like an aging out, like somebody that was iconic. Yes, yes. Actor, an athlete, etc. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video, just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product. That would be genius. Yeah, I mean, you see a lot of these. There was that, there was that, that drink company that, that did this. Do you remember they had some celebrity, like, read every. I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Orca or. Yeah, Orca. Yeah, we remember it today. And a lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage, good editing, a bunch of things to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately, and they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just also. It's just way more thumb stopping. Like you're just gonna be scrolling and be like, oh, what is the Rock doing there? Promoting your product. Obviously not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive and who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to do anyway, CES when it launched, I thought this was impressive. 1967, no precedent. There's not really a tech community. It's sort of new. 17,000 people show up. 200 companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot. It's grown. Not even 10x. I mean, this year or in 2024, they had 130,000 attendees. It's grown a lot, but it's not. It started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot. But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth Wi FI IoT all that stuff was like sort of annoying. Maybe the AI stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in all sorts of different hardware things at the same time. I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI. And I was just shuddering thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating like a Frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing. Samsung had a big announcement last year. Perplexity integration. Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. And again, I just think anytime you're in a situation where you could ask your TV for information, it's probably easier to ask your phone. Yeah, usually. Usually, yeah. And so I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing. We'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting, but I wanted to go into the history of how the tech conference, like the tech conference that's not linked to a single company sort of died. And a lot of it goes back to the iPhone actually. So the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics show like it is the consumer electronics juggernaut. It should have been launched. Most important consumer product of the 21st century. Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9, 2007. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by idg, this international data group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications. That guy started a magazine, International Data Group. Fantastic. We don't know how to make names like that. Yeah, it's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And he kind of scaled this business. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from Apple, but Apple was obviously the cornerstone draw to the event. So they'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just like a phone case, didn't make sense at that time. But you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals. But launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as ces, it allowed Jobs to control everything about the big Reveal the lighting, the pacing. He was famously like fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly. He wanted certain demos to happen after. And he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at ces. And the big thing is that at ces, journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So with TVs, we know like 4K, 8K 3D, not 3D, OLED or refresh rate or number of ports, price point. So they create these like charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best. Weird name. It was more, more performant. Yeah. It beat it on basically everything at the time. He didn't want to go spec to spec. He didn't, he didn't. So The Nokia had 3G already. It had GPS, it allowed for copy pasting of text. It had a front facing camera, it. Had a 5 megapixel rear camera. Until we can copy and paste, we don't have that power. No, no. The number of features that the Nokia N95 is crazy. It could record videos. The iPhone couldn't record videos. It had a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't think anyone really wants. But it had a bunch of features that if it was just. If you just created a table of iPhone vs Nokia N95, the Nokia beat it on like 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible and the iPhone sort of had the first good touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web browser, but it didn't even have third party apps. The Nokia did. And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld, they're not allowed to be here. Best marketer of all time, clearly. And everyone copied him so very, very quickly. Every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full Control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later, started doing WWDC and their own self hosted events, self distributed events. Obviously technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper, you can livestream, you can go to Restream and you can get your event everywhere. So you have Google I O, Microsoft build Meta Connect, Samsung unpacked. When Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray Ban displays, he didn't do it at ces. He didn't wait for ces. He was just like, I'm going to have my own event. He did it as his own event. He created his own news cycle and it was like, you know, he had full control over that. And so everyone's followed Jobs playbook and it's been remarkably successful. Like, I don't think it's been a miss. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there and Nvidia unveiled Vera Rubin, their new. Which looks incredible. Yeah, but also it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even Nvidia has their own conferences now. But my main takeaway is just like in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore. And truthfully, they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the vcr and the cd player and the xbox that's over 25 years old now at this point. Although the Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment. But that is of old at this point. And so still there's plenty to get from a show from ces. It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as like a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch an Apple keynote just to know, hey, should I buy the new iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute or. You'Re in the industry. Your CEO has gotten ready to drink, buddy in Vegas. Get ready to go. Seriously? Seriously. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at ces. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write up of ces. Coverage is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course they highlighted Nvidia, the faster artificial intelligence chips. Vera Rubin the CPU GPU combination. Mercedes Benz Nvidia has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes Benz, set to hit US roads in the first three months of this year. The tire of my Mercedes Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work. You've been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the beginning of the show. And what's happened had three tires blown out on LA roads. I do think I was complaining about. I'm not sure if it was on air or off here, but at least in the last 48 hours I was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads. And of course this morning at 5:35am the tire did not survive a pothole. Anyways. Ridiculous going forward. Amd the Journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet shares fell more than 2%. However Uber ride hailing company plus EV maker Lucid and Neuro have begun on road testing for their planned Robotaxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped 5.5%. So CES at least announcements are still moving. Yeah, moving the market. There's some other cool stuff. I mean Dell's in here, they're reviving the XPS computer line. But the they also launched a massive 52 inch monitor or something like that 6k monitor. I feel like that could be pretty sick. If you need. If you're monitoring situations, get like six. Yeah, six of these. Let me tell you about console consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. LEGO launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toy. This was the launch of the year contender and it's the first week of January. So let's pull it up. For a smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do well, you. More dopamine for children. Let's go. I think this is good. I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I remember there were. We're excited to addict your children to legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And yeah, they go mindstorm, Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbo Puffer is gonna need a rebuild. Totally, Simon. We need to make this a smart LEGO Puffer. Smart Puffer asap. But yeah. So Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more. From the Verge. Tom. Love it coverage. Very cool. And of course, Boston Dynamics, demo champions of the world. Yeah, they got to give us these robots some 11 labs voices. 11 labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology. Interaction actually is a real call to action. Let your robots talk. Yeah, with 11 labs, it definitely needs it as a feature. So Boston Dynamics is starting the year strong. They seem to be upset. That figure is valued at roughly one Ford motor company and they're not happy about it. So they're, they're launching. They had a new video of various Boston Dynamics. They should be de facto Hyundai. Yeah. Here they've been doing this for so long, but I don't know. It looks good. How tall is it? 2.3 meters. Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have been really, really small, just kind of like smaller. Is this, is this not cgi? I can't even tell at this point. This looks like. Wow. Oh, that was a cool move. The way that it can move. That was a cool move. The way that it stands up is wild too. There's standing up. It looks like a spider. And then. Yeah, very disconcerting. But that one is crazy. Oh, we saw this from one of the Chinese humanoid. Do you think that this maybe one of their first use cases could be gloving? Oh yeah, that's really trendy. I've been seeing that gloving I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something. You see that one? Yeah. You saw that? Tyler, you need to start gloving. Yeah. When a founder. Anytime a founder raises more than $100 million, you got to say, can I glove for you? What is that from like EDM culture or something? I don't know. That's very funny. Dark. What? What else is in. Yeah. The Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty interesting. All the way up to 104. 104. 6Ft 2 inches tall. 104. Feels like that's got a great build. Honestly, 6 to 198 pounds can work at negative 4. What's its mid face ratio? How's it upper maxilla? It's a circle. It's a circle. Okay, well. Perfect. That's a perfect ratio, I guess. Yeah. So apparently Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities. 66 pounds sustained weight capacity. Most people can lift more than that. Come on, we gotta get those numbers up. But yeah, this will be interesting. I wonder what the future of this company's traded hands so many times. It's owned by Hyundai right now. They gotta spin it out, they gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again. They got to launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they want to change the world, they got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Great idea. Should we talk about Jamie Dimon? Let's do it. In the New York Times Today, Jamie Dimon's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers. Is this gong worthy? This is gong worthy. Let's do it. First gong. The Trump Admin is lifting regulations. Deal making is heating up. For Jamie Dimon, being JPMorgan Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists. Wait, what talisman? What are you talking about? At just the right time, in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, Mr. Diamond's underlings have crammed in tiny type a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JP Morgan Chase, is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump Admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory Agencies that date Back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again, like cryptocurrency. And President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti bribery rules. Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker. But there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and a. As the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows once imperiled real estate loans look steadier thanks to the rebound in. In office work, stocks are levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020 and gold and silver have soared. All of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming. Let's hear the profit machine. In other words, as analysts at Kief Brew yet and woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big, big bank stocks rose 29% in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the US stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrow, narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained, but performed considerably, considerably less well. So again, I mean, a big part of this is banks have just been, you know, obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as, as the p. As the private credit chat. That's true. That's actually true. Yeah. So they're just sitting there and it's. Sort of the same thing with like crypto. It's like, like, you know, if there's going to be a. If you're going to have a competitor, that's like, unless way less regulated. That is a very. That's a huge. And why would I work with JP Morgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial, which is reinventing financial. Yeah, yeah. Like the whole debanking or not debanking, bankless movement and stuff like. I don't know that it's been a huge headwind, but. No, I think, I think the combination of M and A and private credit that they have just been. Private credit is just much more loosely regulated. A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly 770 million for Jamie Dimon, for the chief executives of Citi, whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slash tens of Thousands of jobs and a years long restructuring and Goldman Sachs shared Tyler displacement. You're going to be. No, because we're up 60. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Because the way that you reacted there. Looked a little suspicious obviously for the labor displacement. But this is not AI driven. Of course. Yeah. So anyways, they're counting some unrealized gains here, of course. But anyways, big, big year for, for Jamie Dimon. Should we pop over to Tuna? Yeah. What's in Tuna says you're first. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents, baby. That's right. Tuna says your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographics. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah, pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy. I've been getting, I mean speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one. I bought one too. Give me a review. What'd you think? Haven't played it yet? No. So here's the challenge. We had less help around the house over the last two weeks and Bored is designed for, I think kids like, I think it's like six and up. It's not like a under five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just gonna have like a one or three year old just like you know, messing with it, it's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it. Hopefully this week. You guys should play live during the show right here. We should, yeah. The review from the 4 and a half year a. He loved it. What'd you play? We stuck to the more simple games. I think also they're still rolling out some of the games so it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags and some of the pieces that they ship to you. The games haven't actually finished. They haven't finished coding them, I guess and so they're not live. But we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this sort of triangle block on the screen and then when you're in this one zone you're basically firing at these asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score and it was interesting. It was like it was intuitive enough that the four year old could pick it up and actually get some points. But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. Eat. So there was like, I, I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a, that it's possible to get 4000 points even though we're averaging like 2500 points now. If I really max this out and we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling is actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there were. I love how you don't, you don't every, like every game, anything like that. You're just like, I need to max it out. Oh, for sure. I need to max it out. Like even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing out the score. Yeah. I told past this in Metaconnect. At one point I had the highest score in Robo Recall in the world. Okay. So apparently. So Mike on our team says my 3 year old nephew loves the weird alien dog game. Is that the one? Apparently this is. Apparently it is suited for three year olds and I need to get into it. Is the weird alien dog one where it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that one's really fun. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like you're supposed to check on it every day and it comes in from the house, it's all dirty. So you wash it off, you soap it up, scrub it and you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can and you put the watering can on the screen of the board and when you do it sort of showers the pet and then it washes it off. Yeah. So I think that mechanic was really fun too. For board to sell a million units, they need like a super, super viral individual game. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's gonna, it won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. Yeah. They need a breakout. This is a hits business. Right. So they need, they need like catan. Yeah. Like people are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done. And the mechanics, you could play them again. There's some repeatability but. But none of the games were so intense that also there just aren't that many pieces Most of the games have like six pieces. There's 10 pieces. And so if you had resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally counted, which might be nice, actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it's like it actually gets overwhelming and annoying? I don't know. But let me tell you about Vibe Co, because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming TV, because Vibe Co is where D2C brands. You mean bored these startups? Oh, yeah, bored. AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. That should be their next place to advertise. I like it. And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographics and pay more attention to the personal ads. They need to let them flow. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says, a week ago, Dwarkesh and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality, as the Financial Times kindly put it. But that was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in, buckle up. Welcome to the dive bar. Yeah, but it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all. And just like seeing another person, another reason to tax the rich. That's funny, I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they like Dorkash, right? And they're like, oh, cool, new door cash thing. I'm a fan. But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly also. I mean, this was a. I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole, like, Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like the whole wealth tax thing that was going on in California and they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in the Zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very it's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says he's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone. Or at least tried to, he says. And before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security, the leading AI trust management platform. So they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods and services are gross compliments for capital provided ones quote in our utility functions what Nordhaus 2021 might call on the demand side. And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people can what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. Funnily enough, on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is under appreciated, but then makes a case for why I think on balance, it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is is a lame just give me a month. But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post exploring the case against long run gross common complementarity on the on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because 1 Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board already 2 Nord House and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non IT goods for capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine. Of course we're we're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways, and I think it is a very far Future. But it is one interesting to think about. Maybe, maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize. People haven't read it, kind of key factors. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So key factors, they talk about privatization of returns. So like very, very hard to get exposure to xai right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home. Right. And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation. Right. So if you have a home, I think they said if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get like, you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe, maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just like land somewhere else in the US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international sort of catch up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital, they would turn that and they would cheaply create work. Yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then they talk about wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging out effectively. So we'll see. We'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought, I thought this post from Tomas Bar Tour was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says both Dwarkesh and his critics imagine an absurd world. Think of the future they argue about. Political economy doesn't change rapidly even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be the thousands of times, will be thousands of times faster, not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world, even if it isn't, if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different. So we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy, question mark. What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy? In an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children. What sort of children? Copies of your brain state? Are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created. Things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe? But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, the ccp? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by Wealth? To OpenAI stockholders, to Sama, to the Coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on? To the coding agent who implements it. Tax policy. Question mark. Truly the important question, what does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions? How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure. Given how easy humans are to scam, there's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own check notes a whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now. Wow, isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies, that's bad. Space opera Treat the future with the respect it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally, like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any. The institutions just break. The way that the world currently works breaks. I was thinking about with if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares in this sort of fast takeoff scenario is this. You know, maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares, right? But is a super intelligence going to say, oh yes, I would like to buy some OpenAI shares, right? Or would they just corners the market. Buys them all or just rebuilt, you know, effectively just rebuilt, you know, so this, I think it's in any type of these, in any type of like fast takeoff scenario. How do you. Actually, it's hard to have, I think the. I love, you know, reading. I love reading this essay I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to. Any scenario you can imagine, there's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply. Yeah, yeah. I wonder. The. The 22nd century thing, you keep coming back to this idea of fast takeoff. And it feels like even in some sort of slow progress, if you just extrapolate the default trend lines and nothing really changes, you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting interpretation of this, saying that. But he said, this gets at what I found the most frustrating. What was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view, the core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition. It just happened to be negative. And he basically said that you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still bothered by wealth inequality. Because in this scenario, there's abundance and there's enough. Like, robots can just create everything. So you have, like, unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective. But you're still bothered by the fact that, like, that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies. Yeah, it's not right. And that. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced. And that's. And it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart. And so you. Takes you a million years to get there. And it's like. And maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we. If we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens, like, you know, a million light years away? Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we actually. We're actually sitting on an entire planet of diamond, and we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay. It's those aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like, how much is it. How much is wealth inequality? A direct focus on, like, the keeping up with the Joneses, like, the neighbor effect, the direct mimetics of, like, the person that you see as your equal. But I don't know, but Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans, and they don't see any value in that. And so because he's making the point that he quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of late Night with Conan, and he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. You've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological. Yeah, let me send it to the team. Let's see if we can drop this. So he says, Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted. Smartphones, Internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to. In just the last 72 hours, I have chafed at slow airplane WI fi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe. He went to Taiwan and back and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery. It is also terrible until I remember I have access to everything. Anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime, and, oh, yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse. Off. Off. That's very, very weird concept, but I. I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots. Clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right Right now, and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it Was open for like three hours. You had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, oh, and he'd bring out this whole shunk chunk and he'd write, he'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, like, it won't. Give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light true? I was on an airplane and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. It's I'm in an Airplane, 2008, YouTube on a TV. And they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes, Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right. They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air? Incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You non contributing zero that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God. Wow. Yes. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on afterwards. All right, pause it, pause it. Yeah, I did this reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me Tell you about Plaid. 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. Great stuff, John. A couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and they stop sleeping well. And with my 3 year old, we hired a, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my 3 year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, you know, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer, blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. Like it's a lifesaver. But with one and a half year old, a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just like breaks down exactly. Like what's happening gets the answer. And it is effectively running calculations based on the, the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours the problem was totally solved. Like back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, basically one shot at it. Then I was just thinking how OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, we're going to solve this. You're going to have a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people, you know, hammer him because it's like, well then we're doing SORA and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that. But it's actually like AI is actually already delivering on this sort of. Do you remember the Fallon clip that, where that went viral where Fallon asks him like, do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? He was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like, it is helpful. And yeah, it is a weird thing, but it's, it's this when technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of like back in 1965, planes used to be so nice and now you're stuffed in the back like cattle. You know these photos where they're like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger flights, like, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total, across everything is the same number, almost exactly the same number as total first class flights in 2025. And so basically anyone who could fly in 1965 is now flying first class. And then you added there's 10 times as many non first class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class, different product. But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class because it was really expensive, it got cheaper, but all the rich people stayed in first class. And then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people. And that just continues. But it's this weird thing because that doesn't feel satisfying because you see the people up in front of your class and you're like, I want to be up there. Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out. But first, let me tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average vive coding tool. It lives in figma so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build prototypes. And John, you always have this critique of the coding models and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone because the United app is so bad. Yes, yes, yes. You always have this. Yes, yes, yes. And then so there's this post, it's in the timeline. It's someone, they say, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is. Oh, no way. Yeah, because it works well and they're. Just like glazing it. Yeah, I talked to Roon about this as well because I brought that up when I was talking to him and he was like, kind of stomped. And then I talked to him again and he was like, actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. So I think that you're right and it's a good point that the software, the quality of the software is increasing. And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably better than I'm giving it credit for, probably just remembering bugs from years ago and I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple tv. It's a great product. I love the Apple tv, plug it into your TV works really well. Are you talking about the Apple tv. The physical device on the Apple tv? Physical device, yes. We're going. Here is an app called Apple TV and they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple tv, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix or hbo, you can go there, but by default it now ships with the home button goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there and it's a great universal interface. At least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said we're not participating. We want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that, that is something that like no amount of vibe coding. It's not a coding issue, it's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience but better like profits for both companies. And it's the rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of like Claude code that can solve for that. So my take now has evolved to be that, why don't you move the goalpost? I will move the goalpost. Move the goalpost. Because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app. And then it will be AGI, then it will be AGI because it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back. Back when they started the show. Business model problems are enduring. And Ben Thompson makes the case that there are human conditions, there are human elements that will be enduring. Even in a post. Software only Singularity. There was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at fai. He said I was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP, economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI given. I believe we'll get fully automated AI R&D by 2029. He said. Here's my response via quick email reply. Re gdp I think we'll get a higher trend TFP level growth rate as past general purpose technologies. This will be a new higher growth regime, 5 to 10% but not hyperbolic exponential growth. So not with the Elon triple digit. Yeah. So real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal and regulatory regimes, supply chains, human in the loop. We will still see a digifoom software singularity. But this will feel more disinflationary than anything that is mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated but a lot will still remain given human rents, social relationships, celebrity status and demand side factors. People liking other people. Science. Big question for me this year anthropic is they have created the drop in software engineer. Right. With cloud code it's clearly working but and it's changing that industry today. You know their goal for 2026 is clearly like the drop in replacement. Like what is the cloud code for every other industry. And it'll be very interesting to see if we see a. If we see progress in AI SDRs because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships like getting to know people. And it's been much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some. You know, you checked in this code, it worked. So you're. So you get paid. Yeah. It's not just hitting the right keystrokes in the right order. Yeah. Any good SDR will tell you like it's not actually about the emails that you send. That's just one piece of the puzzle anyway. So he says science and R and D will speed up dramatically, but these also will have delayed GDP effects given production cycles. And the fact that a lot of fast diffusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life that is GLP1s without necessarily boosting GDP. I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid late 2000s before entering another even higher growth regime greater than 10%. As robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes, fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output. This is also when you start to see the bommel effects start forcing adoption in areas that may otherwise be resistant. We get Robocop and robo nurses because the human cops and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff but thought that was just kind of relevant from a timeline standpoint when you're trying to understand capital in the 22nd century. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep mold multimodal understanding. To close out what Ben Thompson is talking about here, he says when he was a child growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said, I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world. But my perspective. But from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder and it even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me. Social media, or more accurately user generated content feeds which are increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic. All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets or on beaches or at fancy restaurants, living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment. Never mind that this mean that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomplete incomprehensible to the richest person in the world 50 years ago. To put it another way, what Louis CK identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis. But the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire quadrillionaire aliens. We'Re all dogs, probably miserable. It's gonna be brutal. It's just like, oh, there's an alien out there with a two mile long yacht and a plane that holds 700. Their yacht is actually an asteroid. Yeah, he has so much chrome hearts. Yeah, and he has piles of chrome hearts everywhere. He never wears the same pair of chrome jeans twice. Never. Never. One more post from Boaz Barak. He's over at probably mispronouncing his name. He's over at OpenAI. He wrote a post on Less Wrong on New Year's Eve. Yeah, he said. What's that? I mean, white belt title, certainly. Yeah, the title of the essay is you will be okay, he said. Seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring and Knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks. As a general planner, you should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability x of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the 1x fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non trivial probability of total nuclear war and they still went about their lives. Even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes, it is best to follow some common sense best practices. But then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P doom. But just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics we will see centuries of progress compressed into to decades. My own expectation is that as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time. Rather just like we call recessions after we are already in them. We will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones would be needed for at least several decades, if not more. Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this. Like this, you have two months to escape the permanent two years. It's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to become rich in. In two months is going to make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head. And still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon. Maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire. But think on three five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically and physically. However, I expect that, like the Industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is. I was thinking here, people have been kind of asking like, hey, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs? You know, people are like, I actually like. I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that. I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Do we really need to automate this continuing? Us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty. And yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2000s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill you've had that thrill in the tenderloin back in the day on a YC budget. I'm just thinking, if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just, it's so over for the gravediggers. Yep. For the morticians, the coroners. Anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately cooked. They're out of a job. They have to find something new to do. But I'm optimistic that they will find a new, new, new job. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon. I get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Speaking of DAUs, do you think OpenAI is going to buy Pinterest? Where is this coming from? Came from the information. They made a list of predictions that. We went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. This was just one of them. But it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document. It was just a prediction. But do you think that that would make sense, this idea that. But you know, Sora was sort of, you know, supposed to be a social network. Sa. Avenue in 2025. Okay. I just, I just don't. I just don't know what they're really. I just don't know what they're really buying here. But the CEO's name is Bill Ready, so the nominative determinism would be that he's ready, ready, ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from 1 to 2%. And the founder Ben Silberman and Silver's been mooning and they have similar names, so maybe Pinterest will moon. This is the level of analysis you can only get here, folks. Let's go through this Rittenhouse research post about OpenAI's business. But first let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Sam Altman December 18th right before the break, he says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI strategic position, its plan to build memory into ChatGPT, which is already ongoing, its enterprise play compute AI devices, and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse Research breaks it down and says the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI Enterprise is growing faster than consumer companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts. So apparently, apparently right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down. No way. Okay. Technology is like, like nap. Actually, you're not. OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity, Enterprises coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens which OpenAI can't provide. Yet rapid growth in inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line. If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their $1.4 trillion of commitments. Have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. 1.4 trillion of commitments takes place over a number of years. We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always, always penciled in because there was a gradient from like this is a press release. This is a handshake deal. This is still being papered. This is contingent on milestones or there's some flexibility here. But it, but it kind of got all lumped together and mentally people were just putting it on OpenAI's balance sheet as liability, when in fact there was some flexibility there all along. While the 1.4 to trillion of spending commitments is of course absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview. That's great. What a comeback. I mean, people are really, really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG2. It feels like his appearance on the Big Technology podcast is sort of a return to form resetting of the narrative. And he clearly like thought about how to peel back the onion of the 1.4 trillion commitment. So Rittenhouse closes by saying if you assume they raise $75 billion in one last private round, 25% haircut to the rumored 100 billion and another 75 billion in an IPO, that's so much money, the model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive. So they can do it. They can get out and there is enough. So I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. He said he found the pod a little too spoon fed and not very info dense. Interesting. I don't know. I'll have to give it a listen. But first I will have to tell you about linear. LINEAR is the system for modern software development. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. The product planning tool behind OpenAI. Oh yes. Should we take it over to Jocko? Yeah, Jocko. Jocko. One of the greatest podcast capitalists maybe, right? Apparently. I didn't even know he had this brand. Origin. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So many products made gear. Apparently somebody is a. Somebody in the government is a. Is a Jocko supporter because they threw Maduro in some Origin. Looking sharp. Got him out of the Nike tech. It's called Origin built by Freedom Hoodie on Maduro. We got to get Maduro and some TVPN merch. I think we absolutely do not have to do that. Yeah, that's ridiculous. But yeah, silence into these photos. There's a whole bunch of. I guess he was transferred and he made the COVID of the Wall Street Journal again. It was interesting. He says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty. I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got them themselves. We of course, I feel like we. Deserve a small slice for promoting the reward. We did, we did, we did do a promoted post for the capture Maduro back in Q1 of last year. But, but yeah, I, I ultimately think the Delta gets all the credit. Maybe the dea, they do. Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in U.S. federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by US Forces over the weekend. I am innocent, he said. I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delsey Rodriguez was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delsey Rodriguez is picked by Maduro. So should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much he'll be cooperating with the United States. Security officers were out in force in Caracas, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests in Manhattan Monday. Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a US Court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial. So Chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of Ronaldo, not because of somebody's got F1 sponsorship. Yeah, maybe, maybe the Lewis Hamilton. The Lewis Hamilton helmet sponsorship. Honestly, massive props to perplexity. That is a remarkable one because apparently the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves or something like that. And so when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has a Perplexity logo right on his helmet that I guess he was able to sell directly and it didn't go through the team or something. So he gets to keep all of that money or something. That's a crazy. It seemed like an interesting, interesting he. Had some leverage there. I wonder. The Chat is going off saying good. You know the jocko. Oh yeah. Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror from the clink? Got captured by U.S. delta Force. Good, good. Wearing his origin. Arrested. Arrested on drug trafficking charges. Good. More inspiration to grind harder. Time to lock in more. More. It's an opportunity to learn about the U.S. legal system. You're going to learn a lot. Anyway, Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to Fin AI we have a surprise guest joining us. Casey Newton from Platformer dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI Food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing? Casey, welcome. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Hey. Long time. First time. Nice to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on a short notice. What a moment. So great to have you. Absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. I was riveted reading it. Thank you so much for the hard work. The scoop. Hall of fame. Scoop. Hall of fame, I think. I don't even know if this is a scoop of. This is more investigative journalism. This is peeling back the onion. I don't know. It was great. But. But how did you. Did you see this go out on social media? Were you on Reddit? Like, how did you encounter this story first? That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying, like, look how evil the food delivery companies are. And, you know, I was like, a few days from having to come back and write a column again, and I thought, hey, maybe this turns into a skip for me. So I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart. But then it was actually my boyfriend who said people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart. I think he was right about. So. So what was the process like to actually dig into it? What was your interpretation? Because we read the Reddit post, I saw the screenshot, and I was kind of like.

Podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video with Dwayne unveiling the Xbox. Look at this. This is the product that will be out later this year. And there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal. But the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy. It's a box. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is showmanship. This is the Xbox. This is the Xbox for the first time. Let me now unveil Xbox. Whoa. Do you ever have one of these with the controller? Yeah, in the. And the plexiglass. Very cool. Yeah. Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty. The original Modern Warfare was on there. Driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the controller in their hands. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big they had to make a smaller one because they just went, like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. Were they testing on you? No. There's this whole meme that it was, like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something that I seem to remember this. I don't know, loaded. As you move from level to level, what you're seeing on the front, the eject, the on off button and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two. Yeah. The PlayStation, I think just had two at the time. And maybe the N64 had four, but this was like a big jump forward. And then Dwayne comes out. Yeah. 246. While they are skipping ahead, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality Data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds that are so state. Of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that everything in this box is the final design. Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that. Like OpenAI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit there was the. Whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They. They didn't bring out the rock. Yeah. I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really is rock. The celebrity cameo launch is completely forgotten. Art. We don't know how to do this anymore. All right, pause for a second, because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive.

Needed for at least several decades, if not more. Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this, like this. You have two months to escape the permanent two years. It's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to be, trying to become rich in two months is going to make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head. And still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon. Maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire. But think on three, five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change.

Like a victim of its. But it's not fully AI generated. But there's just a weird, like, paradox there where people seem to be distracted. I mean, to me, the thread that ties all those together is that AI is a superpower for motivated reasoning. Like, if there is something you want to believe, like AI can immediately generate the materials that will help you sell that case to other people. And, you know, we're all just going to kind of have to like upgrade our cognitive hygiene and say we now know that there are tools that can get me to sort of believe my own eyes when I shouldn't be doing that. And it's screwing with my mind. That's why I wrote this piece. This whole thing is screwing with my mind and I want all of us to be having a conversation about it. Yeah, there was a very interesting thread just like two weeks earlier maybe about someone claiming.

System that sort of takes advantage of driver's desperation. Okay, so what's the who. What's your theory on who this person is? What's the point? Because. Because in some ways. In some ways, like, I feel like doordash was the loser here. Yeah. Because I feel like doordash has a reputation for just, like, being incredible ruthless operators. And so people are just like, oh, this is doordash for sure. Yeah. And then. And then, and then they had to come out and defend themselves and say, we don't even use this language. There's probably like some fourth tier. Like, the fourth player in the ecosystem that we don't even know is, like, languishing at, like, $400 million market cap. And they're like, we're trying to be as ruthless as that, man. Like, trust us, like, our profit's going to be great next quarter. And we're like, no one thinks it's you. No one. Yeah, I just. I just don't understand. The point is this. Is this. Yeah. Short seller could be disgruntled driver. Did you get any, Any. Any interest or any ideas of be like, why are people doing this? Again, like, this guy, like, his. His answers are so short that I never really got any sense of motivation. You know, I do think, like, this was over the holiday break. I do think that there's a chance that this is like a bored teenager, you know, in the basement type of thing. But, you know, one thing I haven't done and I would encourage people to do is, like, were there any poly market or Kalshee trades around the time of this post dropping? Like, because it would be crazy to me if somebody was trying to, like, take the Uber or Doordy doordash market cap and, you know, make a few bucks. Okay. Yeah. I mean, they could do that in the public markets or I guess in prediction markets, because sometimes there's like, a dedicated prediction market for this specific thing, like, is it real or not? And then they can be trading that because they know it's fake or something. What do you think the actual platform should have done?

That's just wrong. You surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come get up. Trust the experts. 5. Legal cor. Founder. Five code. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Expert. UAV online. Glaze. Double glaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Five killer. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Market clearing order. Inbo. Come on, come on, get up. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike1, Strike 2. Activate. Go. Golden retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe put it. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 7 6, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress. Of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today. Breakfast and Calvin, very good omen to the start of 2026 to run into some. Some folks at Ramp. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in la. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but you'll hear about it. They. Where they weren't is they're not at CES because Ramp is not a consumer electronics project yet. Yeah. Could see them get into the AI hardware. Maybe they should launch anyone out. They should launch a tv. I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You know, Razor? The Razer computer. Oh, yeah, yeah, the gaming company. They have an AI companion campaign they launched at ces. So you should never count anyone out. Yeah. It really is like the festival of creativity for, like, weird AI projects. Weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It has a little bit of, like, hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed. Right. Is it hacker? It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spinoff. What do you think? I think at this point, it's, like, fairly Boomer coded. It's very Boomer coded, but it's also. I would describe it as somewhat novelty. So I think I. I was talking to a buddy who texted me yesterday morning, said, are you at CES this week? He seemed desperate to hang out. And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it, and in some ways, it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual for people in tech to say, like, you just had this nice holiday, and now we're gonna force you to go to Vegas and schmooze for a week. For five days, get ready to go to Vegas, get ready to schmooze. It sounds exhausting. I've actually never been to Seattle ces, but they. Do you know what they call ces? They still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming in strong. What is it? CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I think it still is. It probably still is. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. Talk about the smart brick. Okay. For sure, from Lego, but why don't we go into your op ed? Yeah. So I call it the Death of the Tech Conference because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is, like, CES launched so long ago. 1967. Isn't that like. I would have said like 85, maybe 92. Right, 67. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at ces, like the thing that you put the tape into. I know you don't watch movies and you never had a vcr. I had a vcr. I actually did. Actually. Did you had a vcr, like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in. You have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie that launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Until that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 GS on it. Okay. At the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at ces, but first I'm going to 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. Can we show our new. We have the Lambda Lightning ro. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI generated, not cgi. It's here, here in the studio and. We'Re very excited for Land. Lightning round. We have a Lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff, we have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you the linear lineup taking you through. Pull it up. Alex Epstein, Jamie Siminoff. We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production. Are going to cap it off with Lulu today. We got it. We got a massive lineup. So anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console 1975. The CD player launched in 1981 at CES. The Commodore 64, 1982. The DVD at 1996. The Xbox in 2001. And we really gotta play this video of how the Xbox launched, because it will. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm gonna talk about. My thesis of, like, why the tech conference is dying. But he launches and, you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibreals and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar. Because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video with Dwayne unveiling the Xbox. Look at this. This is the product that will be out later this year. And there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal. But the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy. It's a box. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is showmanship. This is the Xbox. This is the Xbox for the first time. Let me now unveil Xbox. Whoa. Do you ever have one of these. With the controller in the. The plexiglass. Very cool. Yeah. Dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there. Driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the control in their hands. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big they had to make a smaller one because it just went, like, way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. Were they testing on you? No. There's this whole meme that it was, like, really good for Shaq, but that was it. And Shaq loved it or something like that. I seem to remember this. I don't know, loaded. As you move from level to level, what you're seeing on the front, the eject the on off button and Four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two. Yeah, the PlayStation, I think just had two at the time. And maybe the N64 had four, but this was like a big jump forward. And then Dwayne comes out. Yeah. 246. While they are skipping ahead, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality Data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds that are so state. Of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that everything in this box is the final design. Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that, like OpenAI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit there was. The whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out the Rock. Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really is rock. The celebrity cameo launch is completely forgotten art. We don't know how to do this anymore. WWF Champion. All right, pause for a second. One of the top, because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a. A effect. I don't know about a list, but maybe like an aging out. Like somebody that was iconic. Yes, yes. Actor, an athlete, et cetera. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video, just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product. That would be genius. Yeah. I mean, you see a lot of these. There was that drink company that did this. Do you remember? They had some celebrity, like read every single. I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Orca. Orca, yeah, Orca. Yeah, we remember it today. And a lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage. Good editing, a bunch of things to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately. And they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just also, it's just way, way more thumb stopping. Like you're just gonna be scrolling and be like, oh, what is the Rock doing there? Promoting your product. Obviously not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive. And who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to. Anyway, CES when it launched, I thought this was impressive. 1967, no precedent. There's not really a tech community. It's sort of new. 17,000 people show up. 200 companies put on exhibitions that Seems like a lot. It's grown. Not even 10x. I mean, this year or in 2024, they had 130,000 attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not, you know, it started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot. But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, Wi, Fi, IoT, all that stuff was like, sort of annoying. Maybe the AI stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in all sorts of different hardware things at the same time. I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI. And I was just shuddering thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because, like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating like a frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing. Samsung had a big announcement last year. Perplexity integration. Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. And again, I just think anytime you're in a situation where you could ask your TV for information, it's probably easier to ask your phone. Yeah, usually. Usually, yeah. And so I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing. We'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched at Sound Effects. It interesting, but I wanted to go into the history of like how the tech conference, like the tech conference that's not linked to a single company, sort of died. And a lot of it goes back to the iPhone, actually. So the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics Show. Like it is the consumer electronics juggernaut. It should have been launched. Most important consumer product ever of the 21st century. Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9, 2007. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by idg, this International Data Group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications. That guy started a magazine, International Data Group. Fantastic. We don't know how to make names like that. Yeah, it's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And he kind of scaled this business. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from Apple, but Apple was like obviously the cornerstone draw to the event. So they'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just like, you know, a phone case, didn't make sense at that time. But like you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals. But launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as ces, it allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing. He was famously like fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly, he wanted certain demos to happen after. And he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at ces. And the big thing is that at ces, journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So with TVs we know like 4K, 8K 3D, not 3D, OLED or refresh rate or number of ports, price point. So they create these charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best. Weird name. It was more performant. Yeah, it beat it on basically everything at the time. He didn't want to go spec to spec. He didn't, he didn't. So The Nokia had 3G already. It had GPS, it allowed for copy pasting of text. It had a front facing camera, it had a 5 megapixels. Like until we can copy and paste, we don't have that power. No, no. The number of features of the Nokia N95 was crazy. It could record videos, the iPhone couldn't record videos. It had a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't think anyone really wants. But you know, it had a bunch of features that if it was just. If you just created a table of iPhone versus Nokia N95, the Nokia beat it on like, you know, 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible and the iPhone sort of had the first good touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web browser, but it didn't even have third party Apps. The Nokia did. And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld, they're not allowed to be here. Best marketer of all time, clearly. And everyone copied him. So very, very quickly. Every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later, started doing WWDC and their own self hosted events, self distributed events. Obviously technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper, you can livestream, you can go to Restream and you can get your event everywhere. So you have Google I O Microsoft build Meta Connect, Samsung unpacked. When Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray Ban displays, he didn't do it at ces. He didn't wait for ces. He was just like, I'm going to have my own event. He did it as his own event. He created his own news cycle and it was like, you know, he had full control over that. And so everyone's followed Jobs playbook and it's been remarkably successful. I don't think it's been a miss. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there and Nvidia unveiled Vera Rubin, their new. Which looks incredible. Yeah. But also it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even Nvidia has their own conferences now, so. And, but my main takeaway is like just like in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore. And truthfully they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the vcr and the cd player and the xbox that's you know, over 25 years old now at this point. Although the Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment, but that is of old at this point. And so still there's plenty to get from a show from ces. It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as like a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch an Apple keynote just to know, hey, should I buy the new iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute or. You'Re in the industry. You go because you're in the industry. Your CEO has got ready to drink in Vegas. Get ready to go. Seriously? Seriously. Anyway, let me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at ces. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write up of CES. Coverage is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course they highlighted Nvidia, the faster artificial intelligence chips. Vera Rubin the CPU GPU combination. Mercedes Benz Nvidia has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes Benz, set to hit US roads in the first three months of this year. The tire of my Mercedes Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work. You've been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the day beginning of the show. And what's happened? I've had three tires blown out on LA roads. I do think I was complaining about. I'm not sure if it was on air or off air, but at least in the last 48 hours I was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads. And of course this morning at 5:35am the tire did not survive a pothole. Anyways. Ridiculous going forward. Amd. The Journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet shares fell more than 2%. However Uber ride hailing company plus EV maker Lucid and Neuro have begun on road testing for their planned robo taxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped five and a half percent. So CES at least announcements are still moving. Yeah, moving the market. There's some other cool stuff. I mean Dell's in here, they're reviving the XPS computer line. But the. They also launched a massive 52 inch monitor or something like that. A 6k monitor. I feel like that could be pretty sick. If you need. If you're monitoring situations, get like six. Yeah, six of these. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. LEGO launched a smart brick and high tech Star wars toys. This was the launch of the year contender. And it's the first week of January, so let's pull it up. If. If video. Watch this. Let's watch for a smart minifigure. And you'll see from the sound and. The color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the minifigure. It knows who that minifigure is and actually it knows where that minifigure is. So as I move the minifigure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the minifigure is compared to the brick. What does this allow us to do? Well, you. More dopamine for children. Let's go, let's go. I think this is good. I remember we turned every LEGO brick into a mini iPad. I remember there were. We're excited to addict your children to Legos. There was some sort of LEGO programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And yeah, Lego Mindstorm. Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing because you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self driving cars, like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that could have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around and it just let you. Ryan says the LEGO Turbo Puffer is going to need a rebuild. Simon, we need to make this a smart LEGO Puffer. Smart Puffer asap. But yeah. So Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. It will make entire LEGO sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more from the Verge. Love it coverage. Very cool. And of course, Boston Dynamics, demo champions of the world. Yeah, they gotta give us these robots. Some 11 labs voices. 11 labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology actually is a real call to action. Let your robots talk. Yeah, with 11 labs, it definitely needs it as a feature. So Boston Dynamics is starting the year strong. They seem to be upset. That figure is valued at roughly one Ford motor company and they're not happy about it. So they're launching. They had a new video of various Boston Dynamics. They should be in de facto Hyundai. Yeah, here they've been doing this for so long, but I don't know. It looks good. How tall is it? 2.3 meters. Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have been really, really small. Just kind of like smaller. Is this. Is this not cgi? I can't even tell at this point. This looks like. Wow. Oh, that was a cool move. The way that it can move. That was a cool move. The way that it stands up is wild too. There's. Yeah, it's standing up. It looks like a spider. And then. Yeah, yeah. Very disconcerting. But that one is crazy. Oh, we saw this from one of the Chinese humanoid. Do you think that. Do you think that maybe one of their first use cases could be gloving? Oh, yeah. That's really trendy. I've been seeing that. Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something. You see that one? Yeah. You saw that? Tyler, you need to start gloving. Yeah. We founder. Anytime a founder raises more than $100 million, you got to say, can I glove for you? Can I glove for you? What is that from like EDM culture or something? I don't know. That's very funny. Sorry. What else is in this? Yeah. The Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Pretty interesting. All the way up to 104. 104. 6Ft 2 inches tall. 104. Feels like that's got a great build. Honestly, 6 to 198 pounds can work in negative 4. What's its mid face ratio? How's it upper maxilla? It's a circle. It's a circle. Okay. Well, perfect. That's a perfect ratio, I guess. Yeah. So apparently Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities. 66 pounds sustained weight capacity. Most people can lift more than that. Come on, we gotta get those numbers up. But yeah, this will be interesting. I wonder what the future of this company's traded hands so many times. It's owned by Hyundai right now. They gotta spin it out, they gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again. They got to launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they want to change the world, they got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Great idea. Should we talk about Jamie Dimon? Let's do it. In the New York Times Today, Jamie Dimon's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers. Is this gong worthy? This is gongworthy. Let's do it first gong. The Trump admin is lifting regulations. Deal making is heating up for Jamie Dimon being JPMorgan Chase's. Chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists. Wait, what talisman? What are you talking about? At just the right time, in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, Mr. Diamond's underlings have crammed in tiny type a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JP Morgan Chase, is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date Back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again, like cryptocurrency. And President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti bribery rules. Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker. But there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and a. As the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows once imperiled real estate loans look steadier thanks to the rebound in. In office work, stocks are levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020 and gold and silver have soared. All of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming. In other words, as analysts at Keefe yet and woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big, big bank stocks rose 29% in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the US stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrow, narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained, but performed considerably considerably less well. So again, I mean a big part of this is banks have just been, you know, obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as, as the p. As the private credit chat. That's true. That's actually true. Yeah. So they're just sitting sort of the. Same thing with like crypto. It's like, like, you know, if there's going to be a, if you're going to have a competitor that's like less, way less regulated. That is a very. That's a huge. And why would I work with JP Morgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial, which Is reinventing financial. Yeah, yeah. Like the whole debanking or not debanking bankless movement and stuff like I don't know that it's been a huge headwind. But no, I think, I think the combination of M and A and private credit that they have just been, you know, private credit is just much more loosely regulated. A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly 770 million for Jamie Dimon. For the chief executives of Citi whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slash tens of thousands of jobs in a years long restructuring and Goldman Sachs shared. Tyler. Tyler. Displacement. You're going to be. No, because we're up 60. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Because the way that you reacted there. Looked a little suspicious obviously for the labor displacement. But this is not AI driven. Of course. Yeah. So anyways they're counting some unrealized gains here of course. But anyways, big, big year for, for Jamie Dimon. Should we pop over to Tuna? Yeah. What's in. Tuna says you're first. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents, baby. That's right. Tuna says your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographics. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah. Pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy. I've been getting. I mean speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one. I bought one too. Give me a review. What'd you think? Haven't played it yet? No. So, so here's the challenge. Yeah. We had less help around the house. Sure. Over the last two weeks and Bored is designed for I think kids like, I think it's like six and up. Like it's not, it's not like a under five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just going to have you know like a one or three year old just like you know, messing with it. It's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it. Yeah. Hopefully this week you guys should play. Live during the show right here. We should. Yeah. The, the review from the four and a half year old was a plus. He loved it. Why'd you Play. We stuck to the more simple games. I think also they're still rolling out some of the games. So it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags and, and some of the pieces that they ship to you. The games haven't actually finished. They haven't finished coding them, I guess, and so they're not live. But we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this like sort of triangle block on the screen and then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these like asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was interesting. It was like it was intuitive enough that the four year old could pick it up and actually get some points. But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. So there was like I, I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a, that it's possible to get 4000 points even though we're averaging like 2500 points now if I really max this out. And we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling is actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there was. I love how you don't, you don't every, like every game anything like that. You're just like, I need to max it out. Oh for sure. I need to max it out. Even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing out the score. Yeah, I told it's a good. At one point I had the highest score in Robo Recall in the world. Okay. So apparently. So Mike on our team says my 3 year old nephew loves the weird alien dog game. Is that the one? Apparently this is. Apparently it is suited for three year olds and I need to get into. It is the weird alien dog one where it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that one's really fun. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like you're supposed to check on it every day and it comes in from the house, it's all dirty. So you wash it off, you soap it up, scrub it and you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can and you put the watering can on the screen of the board and when you do it sort of showers the pet and then it washes it off. Yeah. So I think that's. That Mechanic was really fun too. For board to sell a million units, they need like a super, super viral individual game. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's going to. It won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. Yeah. They need a breakout is a hits business. Right. So they need, they need like a catan. Yeah. Like they're going to be. People are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done. And the mechanics, you could play them again. There's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that also there just aren't that many pieces. Like there's. Most of the games have like six pieces, there's 10 pieces. And so if you had resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally like counted, which might be nice actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it actually gets overwhelming and annoying. I don't know. But let me tell you about Vibe Co, because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming tv, because Vibe Co is where DTC brands. You mean bored these startups? Oh, yeah, bored AI companies advertise on streaming tv, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. That should be their next place to advertise. I like it. And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographic and pay more attention to the personal ads. They need to let them float. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says a week ago, Dwarkesh and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality. As the Financial Times kindly put it, that was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in, buckle up. Welcome to the dive bar. Yeah, but it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people, people who did not read it at all and just like seeing another person. Another reason to tax the rich. That's funny, I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they like Dwarkesh, right? And they're like, oh, cool, new door cash thing. I'm a fan. But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly also. I mean, this was a I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole like Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like the whole wealth tax thing that was going on in California, and they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in the Zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very. It's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says he's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone. Or at least tried to. He says, and before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. The leading AI trust management platform is Vanta, so they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods and services are gross complements for capital provided ones. Quote in our utility functions what Nordhaus 2021 might call on the demand side. And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people people can what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. Funnily enough, on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is underappreciated, but then makes a case for why I think on balance, it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame just give me a month. But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post exploring the case against long run gross common Complementarity on the on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because 1 Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board already 2 Nord House and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or grow substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non IT goods. For capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine. Of course we're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways. And I think it is a very far future. But it is one interesting to think about. Maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize if people haven't read it kind of key fact. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So key factors. They talk about privatization of returns. So like very, very hard to get exposure to xai right now if you're just a normal person. 2 Most people have their wealth in their home, right? And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation. Right. So if you have a home, I think they said if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get like you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe, maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just land somewhere else in the US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international sort of catch up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital, they would turn that and they would create cheap labor work. Yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then they talk about wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging, aging out effectively. So we'll see, we'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought this post from Tomas Barjar? Tor was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post, Tomas says both Dwarkesh and his critics imagine an absurd world. Think of the future they argue about. Political economy doesn't change rapidly even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be the thousands of times will be thousands of times faster. Not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world, even if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different. So we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy question mark. What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy? In an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children. What sort of children? Copies of your brain state are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created, things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe? But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving? Exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, the ccp? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by Wealth? To OpenAI stockholders? To Sama? To the Coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on to the coding agent who implements it? Tax policy, question mark. Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions? How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure. Given how easy humans are to scam, there's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own check notes. A whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now. Wow, isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies? That's bad. Space opera. Treat the future with the respect of it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so Crazy that we won't have any. The institutions just break. The way that the world currently works breaks. The thing with, I was thinking about with, if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares in this sort of fast takeoff scenario, maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares. Right. But is a super intelligence going to say, oh, yes, I would like to buy some OpenAI shares. Right. Or would they just buy them all or just, just rebuilt, you know, effectively just re, you know, so, so this. I, I think it's in any type of these, in any type of like, fast takeoff scenario. How do you actually, it's hard to have. I, I think, I think the I, I, I, I love, you know, reading. I love reading this essay. I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to. Any scenario you can imagine, they're 50. There's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply. Yeah, yeah. I wonder. The. 22Nd century thing is, it does. I mean, you keep coming back to like this idea of fast takeoff. And it feels like even in some sort of like, slow progress, like if you just extrapolate, like the default trend lines and nothing really changes. Like, you still see a of lot, A lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting, an interesting interpretation of this, saying that he said, this gets at what I found the most frustrating. What was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view, the core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition. It just happened to be negative. And he basically said that you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same in that they are still bothered by wealth inequality, because in this scenario there's abundance and there's enough. Robots can just create everything so you have unlimited everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective. But you're still buying by the fact that like, that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies. Yeah, it's not right. And that, yeah, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced. And that's, and it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart. And so it takes you a million years to get there. And it's like, and maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos go to bed. Sadder if they found aliens, like, a million light years away. Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we are actually sitting on an entire planet of diamond. And we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay. Those aliens that are over there, I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like, how much is it. How much is wealth inequality a direct focus on, like, the keeping up with the Joneses? Like, the neighbor effect, the direct mimetics of, like, the person that you see as your is your equal. But I don't know. But he. Ben Thompson kind of returns to this. This idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans, and they don't see any value in that. And so because he's making the point that he quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of late Night with Conan, and he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. You've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technical. Yeah, let me send it to the team and see if we can drop this. So he says, Louis CK Focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted. Smartphones, Internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to. In just the last 72 hours, I have chafed at slow airplane wi fi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe. He went to Taiwan and back and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery. It is also terrible until I remember I have access to everything, Anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime, and, oh, yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's a very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots. Clanging on the sides. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. Do you realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone? And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy, why don't we? And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring. Lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for, like three hours. You had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you'd just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole shunk chunk and he'd write, he'd have to call the president to see if he had any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, ugh. It won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light truth? I was on a. I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exactly exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. It's I'm in an Airplane, 2008. And then it breaks. And they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes, Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror Story. It's they act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound, right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? United contributing zero that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God, Wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on. All right, pause it, pause it. This reminded me a couple days ago. Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid 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, great stuff, John. A couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not been sleeping super well. Toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and then they stop sleeping well. And with my 3 year old, we hired a. When he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my 3 year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer, blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. It's a lifesaver. But with the one and a half year old, a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just breaks down exactly what's happening, gets the answer. And it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours, the problem was totally solved. Like back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, basically one shot at it. Then I was just thinking how OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically, Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, we're going to solve this. You're going to have a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people, you know, hammer him because it's like, well, then we're doing SORA and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that. But it's actually like AI is actually already delivering on this sort of do. You remember the Fallon clip that, where that went viral, where, where Fallon asks him like, are you. Do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? He was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like, it is, it is helpful and yeah, it is. It is a weird thing, but it's. It's this when technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of like back in 1965, planes used to be so nice and now you're stuffed in the back like cattle. You know these photos where like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger flights, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total across everything is the same number, almost exactly the same number as total first class flights in 2025. And so basically anyone who could fly in 1965 is now flying first class. And then you added there's 10 times as many non first class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class. Different product. But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class because it was really expensive, it got cheaper, but all the rich people stayed in first class. And then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people and that just continues. But it's this weird thing because that doesn't feel satisfying because you see the people up in first class and you're like, I want to be up there. Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out. But first, let me tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average vive coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build prototypes. John, you always have this critique of the coding models and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone. Because the United app is so bad. Yes, yes, yes. You always have this. Yes, yes, yes. And then so there's this post, it's in the timeline. It's someone there say, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is. Oh, no way. Yeah, because it works well and they're just like glazing it. Yeah, I talked to Roon about this as well because I brought that up when I was talking to him and he was like, kind of stumped. And then I talked to him again and he was like, actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. So I think that you're right and it's a good point that the software, the quality of the software is incredible. And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably better than I'm giving it credit for. I'm probably just remembering bugs from years ago and I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple tv, it's a great product. I love the Apple tv. Plug it into your tv. Works really well. Are you talking about the Apple tv. The physical device on the Apple tv? Physical device, yes. We're going. Here is an app called Apple tv and they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple tv, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix or hbo, you can go there, but by default it now ships with the home button, goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount plus that will be integrated in there, and it's a great universal interface. At least it should be a universal interface. Except Netflix said, we're not participating. We want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that like no amount of vibe coding. It's not a coding issue, it's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition and so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better, like profits for both companies. And it's a rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of like, Claude code that can solve for that. So. So my take now has evolved to. Be that, why don't you move the goalposts? I will move the goalposts. Move the goalposts. I gotta move the goalpost. Because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app. And then it will be AGI. Then it will be AGI because it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back when they started the show. Business model problems are enduring and Ben Thompson makes the case that there are human conditions. There are human elements that will be enduring even in a post Software only. Singularity I had some. There was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at fai. Oh, he said I was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP, economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI given. I believe we'll get fully automated AI R&D by 2029, he said. Here's my response via quick email Reply Re GDP I think we'll get a higher trend TFP level growth rate as past general purpose technologies. This will be a new higher growth regime 5 to 10% but not hyperbolic exponential growth. So not with the Elon triple digit. Yeah. Real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal and regulatory regimes, supply chains Human in the loop we will still see a digifoom software singularity, but this will feel more disinflationary than anything that is mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated, but a lot will still remain given human rents, social relationships, liberty status and demand side factors. People liking other people. Science. Yeah. Big question for me this year anthropic is they have created the drop in software engineer with Claude code. It's clearly working and it's changing that industry today. Their goal for 2026 is clearly like the drop in replacement. Like what is the cloud code for every other industry and it'll be very interesting to see if we see if we see Progress in AI SDRs because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships like getting to know people and it's been a much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some. You know, you checked in this code, it worked. So you're. So you get paid. Yeah. It's not just hitting the right keystrokes in the right order. Yeah. Any good SDR will tell you like it's not actually about the emails that you send. That's just one piece of the puzzle anyway. So he says science and R and D will speed up dramatically, but these also will have delayed GDP effects given production cycles and the fact that a lot of fast diffusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life, I. E. GLP1s without necessarily boosting GDP. I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid late 2000s before entering another even higher growth regime greater than 10%. As robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes, fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output. This is also when you start to see the bommel effects start forcing adoption in areas that may Otherwise be resistant. For example, we get RoboCop and Robo nurses because the human cops and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff but thought that was just kind of relevant from a timeline standpoint when you're trying to understand capital in the 22nd century. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding to close out what Ben Thompson is talking about here, he says when he was a child growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said, I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world. But my perspective. But from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder, and it even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me. Social media, or more accurately, user generated content feeds, which are increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic. All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets or on beaches or at fancy restaurants, living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment. Never mind that this means that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomprehensible to the richest person in the world 50 years ago. To put it another way, what Louis CK identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis. But the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire quadrillionaire aliens. We'Re all it's going to be brutal. It's just like, oh there's an alien out there with a with a two mile long yacht and a and a plane that holds 700. Their yacht is actually an asteroid. Yeah, he has so much chrome hearts. Yeah, and he has piles of chrome hearts everywhere. Truly. Truly. He never wears the same pair of chrome jeans twice. Never. Never. One more post from Boaz Barak. He's over at probably mispronouncing his name. He's over at OpenAI. He wrote a post on Less Wrong on New Year's Eve. Yeah, he said. What's that? I mean, a white belt title certainly. Yeah, the title of the essay is you will be okay, he said. Seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring and knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks. As a general planner you should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability x of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the 1x fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non trivial probability of total nuclear war and they still went about their lives. Even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes, it is best to follow some common sense best practices. But then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades. My own expectation is that, as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time, rather just like we call recessions after we are already in them we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively, six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones, would be needed for at least several decades, if not more. Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this, like this. You have two months to escape the permanent two years. It's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to become rich in two months is gonna make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head. And still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon. Maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire. But think on three five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically and physically. However, I expect that, like the Industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is, I was thinking here, people have been kind of asking like, hey, why, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs? You know, people are like, I actually like, I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that. I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Do we really need to automate this? Continuing us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible. We will cure diseases and poverty. And yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2000s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill you've had that thrill in the tenderloin back in the day on a, on a YC budget. I'm just thinking, if they, if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just, it's so over. For the gravediggers. Yep. For the morticians, the coroners, anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately cooked. They're out of a job. They'll have to find something new to do. But I'm optimistic that they will find a new job. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon, I get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Speaking of da use, do you think OpenAI is going to buy Pinterest? Where is this coming from? Came from the information. They made a list of predictions that. We went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. This was just one of them. But it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document. It was just a prediction. But do you think that that would make sense, this idea that, you know, Sora was sort of, you know, supposed to be a social network? It's SA. Avenue in 2025. Okay. I just, I just don't, I just don't know what they're really. I just don't know what they're really buying here. But the CEO's name is Bill Reddy. So the nominative determinism would be that he's ready to do, ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from 1 to 2%. And the founder Ben Silberman is in Silver has been mooning and they have similar, similar names. So maybe Pinterest will moon. This is the level of analysis you can only get here, folks. Let's go through this Rittenhouse research post about OpenAI's business. But first let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Sam Altman December 18th. Right before the break, he says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI strategic position, its plan to build memory into ChatGPT, which is already ongoing, its enterprise play compute AI devices, and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse Work Research breaks it down and says the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI Enterprise is growing faster than consumer companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts. So apparently, apparently right. Right when. Right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down. No way. Okay. Technology is like nap, actually, you're not. OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity. Enterprises coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens which OpenAI can't provide yet. Rapid growth in Inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line. If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their $1.4 trillion of commitments. Have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. 1.4 trillion of commitments takes place over a number of years. We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always, always penciled in because there was a gradient from like this is a press release, this is a handshake deal, this is still being papered, this is contingent on milestones or there's some flexibility here. But it, but it kind of got all lumped together and mentally people were just putting it on OpenAI's balance sheet as liability, when in fact there was some flexibility there all along. While the 1.4 trillion of spending commitments is of course absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview. That's great. What a comeback. I mean, people were really, really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG2. It feels like his appearance on the big technology podcast is sort of a return to form resetting of the narrative. And he clearly like thought about how to peel back the onion of the 1.4 trillion commitment. So Rittenhouse closes by saying, if you assume they raise $75 billion in one last private round, 25% haircut to the rumored 100 billion and another 75 billion in an IPO. That's so much money, the model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive. So they can do it, they can get out and there is enough. So I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. He said he found the POD a little too spoon fed and not very info dense. Interesting. I don't know. I'll have to give it a listen. But first I will have to tell you about linear. LINEAR is the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. The product planning tool behind OpenAI. Oh yes. Should we take it over to Jocko? Yeah, Jocko. Jocko, one of the Greatest podcast capitalists maybe, right? Apparently I didn't even know he had this brand. Origin Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So many products made gear. Apparently somebody is a. Somebody in the government is a. Is a jocko supporter because they threw Maduro in some origin looking sharp. Got him out of the Nike tech. It's called Origin built by Freedom Hoodie on Maduro. We got to get Maduro on some TVPN merch. I think we absolutely do not have to do that. Yeah, that's ridiculous. But yeah. Silence into these photos. There's a whole bunch of. I guess he was transferred and he made the COVID of the Wall Street Journal again. It was interesting. Says I am. He says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty. I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got him themselves. We of course, I feel like we. Deserve a small slice for promoting the reward. We did, we did, we did do a promoted post for the capture Maduro back in Q1 of last year. But. But yeah, I ultimately think the Delta gets all the credit. Maybe the dea, they do. Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in U.S. federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by US Forces over the weekend. I am innocent, he said. I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delsey Rodriguez, was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delsey Rodriguez is picked by Maduro. So should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much he'll be cooperating with the United States. Security officers were out in force in caucus, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests in Manhattan Monday. Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a US Court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial. So Chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of Ronaldo, not because of somebody's got F1 sponsorship. Yeah, maybe. Maybe the Lewis Hamilton. The Lewis Hamilton helmet sponsorship. Honestly, massive props to perplexity. That is a remarkable one. Because apparently the, the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves or something like that. And so when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has a perplexity logo right on his helmet that I guess he was able to sell directly and it didn't go through the team or something. So he gets to keep all of that money or something. That's a crazy. It seemed like an interesting, interesting. He had, he had some leverage there. I wonder. The chat is going off saying, good. You know the jocko. Oh yeah. Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror from the clink? Got captured by U.S. delta Force. Good, good. Wearing his origin. Arrested. Arrested on drug trafficking charges. Good. More inspiration to grind harder. Time to lock in. More. More. It's an opportunity to learn about the U.S. legal system. You're going to learn a lot. Anyway, Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to Fin AI. We have a surprise guest joining us. Casey Newton from Platformer dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing, Casey? Welcome. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Hey. Long time, first time. Nice to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on on short notice. What a moment. So great to have you. Absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. I was riveted reading it. Thank you so much for the hard work. The scoop hall of fame scoop. Hall of fame, I think. I don't even know if this is. A scoop of scoop. This is more investigative journalism. This is peeling back the onion. I don't know. It was great. But. But how did you. Did you see this go out on social media? Were you on Reddit? Like, how did you encounter this story first? That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying, like, look how evil the food delivery companies are. And you know, I was like a few days from having to come back and write a column again, and I thought, hey, maybe this turns into a skip for me. So I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart. But then it was actually my boyfriend who said people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart. I think he was right about. So what was the process like to actually dig into it? What was your interpretation? Because we read the Reddit post, I saw the screenshot and I was kind of like. And people were going back and forth, is it AI generated, blah, blah, blah. It didn't feel AI generated to me, but there were some red flags in there. Like being drunk at a library seemed weird. And he said something. There was some other element in there that was, like, very, very odd to me. I forget exactly what he said, but. Some people are, like, pointing out the EM dashes that.

Has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip. We may be going back to that, by the way, but in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like, oh, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank when it was open for, like, three hours, you had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things. That's it. Yeah, that was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole chunk. Chunk. And he'd write. He'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the. On the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, it won't give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light truth? I was on an airplane, and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet. And it's fast. And I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane, 2018. And then it breaks down and they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like, how quickly the world owes him something. Yes. He Knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on. Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. It's. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right? They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the Runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight? You 9 contributing 0 that you got to fly. You're flying. It's amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh, my God, Wow. Yes, you're flying. He wants to bring back clapping. Clapping on. Yeah, all right, pause it, pause it. Yeah, I did. I. This reminded me.