NEWSMAX

Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even know I was doing it, but okay. Yeah. I do agree with you, though, John. There is something about looking a little older. Yeah, people take you serious.

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With your personal AI Engineering team. So there we go. Elon Musk says that Xai will have more AI Compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building Macro hard, which now has.

Your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So there we go. Elon Musk says that Xai will have more AI Compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building Macro hard, which now has a A.

I see a larger pier on the horizon. You're surrounded by journal for your position. Overnight success.

Synergistically when it's done right. Is there something that they're maybe less disparate when they're done? Well, yeah, for sure. And I would actually put it more on the other end, which is like, you definitely go to events that are not journalistic and that are fundamentally kind of promotional. And the interview is often like the chief marketing officer of company A is interviewing the chief marketing officer Company B. And the thing is, like, journalism, like, and tough interviews bringing a kind of tension and drama and interest. And you lean forward. And the. Deal book this year was amazing. It was just like, it may as well have been a pay per view boxing fight in some of them. And it was amazing content. It was great content. It was so good. Yeah. And people want to watch, you know, like, us well informed interviewer. And again, like, whether they're a journalist or not, actually, they, like, professionally, like, ask the hard questions. So the thing is, like, smart CEOs would also rather be asked hard questions than sit on stage for an hour and, like, recite monologues that they memorized. Yeah, I want to watch a serious journalist ask a public official a hard question and have that public official turn around and call them a papa.

And again, like, relevant as you get increased rate of change. What's your thing on inevitable? Yeah, yeah, I think you. I think there's a few things. So, yes, I think. And I think Pat and I agree on a bunch of this too, but I think one, you want things that are early and inevitable, Right. Like, I think that there are things that when you see them, they're like, well, that definitely is going to happen. And just to, like, go back in time. I think, you know, when I joined Instacart in 2015, this idea of, like, are people really going to shop for their groceries in 100 years the way they shop for them 80 years ago? Like, it certainly doesn't seem like we will do that. You know, this is inevitable, that it will go and it'd be different. I think that to your point, it is harder to figure out what things are inevitable right now because the world is changing super fast. So I think, one, you got to be, like, more limited in that, right. Of, you know, what are the. What are the industries that will be durable? I think the. There are two things I would tell you to answer your question, though. One. One, I think network effects are still potentially even more powerful than they've ever been, which is, I think if you get a company with a network effect and you execute with excellence and speed, I think you can keep going and build it even up more. And you don't never want to predict what the AIs are not going to be able to do. But I think it would be hard to say, press this button, cloud code, and create a network effect of highly fragmented buyers and sellers. And so I do think network effects can endure. And then I think the biggest thing is the people, which is you need the people that you will trust to go and face these realities. And it's the same way, honestly. Like, I know I got called Unk on Twitter today, but I'm going to go with this, dude. It's the same way with your kids, which is you want to prep them for every possible situation that's ever going to happen in their life, but the reality is you can't. And all you can do is make sure that they're actually good at reacting to tough things as a general matter. And that's the same thing. I think that in a value system. Yeah, yeah. What's the changes we're going to see? What you want is to trust that the people you have are good at responding to those things with truth seeking, with agency, with aggression. And I know on that dimension, I know Pat and I agree. There's also, there's a Jamie Dimon line which is it's easier for me to predict the next 10 years than it is for me to predict the next quarter. And part of what goes into that is the forces that shape the next 10 years are kind of so big and so obvious that you can actually make, in some ways, higher fidelity predictions over a longer period of time. And I think similarly with our business, if you look at like, for example, can you imagine a version of the future in which doctors aren't using all of the world's medical knowledge on an application in their pocket to make better decisions at the point of care? Of course not. Like, of course that's going to be a thing. And like, there happens to be a company, open Evidence that is doing that today for a decent chunk of the doctors in the country. But, like, obviously that's going to be a thing. Or by 2050, are people going to drive cars in 2050? I have a hard time believing they will. Like, it's going to be the way people ride horses today. Like, you might do it as a novelty, but it's not going to be the way you get to and from point A and point B. And so there are some things where you just know that it's inevitable. And it's a question of, okay, well, what's the path from here to there, and who is it that blazes that path? And that's where it can be tricky. And I think that's where Ravi's commentary on the people really come in. Because one trap that easy to fall into is theorizing on market structure and different technical approaches. And the reality is, if you can figure out the best people, they're going to figure all that stuff out. They'll figure out the right technical approach and the right business model and all that stuff. If you just figure out the right people, they'll probably find the path. I think one challenge right now for founders that are trying to navigate the world is.

The organization. Outside of what people think of from like a classic VC partnership, what else are, what else is going on at Sequoia? Yeah, I mean, you know what's funny, guys? I think people would be surprised at how small Sequoia is. You know, like the, I mean we, I think we barely have double digit general partners in the business. Right. The entire firm is pretty small. And so I would tell you this, and I mean this sincerely, like, I think people tend to overestimate like surface area. Right. Of what we have in terms of like management scope. And realistically, the most important thing is that the stewards are awesome investors and people that great people want to work with. You know, and so the thing, I didn't say that's what you guys were. I said that's like an important thing for you guys. That's the idea. That's like the, that's the standard now, now we'll talk about it. Yeah, that's what they're supposed to be. No, but obviously, like, so truly, like, I would tell you the thing that's most important for these guys is to be great investors. Yeah. It is to sponsor investments in the best companies and to continue that because like Sequoia's entire thing needs to be that we back the best companies in the world. Right. And if we keep doing that, everything else kind of follows. If we don't. You could be the best manager ever. Yeah, it's like a GP or a steward that's not investing is like a CEO with bad product sense. It's like.

Missing. Or maybe it'd be impossible. I don't know. Yeah. What do you think? Oh, I, I, I agree with you. I think we, we are missing that person. I think Pat and I are both in the meeting yesterday, though, that this kind of reminds me of, and I will share it on his behalf. But, like, Alfred shared a story the other day yesterday about his dad. Okay. And I think it is pretty instructive in terms of this thing. So Alfred's dad, I don't think this is going to surprise you, was a pretty brilliant guy, right? But what his job was was to be a human, human calculator, okay? Like, literally, like, sit in a row, like, do math. Like, you know, be a cell in Excel, right? And just be a human calculator. And at some point, what technology allowed was for him to not have that job anymore, right? And someone with this giant brain and this ability to produce and help society could all of a sudden not do math and put numbers into one cell anymore, and he could have way more impact and build an accounting system for the company that he worked with. And all of a sudden, all those other people who have huge brains, right, could go do that because of technology. And he made this point, which is like, look, technology is neither good nor bad. It's what we do with it, right? The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant, right? And so the idea, it's like, what do we do with it? What do we do with it? What do we do with it? I do think that a lot of what people are doing when they go and talk about the technology is they talk about all the things that might happen. I would rather us talk about the fact of it's going to get more and more and more powerful, and it's more and more incumbent on all of us to make sure we use it for something. That's great. And I actually, genuinely believe that. Like, I've written about this before, but, like, you know, if I could give my kids one thing, it wouldn't be kindness. It wouldn't be curiosity. It'd be agency. And this is that same point, which is like, listen, the technology is going to be what all of us make of it, you know? And I think Alfred's point sat with me, which is, like, he talks about his dad being able to do more with his life so that his son could do more with his life. And a lot of that's due to technology. Like, there's nothing better than that. Yeah, well, that's a great place to wrap it thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And congratulations on the.

Being a partner for a while. But how do you. How do you. Do you think that. Do you expect valuations to actually trade down at any point? Could we be at a. At. At somewhat of a local top, top? I think at some point we. It has to max out. Right? Like, some of the valuations seem almost insane to me. Mercedes, just the team itself. Six billion is what it's right around. McLaren four, four and a half. Ferrari is a little bit different. They've got this, a global brand. They're a little over six and a half billion. And even at the bottom of the grid, you're still looking at 2 billion. I remember Zach Brown, CEO of McLaren, had said, and I actually had a conversation with him in Vegas, but he had said, 2024, 2023. Maybe it was at one point, all of the teams will be valued at $1 billion. And we all thought that was like, no way. This is like, like, are you kidding me? And here we are, not even a full two years later, and every team is. Has a valuation of roughly, you know, 2 billion. Of course, there's private equity now investing. You've got some big, you know, bigger players that want to put money into these teams. And so valuations just shoot up. I think has to cap somewhere. I don't know where that cap is. I have said 10 billion. I thought it was like absolute max, but I think. I think even that might be ridiculous. But, you know, yeah, I know that if I say that now, then in two years, when. But the average of the average net new investor, are they really going into this expecting a return or do they want to be an owner of a Formula One team? They want to be the owner of Formula. I mean, it. It's cool. You can't put a price on cool. You can't put a price on being in the suite. Like you said, it's a tech conference. It's who's who. It's who. Who can I be seen around? Look at all the celebrities that show up. Look at all the major, you know, tech companies or all the player. All the network. It's. It's a level of networking you can't really put a price on. And that's what you're buying into. You're buying into the opportunity to entertain your clients, entertain your friends, entertain other executives to be seen as well. I'm the CEO or I'm the founder, whatever it is, I'm the boss. There's so many levels to it. You know, our friends at Public who we went to Vegas with are.

Racing, but still trying to work out who they want to be. And so there's. There's increase in popularity in F1 in America. Actually hurt Indie. Indie car. Because it feels like some potential overlap or is it kind of a Rising Tide lifts all boats? I think it's actually so I think it is. There is a lev. An aspect of Rising Tide is raised all boats, but it's also hardened the die hards like they are. The IndyCar diehards I feel like, have come out more now because they're like, we don't want to be run over, taken over by this European thing, this Formula One, which is the actual conversations that happen. I mean, it's. It's kind of funny, but so IndyCars is seen it. But what no one has been able to figure out that Formula one did was the content aspect. Drive to Survive was one of many, many things that they've done behind the scenes. Right. ESPN didn't get enough credit for the growth. Everyone said, oh, Netflix, drive to survive effect all of that. I mean, including myself at one point it was like, wow, this Netflix thing is really. This is what's causing all of this. But it wasn't. ESPN did put a lot into it. And so I would say that you have seen a lot of Rising Tide, but no one's figured out the content aspect. It's for whatever reason. It's like not for whatever reason. I know. We know what the reasons are. Formula one is just the attractive. It's the flavor of the day, month, year right now, maybe the next couple years. But it's sexy, right? It's European. So if you want an audience, it's global. Let's not say it's not just European, it's global. Yeah. It's a travel show in addition to being a race, in addition to being a reality TV show, in addition to being a dating show show. It. It sort of scratches every itch so a household can sit down and everyone in the family and yeah, the business. The business. I always appreciated the. The business side, seeing how the owners were kind of processing. Yeah. Being in. Being in that understanding that dynamic where you have this like, desperation to win. You badly want to win. And then every single decision that you're making throughout a season is like, okay, how much, like, technically, you know, how much do I want? How badly do you want to win? How much do you want to actually spend? How much do you like how. How much are you willing to personally invest? So that happening at the owner level and the athlete level and at one. Point it was, you know, it was whoever could just keep spending. Right now we have the.

Dried January dried sauce. Colin Frazier says, I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis. This is an interesting take. And I could see this being actually what's happening, right. Typically if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off the ledge or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, et cetera. But an LLM's just like, I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's. Let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your. I had a friend in high school that was going through this and he thought that deers were. Deers were like gang stalking him. Yes, yes, actually. And so he started telling the bottom of that. He started talking with people about that and they were like, let's figure this out and let's go hunting. He's back. He's fully, fully recovered. I feel like a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in that scenario. Super. Just reclaim the authority. And then you, you know who's in the driver's seat, you're like, yeah, they might be stalking me, but they don't. They should not be. The whole house is like, deer's mounted like trophies. Or that might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things. Deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad. So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from. Or smartphone penetration, it went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 20, 2015 or something. And basically everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them and you get all that and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients and you get all the good. But then also all the crazy people are using them and everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. And so you really need to look at the Bayesian crime. If grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere, you'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stor and people would be like, well, our grocery stores making people go insane, right? They'd be like, we're seeing all this where there's all this evidence that people are going insane and, you know, acting insane in grocery stores, it must be that grocery stores are causing. So you have to look at like the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the, what's the, what's the incidence of psychosis with LLMs? Is it higher then you have a problem? Is it? And I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that some of the models were sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything. Like the Glaze gate was a real problem. They sort of fixed it. It seems like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no? And that's like a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down. And also just some of the newer models that I've been interacting with, they do push back, they hallucinate even less. They just, they feel like way. There's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown. Like, there used to be a time when you could go and say, explain to me the definition of the time. Old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day, keeps the Doctor away. And it was nonsense. But the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the user. People started saying this, People started to. Say, saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing, so I have to make up a definition and they would just make up a definition. But now I've seen screenshots where people have come to it with these weird tests and the models will actually say, ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real and that doesn't exist. And you should, if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something. Anyway, Railway says correlation is not causation. Yes, yes, yes, Railway.

Extra. Uav online. Glaze. Double glaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five cup. Wrong. Wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll, right? Market clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists holding. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go retriever rock. Market clearing order inbounder. You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress. Of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp time is money, say both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some great posts from Ara Kharazian in the stack today. He's been doing some fantastic analysis on the economy, employment, AI adoption, all this fun stuff. But speaking of AI adoption, is anyone adopting XAI? Certainly investors are because they got $20 billion in the bank. Now, seriously, we talked about it yesterday, but I wanted to reflect on it because there were rumors that they weren't going to get this one done, that the initial back in November. A little more. Yeah, a little. A little kind of trouble getting enough interest. And again, these were just rumors. But when you looked at xai's traction relative to their valuation at the time, they were looking for a greater valuation than anthropic. And yet the enterprise adoption certainly didn't justify it by itself. Yeah, there were lots of weird questions. Before we dig into xai, let's take you through the linear lineup today. We got a bunch of great guests. We got Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta from Sequoia coming on. Ben smith's back with $30 million for semaphore. Massive news there. We got a bunch of other folks joining linear, of course. Meet the System for modern Software Development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. So the rumor back in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that XAI was out raising 15 billion in new equity at a $230 billion valuation. And people were skeptical. XAI had accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. No one would argue with that. They definitely caught up. The benchmarks were good, the data centers were massive and they were being completed in record time. That's what Elon's really, really good at. But there was a big question about the product and where it was going. It had some useful hooks and some extremely controversial hallucinations. Right. But in general, like I did find myself using Grok certainly monthly, probably weekly. I would just hit the little Grok button on a post and get some extra details and then just be chatting There because I didn't want to copy the post and go over to some other LLM and ask about it. So, like, they were getting some adoption, but. And even in the last 48 hours, Grok has gone a little bit off the rails. But the thing is, you have millions of people that are trying to manipulate it into doing things. It does have guardrails. But grok's challenge is that you can ask it to create images. And certainly again, some of these images have been pretty wild and have gotten deleted pretty quickly. But it is fully automated system and I believe if any other lab had a bot that was doing this, it would be happening to all the other labs. Right. So this is a thing that. I don't think it's a GROK problem as much as it is just the nature of the product experience, which is you can just prompt it via comments and it's all public. And it actually gets. Yeah, it's just crazy to see a lab posting images like that from their own official account. If we had sat down and done, like, prediction, what lab's going to be in hot water for controversial AI content in January, we both would have agreed. OpenAI adult mode. It's coming out. They teased it, we said it was coming out. And then we get this and it makes. Whatever erotica is going to come out of OpenAI is probably not going to be as controversial as what's happening with GROK right now. Right. I don't know. And. And people will be less likely to even share image, you know, one OpenAI won't like. Part of the reason these images are especially controversial is because it's being shared from the official GROK account. From the official GROK account, which gives it more authority. And then also there's a whole host of anons on X that can generate this stuff. Whereas if I go into OpenAI ChatGPT and I generate some weird and you jailbreak it. You're weird. You're weird. That's on you. Yeah, you're racist. You seem racist. Exactly. Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. You know, I love talking about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So even though GROK and XAI hit a bunch of interesting milestones, did a bunch of great stuff, they didn't really have a breakout in consumer the way ChatGPT and Gemini did. And they weren't making waves with developers the way Claude Code or Cursor were either. And all of that made the rumors of a struggle to raise more believable. But I have this thesis the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. Elon has posted this many times, he clearly believes it and he's manifesting it and it seems to be the most ridiculous vibes based analysis that actually comes true again and again and again. So I wanted to go through some of the some of the hilarious, entertaining outcomes that have arisen from Elon Musk's tour de force over the past decades. So I think a lot of people believe that maybe this raise wouldn't happen. But once there were rumors that they get rolled in SpaceX, you get SpaceX stock that there would be some sort of other thing and just Elon going to make make a play that it would get done. And so instead, you know, we are going to be endlessly entertained by the assembly of the ever larger Elon Inc. Megacorp in my opinion. So Xai, winning the AI race feels like the wrong framing here. I like Dan Wong's formulation of the AI future versus the AI race. There's not some definite point in the future where, oh, the consumer chatbot race is over. It's like you can always build a business and figure out how to grow and scale and the same thing might be true on the API side and on the cloud side and that might wind up just being a economic equation. And if you have the cheapest possible energy from space, maybe in the future it could make sense. Even if you're not in the most frontier model, there's some interesting thing there. There's certainly plenty of bull cases. So Elon has a long history of making wild calls that immediately read as dumb or impossible, mostly because he puts very short timelines on everything. And then he also tends to get pricing wrong sometimes, but they never actually blow up. Or I mean sometimes they do, but rarely they do. So even in the SolarCity acquisition. I was looking back on this SolarCity acquisition. It was widely panned as a bailout. When it happened, the shareholders, Tesla shareholders, were not a fan because it was this Elon Musk company that didn't seem to be doing very well. It gets tucked in and everyone was like, oh well, SolarCity, like the residential solar, hasn't really taken off. SolarCity is a failure. But Tesla actually built a real powerwall and grid scale storage business and a lot of the battery technology sort of did come from that team. So that oddly penciled out. And also just in the long term. Elon still a Solar Maxi. I was listening to him on on a podcast yesterday. He sat down with Peter diamandis for a 3 hour really wide ranging conversation. And in there he, he can quote all these obscure statistics about the sun generating 99% of the mass in the galaxy. And even if you burnt Jupiter and then burnt three more Jupiters, you still would not even be at 1% of the overall energy that the sun produces. So he clearly, just from first principles, believes in solar, believes in energy. And so having a solar strategy makes sense even if it's not playing a huge role right now. So no one delivers more entertaining outcomes than Elon. No one delivers more entertaining, emotional, real time, intelligent conversational agents than eleven Labs. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs, the maker of our theme song, which we've been enjoying. So throwing out $420 per share for a theoretical take private of Tesla, then getting sued by the SEC and then blowing past that price is still one of the most entertaining corporate finance sagas in tech history. So in 2018, when Elon pitched the funding secured take private, I think we've sort of forgotten because a lot of our audience doesn't think in stock prices like the scale of that, of like what he was trying to do at that time. So at that time Tesla was worth $64 billion and he was proposing to take it private at $71 billion. It's worth 1.44 trillion today. So the stock is up 22x since that is. So like, I don't know if it would have been a great, probably would have been an amazing deal for those investors, but maybe those investors, I don't even know who was lined up because he said funding secured. Presumably someone was like, yeah, I'm good for the 71 billion roughly, or part of it, or there'll be bank financing or something. But that didn't happen. Obviously Tesla went on a huge run. Who knows what it would have done in the private markets, but still, it seemed super crazy at the time, but in fact it panned out very well. And so the most entertaining outcome of this fundraise was clearly that XAI would get the deal done. And they did that and they upsized the round because they got 20 billion when they were rumored to be raising 15 in Series A funding. And interestingly, that's almost twice the amount of money that SpaceX has raised in its entire history, lifetime. So SpaceX has done 31 funding rounds. A lot of those have been secondary transactions, but 31 funding rounds to raise 12 billion. XAI just goes out and raises 20 in one round. And so there's an interesting Dynamic if they get rolled together about what the balance sheet of this new entity looks like, because they'll have this new 20 billion. But then SpaceX also put 2 billion into the previous round. So there's all this like circular deal going on. But people are used to this with Elon, it's Elon Inc. And so the question is XAI overvalued? Well, what's the most entertaining outcome? Clearly that would be the Elon Inc. Mega corp forming SpaceX acquires Xai before going public, which is easier to do than rolling it into Tesla, which is public and would face a bunch of scrutiny. And that gives us a very entertaining situation. Just think about Twitter, which launched in 2006, being owned by SpaceX, founded in. 2002, being able to own Twitter and SpaceX in a single ticker. Hilarious. Hilarious. It's just the most entertaining outcome. I would love to ask Jack Dorsey if he ever imagined Twitter being owned by a rocket company. If you went back in time, even in 2010, 2012, even just a few years ago, and you were like, what if Twitter and SpaceX merged? What are you talking about? But lay off the ayahuasca, buddy. Seriously. Yeah, maybe Jack Dorsey is actually like, I did imagine that. Imagined it on day one. A jungle demon told me about. Yes, yes, I saw that. But then the question is like, is there going to be the big merger? SpaceX with Xai and Twitter tucked in, plus Tesla. That would be very, very weird. Who knows how or when that happens. But it would certainly be entertaining to watch. And you'd wind up with this fully vertically integrated company, AI chip design. You'd create some efficiency too. Elon would only need one badge, right? Oh, true. Which could huge, huge productivity boost. Yeah, huge productivity. He probably has to have a full time badge guy, right? For all the different companies. So you have AI chip design, which is done at Tesla, running models trained by XAI deployed on Starlink satellites launched. On SpaceX rockets rock, running optimus robots. The stock chart will be as entertaining as the hallucinations that happen along the way, was my conclusion. Anyway, it's a fun story. There's a whole bunch of posts in the timeline that we'll go through to give this more context. But first, let me tell you about cognition and Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. There we go. Elon Musk says that XAI will have more AI compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building Macro Hard, which now. Has a sandbox that Is a bold statement. It's a bold statement. He certainly has marshaled a lot of the capital. He doesn't have all of it. He's not as much of a capital sponge as Sam Altman at this moment. This is an actual satellite image? Yes. Correct. No. They really painted this on the top of the data center and it's the answer to Microsoft. I love that Macro Harbor. I appreciate that about Elon and companies where they're trying to move so quickly and the entire ethos is around Ruth efficiency and yet they still think it's worth the time to paint the ceiling of the data center so that you can see it from space. Very, very funny. XAI has also bought a third building called Macro Harder will take. Is this a typo? Well, I mean, it's all a joke on Microsoft. I guess. We'll take XAI training compute to almost 2 gigawatts. And how does Grok responding? Impressive expansion. 2 gigawatt will supercharge our quest for understanding the universe. Did that just happen autonomously? Because Elon tagged Grok. If you tag Grok, even if you don't ask it a question, it'll just chime in. That's kind of interesting. Maybe we should be tagging Grok when we go live to just have it engage. More news here. On January 1, an account called Ming said. Good news. A mass production audit for Tesla's Optimus V3 has been completed. Completed. And seven Chinese companies have been finalized as core suppliers. Operating as Tier one partners, these firms will manufacture critical components and support key assembly processes. The supply chain is geared to kickstart mass production in Q1 2026, targeting a capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 units by the end of the year. And then they go through some of the suppliers here. Scott asked the question that I was asking. You remember when Tesla had placed an order for I think it was 750 million worth of actuators last year. And I was thinking like, that's not the kind of like order that you do if you're not planning to sell a lot of these. Like it's pretty, you know, even at Tesla scale is like not an insignificant amount of money. And so yeah, Scott is asking, does this, does this mean butler ready robots with some sort of intelligence we have not seen will be ready by then? And again, it's like I imagine Elon would be excited about doing like some type of like shock and awe announcement, but at the same time I feel like he also likes teasing stuff and like pretty far in advance. And so if he's planning to be selling 100,000 units this year of the Optimus, you would imagine that we would have been like hearing about it and seeing some more demos and getting teased. But again, hard to say. But yeah, it still feels like we need some type of meaningful breakthrough before these are going to be. Maybe there's 100,000 people that have absolutely printed on Tesla. They're just going to be like, I'll just buy one. I'm just ride or die. But that's a big, big number. Especially when you're talking about, I expect these to cost somewhere in the range of what, 50,000 to, I don't know, 50,000 plus. How much is the dog from Boston Dynamics? Isn't that one. I mean, the unitree is the unitree, which you can, I would assume, is at least half the price. Yeah, the cheapest unitree that you get in the US is like 20 grand. Oh, it's 20. Okay. So yeah, yeah, maybe the Boston amics dog is 75, but that's real. That was from 2020 Hyundai. You gotta figure it out. You can get a real dog that's a purebred Newfoundland for 5k or something, or 2k. I don't know. Do you want 20 real elite dogs or one robot dog? Clearly the real dogs for sure. We should ask Jake about this later. Yeah, he's coming on. It is weird because I think as the frontier, I think physical intelligence is on the frontier of the actual software. Sure, sure. And even their most advanced demos that they're just coming out with this past month, it's very simple. There's like two arms, they have like one claw. Yeah. And it can generalize pretty well from that, but it's still like, that's orders of magnitude less, you know, degrees of freedom or whatever, like actuators than like this robot. Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud. Building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I was listening to George Hotz talk about the Optimus robot and he was setting timelines further out. He was sort of saying, like the humanoid robot thing will happen more like in a decade. And he was, he was, he was projecting out some, some exponential growth, but still saying it's going to take a while. But he was saying that it's a great project for Tesla because you can put the optimists in all their showrooms and those are really big draws for people. You go in, you see the robot, even if it's like on some pre scheduled hard coded routine. It's doing a choreographed dance or it's tele operated. Whatever it is, it's a great awe inspiring thing to just pull you into the random Tesla showroom. But there's only 300 Tesla showrooms, so. Okay, maybe you need a thousand of these. Do you think that post from Denny's on X earlier was maybe in response to to seeing some of this optimus news? You think so they said the trough is open. Piggies maybe. Maybe this is teasing that they're going to get some optimuses. You know it seems like it's, it's teasing an AI generated vertical video feed from Denny's. You got to get into the social network space. Having a fast food restaurant make a short form video app and it's just AI slop of their food. But if you really could activation you could probably build that. I mean we're supposed to be going into the TEMU SaaS era, shein. Fast fashion for SaaS is what Sam Altman called it. And so you would think that someone at Denny's could vibe code a vertical video app in a weekend and deploy it as a prank. Fast fashion or SaaS is going fast fashion. Maybe fast fashion needs to go fast food. Find SaaS. I don't know. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business. Today. We have a post here of the Razer Akka. Okay, this is. Wait, did you mention this Yesterday you talked about Razer. We needed to pull it up because. What is this video? This is powered by Grok. No way. Here we go. Looks like it can directly see what's on your monitor and respond to what you're doing. Sort of a Tamagotchi. Oh, and it's basically just taking the the Grok video generator and removing the background and then just putting it in some sort of holographic screen. This is interesting. I personally would not pick this character but there's something about I would pick. Playing Counter strike and how we get. Tyler in one of the things there. If we could get Tyler, don't put me in the Stigs and just bring a mini Tyler. That's very black mirror put looked at them in the snow globe. Wasn't that one of the Black Mirror episodes? Snow globe? Yeah. I don't know. You're playing League of Legends and you have your League of Legends coach there and the League of Legends coach is giving you advice and answering questions for you in real Time. That's pretty cool. I think there's something there. I can see them selling a lot of these. How much do you think this is? I don't know if it's good for the world. I wonder how much this costs because as a hundred dollar gaming peripheral, it's sort of like a fun little add on toy gift. At $500, I think it's a completely different question. 2.6 is calling it the Goon Cylinder. Ridiculous. The Goon Tube. So they're not selling these yet, but they do have a reservation page. So there's Razer, AVA Project AVA. Your all in one AI companion. From planning your day to analyzing spreadsheets and GameStart Project AVA. They're like copilot. No thanks. Leverages AI inferencing and reasoning that dynamically evolves based on your personal interactions. Select your 5.5-inch companion. From an expanding library of characters from esports legends to custom anime inspired razor designs. Be among the first to sign up for Razor Project EVA at release. And Nick Dobo says they are going to make a billion dollars. Lmao. This makes me want to touch grass personally. Yeah, this would be cool as almost a. It's like the. On the Apple Vision Pro when you FaceTime someone it has like the 3D rendering of their face. If you could. Like when you're FaceTime someone, they're just in the tube. Well, I mean you could, you could also. I mean you really could. You really could fine tune a model on everything. Tyler, am I in the tube right now? Be honest. I mean you can clone Your voice at 11 Labs, clone your, clone your. Your likeness, fine tune a model and have it just be running locally and have this like captured version of Tyler in the tube. Very weird. But it's high in the tube. I don't know. I do think that there's something. I don't know. Will this. Will they make a billion dollars on this? How much money does. Does Razer actually make? Razor revenue? Do they make billions? 1.6 billion in 2021. Not bad. So billion. A billion says Nick. One billion. So is this enough to double their revenue? I don't know. But it does seem like it could be. It could be an interesting gift. Gary Tan likes the idea. He says gamers are an incredible first customer. I agree with that. They have a lot of disposable income and gamers, I mean they spend $50 on a game or it's a free to play game and then they play it for hundreds of hours. So unless they're playing something that's sort of pay to win or pay consistently. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedded models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next. Somebody just texted me that we should put one of our guests today in the tube. In the tube. We'll try, we'll try. I think we have to buy one of those. I was thinking we don't have enough hardware around here. We don't have enough thinking about the. I mean holographic display is probably underrated in a world where you can have a big holograph here and somebody can be around the table having a conversation with us. Really cool. We're not looking at a monitor. That's going to be pretty wild. I mean, yeah, can you just scale up that too? But then at one point why not just wear a headset? But I mean there's something nice about not having glasses on your face. Like, you know, it's Lasik for VR. I guess you just take off the glasses and you just sit there talking to the thing. I really wonder from a physics perspective if it's possible to just scale that up. Huge. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. He was Texting Sam Altman two years ago on February 18, 2023. Sam says, I remember you. I remember seeing you in a TV interview a long time ago, maybe 60 Minutes. It was 60 Minutes about SpaceX where you were being attacked by some guys and you said they were your heroes, they were heroes of yours and it was really tough. This was a NASA astronaut who said that SpaceX would not work. Need to check in on that guy. Wellness check. And Sam goes on to say, well, you're my hero. And that's what it feels like when you attack OpenAI. Totally get that. We some screwed up stuff, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing and I think we have ensured that neither Google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which I believe we both think is critical. I am tremendously thankful for everything you've done to help. I don't think OpenAI would have happened without you. And it really effing hurts when you publicly attack OpenAI. And Elon says, I hear you and it's certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake. So some drama going back and forth with them. But next time someone is suing you and very mad at you. Copy paste this, copy paste this, Tell them you're their hero and maybe it gets you a little ground. Yeah. Also. I have some breaking news. You hit me. Well, it's not actually that breaking, I think, but it came out today in the Wall Street Journal. They're saying anthropic is raising 10 billion at 350. I mean I've heard the 350 number. For like a while. A while. So I don't think this is really like brand new. Okay, but that's exciting. Yeah, yeah, but more, more advanced talks. Are you chasing a slug? I'm looking, yeah. I think I'm in some kind of triple layer SPV. There's like five. You're in the fifth layer. Deploy, deploy. Claude. Anyway, speaking of the AI race, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. You gotta try it. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Emily Sundberg says if media companies are valued at 165 times EBITDA, then I have some calls to make. This is on the News. Semaphore raised $30 million. We will save the gong ring for when Ben Smith joins us in just a little bit. But this is massive news. This is very exciting. I'm very interested to hear what they're going to do with the money, how the business will change. Semaphore has obviously built a fantastic publication, but do they just want to do more of the same? Are they expanding? Are they diversifying? Where will they go? They do a lot of events. Apparently they had their first profitable year last year. That's great. Hence the ebitda. Yes, and we know exactly what it is just from this Emily Sunberg tweet. Lot of interesting investors in. Yes, they made 2 million in the round. Right. Because the valuation was 330. So 165x EBITDA puts it at 2 million in EBITDA. But congrats. Roughly twice what the Free Press was acquired for. Was the Free Press 100. Where did it actually end up landing? I don't know, somewhere in the 1 to 200 range I believe. But again, I wonder how much of that deal is. Is like pre negotiated contract because you know, it's not an acqui hire. They did bring in the Free Press but like Barry is a really important talent and so you have to imagine that she's on some pretty big contract for a long time and that. Yeah. And you sort of like that could have out of the. Yeah. 50. Yeah. But then also like the acquisition is part of you know, paying a little bit of that upfront. But then there's still some. Some free press was 150. 150. Okay, well, semaphores at 2x that and Jordan Schneider from Chinatalk says much have. Must have richer friends. Jordan. Jordan's been on a tear. He did a great, great show with Joe Weisenthal where they just hung out. They did a show about nothing. And Joe Weisenthal is just an underrated guest. I think he's so often in the. He's been in the interview receipt for 10 years. Goat Weisenthal. Goat Wiesenthal. Play that goat noise. But I like just hearing him talk about his business and his view on media and his view on whatever food. Yeah, there's good. Something good. Nominal terminism here. Wise and tall. How tall is he? Goats. Wise and tall. He's actually not that tall, but he has. He has a sort of a tall aura. He does. He does. He fills the room. Yes, yes, yes. That is like a famous thing about, like, legendary people. All the. You heard of this bed chairman? They're all super tall. Like Paul Volcker. Is that true? Yeah. Jerome Powell, super. Well, yeah. I didn't know that. Interesting. We have a future there. But there's a consistent. Jerome Powell is six feet tall. I swear I. Super tall. I swear I. In this office. In this office. Yeah, but maybe he's wearing. In this office. You're getting brutally hype mogged. Well, do we know if Jerome's getting leg lengthening surgery anytime soon? Maybe he's been in. Maybe it hasn't updated. Where do they get the leg lengthening? Is it China? Yeah, usually I think so. Maybe Jerome got leg lengthening surgery. Okay, someone lied to me. Then someone told me that all the Fed chairmen are. They're always tall. Well, I mean, six foot is tall. It's the start of being tall. Six foot. You're really the shortest tall guy? Paul Volcker, he was six, seven. Okay, there we go. Still short in this office, but better. Yeah. Janet Yellen. How tall is she? Forget what I crowdstrike. Your business is AI their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Rob says Tyler is letting meme Dick's memes dictate his height estimate of Powell. Ben Bernanke is only 5. 8. This is a total. I swear. I swear I saw this. You've been lied to. No, this is a thing throughout history, like, the great men of history who have, like, long biographies written about them. Oftentimes their heights get Inflated because of their like egos and their reputations and whatnot. Yeah. I will give you access. You can write this book. But you gotta say that I was six' ten. Yes, yes, yes. And oftentimes that I could have played in the NBA, people will say oh, you're shorter than I imagined. When they meet these amazing people or these powerful people. There's also the opposite happening where there's like sort of a war to make people appear shorter in the Google height snippets. This was like JD Vance thing for a while. People were going back and forth is he 5, 9, 5, 8? I met him and I'm pretty sure he's 6 foot at least. But people like war back and forth. You're like, it's gotta be at least six foot. There is a problem when you're six'. Eight, but not much. Literally everyone feels at six foot. It's not like six, eight. It's a very silly, very, very silly. Anyway, Semaphore generated 2 million in EBITDA. It is, it is interesting. EBITDA is an interesting figure for media companies because like do you have. But that's not how. But it's just to be very, very, very, very clear that it's not like they were. The valuation was not. Clearly they were willing to sell about 10% of the company. Sure. And investors believe that it will be worth way more than 330 million at some point. Yeah. Or it's enough to just be own 10% of its assets. Strategic asset. Right. Yeah. No one does these deals based on EBITDA at this stage. It's like a, it's a few year old company. They're clearly looking at growth rate, how much influence it's having, how much impact it's having, viewership revenue. EBITDA is probably the last number that you look at to get to a number for valuation at least, but very exciting for them and we will be talking to them later today. Before we move on, let me tell you about label box delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The label box. Get in the box. They're like, we didn't ask you to say that. Francois Chalet Arc AGI, co founder of ArcPrize. I hope he enjoys our goalpost moving. We might have to move it after we read this post. So he says, if you're wondering whether saturating arc AGI 1 or 2 means we have AGI now, I refer you to what I said when we launched ARC AGI 2 last year, which is also the same thing I said when we announced Arc AGI 2 was coming in spring of 2022, before the rise of LLM chatbots. The Arc AGI series is not an AGI threshold. It's not even a goalpost. I don't even know if we need to. Why is it called that? Why is it called ARC AGI? It is a compass that points the research community towards the right questions. ARC AGI 1 is a minimal test of fluid intelligence. To pass it, you need to show non zero fluid intelligence. This required AI to move past the classic deep learning. Should I just disassemble the goalposts? Disassemble the goalposts. The LLM paradigm of pre training scaling and static models at inference toward test time adaptation. Rkgi. The camera moves are wild today. I love it. Rkgi 2 is the same, but with tasks that probe deeper levels of reasoning complexity, particularly with regard to concept composition. Still, these are tasks that are solvable in minutes by regular people with no external tool use. We hired our test takers off the street. So imagine just walking down the street and somebody, hey, come take ARC AGI V2. That sounds fun. So it does not represent the upper bound of what human fluid intelligence can achieve, say, solving a millennium problem. Arc AGI 3 launching March 2026. I thought it was already out. Was that a preview that we played with? Because I remember we put you on this task, Tyler. We made you. Yeah, I think they were still adding new games because I only played. I think there were just three. Because I was really wondering, we've been seeing the V1 and V2 benchmarks get sort of dominated. I was wondering, how are these models doing on V3? Well, now we have the answer. It hasn't launched yet, so. March, March. Your calendars, folks. Arc AGI V3 launches then. And RKGI V3 will probe interactive reasoning. We evaluate how systems explore unknown environments, model them, set their own goals and plan and execute toward these goals autonomously without instruction. We have also started to work on AGI 4 and 5, two more sequels. You thought it was a trilogy? I mean, they're doing nightmare scenario for everybody. It's a cinematic universe, folks. It's not just a trilogy. There's going to be a whole saga, the ARC AGI saga. And he's pretty excited about it. So congrats to ARC AGI team. Fantastic benchmark. Very interesting, very fun that you can actually play it. A lot of these benchmarks, they're just not fun to go do hard math problems all day. ARC AGI is something that anyone can go and toy around with and understand. Oh well I am better than AI at this weird thing that is just a simple puzzle that a kid could do. So it's a lot of fun and we've enjoyed working and hanging out with the Arc AGI team and expect to move the goalposts many more times in 2026. Before we move on, let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build create code back prototypes and apps fast. Sholto says he spent a week over Christmas making RTs and his Twitter algo has fully switched into game dev Twitter. It's incredibly wholesome. People are making some insane things in particular image to mesh models mean some indie devs have created absurd production quality and he shares some examples where are. The AI risk people on because what if he creates a game that's so addictive that all of humanity just plays his vibe coded RT seriously? Endlessly seriously. Gonna be nothing wholesome about that. Ceases to go outside. It's the true wire heading scenario. And if Sholto's not taking this is. The wellness checks I do on you sometimes. I'll call you late John just How you doing buddy? I called you last night literally in bed. Yeah, yeah, I called you last night. Hey, just checking in on you buddy. You're not not playing video games, are you? Fortunately not. I'm off the sauce, Mark. Safe. Back on the wagon. Doing dry January. Off the sauce. Colin Frazier says I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis. This is an interesting take and I could see this being actually what's happening right. Typically if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off a ledge or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, et cetera. But an LLM's just like I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your I had a friend in high school that was, was going through this and he thought that deers were like gang stalking him. Yes, yes, actually. And so he started telling, he started talking with people about that and they were like let's figure this out and let's go hunting. He's back. He's fully, fully recovered. I feel Like, a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in that scenario. Super. Just reclaim the authority. And then you, you know who's in the driver's seat? You're like, yeah, they might be stalking me, but they should not be. The whole house is like deer mounted like trophies or whatever. That might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things. Deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad. So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from. Or smartphone penetration, it went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 2015 or something. And basically everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them, and you get all that, and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients, and you get all the good. But then also all the crazy people are using them, and everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. And so you really need to look at the Bayesian crime. If grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere, you'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stores. And people would be like, well, our grocery stores making people go insane, right? They'd be like, we're seeing all this. Where there's all this evidence that people are going insane, you know, acting insane in grocery stores. It must be that grocery stores are causing. So you have to look at, like, the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the. What's the. What's the incidence of psychosis with LLMs? Is it higher then you have a problem? And I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that some of the models work sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything. Like, the glaze gate was a real problem. They sort of fixed it. It seems like. Like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no? And that's like a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down. And also just some of the newer models that I've been interacting with, they do push back. They hallucinate even less. They just. They feel like Way, there's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown like, like there used to be a time when you could go and say, explain to me the definition of the time. Old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day keeps the doctor away. And it was nonsense. But the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the user came to me saying this, saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing, so I have to make a up a definition and they would just make up a definition. But now I've seen screenshots where people have come to it with these weird tests and the models will actually say, ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real and that doesn't exist. And you should, if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something. Anyway, Railway says correlation is not causation. Yes, yes, yes. Railways. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. Get on the train, get on the railway. Get on the boat. Skooks. I had this pulled up. I kept seeing it and laughing at it over the last two minutes. If I was cracking up at the wrong time. This was why Skooks has been using Gemini as a calorie tracking app. Oh, I didn't even see that comment. I just thought he just went to Gemini and said, another beer. And it's just funny that you see the little thinking and it's like thinking about how to process that. That alone was funny. Just imagining the chat. Just another beer, another beer, another beer. Fifteen beers, another beer. Yeah, you know, a lot of people are doing dry January other side of that. Drunk January. Potentially underrated. Everyone says if you can do dry. January, that's the real contrarian. Yeah, you prove to everyone. Oh, I'm not, I'm not, you know, in the pocket of big alcohol. I'm not boosting the alcohol stocks. But if you can do drunk January, drunk the whole time, hold it together and then go back to normal life, that's potentially even more willpower. Potentially. I don't know. So I saw a picture yesterday. Apparently there's a college female college basketball player whose last name is Beers. And so on her jersey it says Beers. It says the number 15. Or number says 15 beers on the back. That's great. The alcohol economy is suffering, by the way. This is in the journal. Here's to unloved booze stocks. The five year total return through 2025 for the S&P 500 is 96%. If you just bought the S&P 500, you doubled your money in five years. Years. Not bad. Everyone else is down in the alcohol industry. AB InBev not doing that bad. They're only down 4% over the last five years. But Heineken down 21% Diageo down 38%. Pernod Ricard down 50%. Remy down 75%. Boston Beer, the backbone of Boston, is down 80% over the last 20 over the last five years. So the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage. What? Oh, the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage than by smoking a joint, says the Wall Street Journal. I don't understand this because I But the popularity of cannabis, along with the effects of drugs like Ozempic and rising awareness of alcohol health risks, have investors in the sector worried. An equal weighted basket of 11 global alcoholic beverage producers has lost a third of its value in the past five years, including dividends. A dollar invest in the S&P 500 nearly doubled dry January might be an odd time to think about alcohol's appeal, but it's often a good month to snap up unloved stocks that other investors dumped toward the end of the previous year. In a market with few bargains, booze looks interesting, says the dirt. Interesting. Anyway, moving on Vibe Co where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales. Just like on Meta. Nikita responded to your post. Yeah, I want to go in yesterday. He said the point of CES is maximalist futurism. It's all concept art to show if things keep going in this direction, this is how the world should work. Once you understand it as a museum exhibit and not in any way commercial products, it becomes more enjoyable. That's a good take. Ray showed me. Thanks Nikita. I liked it. No, no, this was a very interesting thing and I think we were he. Also responded I know the next thing. Apparently there's a zoom a zoom face station. I don't know what this is actually meant. So I think if you put this on in a crowded coffee shop, you can talk, hear and see and no one can hear or see what you're doing. I think if you put this on in a coffee shop, you're getting tagged like not today. Banging. It really does look like you're it looks like a special forces, you know, like rebreather unit, a scuba diving unit like that. Like that. That'd be tight. If you could wear. If, if it was a re. You know, if you could, if you could spend like 20 minutes underwater with something like this. People are not fans of this. The replies. Tyler says the first X hardware product right there. It's locked in. Yeah, I mean, I think that looking at more of like, novelty is fun and making it just a fun showcase of all these interesting things. And the problem is that I think people still associate CES with like, this stuff's going to work its way into my life and it's going to be just rough around the edges. Like the smart home. If you really dial it in, it's maybe better than just analog light switches, but for a lot of people it's worse. We've talked about Sonos a lot. The app was great and then it just degraded and degraded and degraded. Now there's a lot of stories about you going to a hotel room and all of the buttons. Everything's smart connected and it's just like, like the lowest quality product and it doesn't have the polish or the network effects because it's from some mid tier company. And I think people are a little bit disheartened by that. But Jason Fried went hard on smart homes. Oh, yeah. He called it the big regression. My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months. We rented them a house nearby. It's new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It's amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touch screens of various sizes, IoT appliances and interfaces that try too hard and it's terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4 and require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understands which ones, control what and to be sure not to hit that one because it'll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn't mean to. Worse, the TV is the latest Samsung, which has a baffling UI just to watch cnn. My parents aren't idiots, but definitely feel like they're missing something obvious they aren't. TVs have simply gotten worse. You don't turn them on anymore. You boot them up. The Malay dishwasher is hidden, flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here's what isn't. It wouldn't even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn't know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate for serious. Worse. Thermostats Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other proprietary ones from some other company trying to be Nest. Like baffling round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options. Just to be sure it's set to 68. Or is it? Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at? But it's at 72. Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10 inch iPad bolted to the wall that has the weather forecast on it. And it's bright. I'm sure there's ways to turn that off. But then the screen would be so barren that it would just be filled with the news instead. Why can't the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse. And the lag lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind everything lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. And he says, now, look, I'm no Luddite, but this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can't see it in these cases. Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to make a beautiful, modern, ultra analog system for the home. I'm sure some people are working on that, but we've seen this in cars too. Like a lot of the new higher end vehicles that are coming out are actually like analog. Yeah, they're like people like buttons. Yeah. Yeah. You still want some displays, but a few buttons that you can have more, more memory around. More muscle memory. What do you think of Smart Home? Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say, like, I feel like it's just a barbell. Like if Apple made your thermostat, it would be good. And otherwise I don't want any screens. Yeah, there really is some benefit either way.

I only know about IPDs because of VR goggles. Different VR goggles need different IPDs. Timothy Chalamet. I gotta interrupt you guys to Talk about the Universe 25 experiment conducted by ethologist John B. Calhoun between 1968 and 1973. The experiment was the Rodent Utopia Experiment. Experiments. Calhoun built a paradise for mice where every physical need was met. They had unlimited food and water, so there was no competition for survival. There was no predators. They were completely safe from external threats. They had climate control, so it was a perfect environment for living and reproducing. It was disease free. The initial mice were chosen for their health. And so despite having space for 3,800 mice, the population peaked at 2,200 and then began a rapid, irreversible decline to extinction. There was a specific group called the Beautiful Ones. It was a generation of males born during the peak of overcrowding because the older dominant males had become hyper aggressive. These are the boomers in our society. And the social hierarchy had collapsed. These younger males never learned normal social behavior. So I think we see this with, like, clarity, clavicular, and people like that, like defending territory or courting mates. They were called the Beautiful Ones because their physical appearance, of course. Unlike the older alpha males, who were covered in scars. Again, these are the boomers, right? They bought their homes for like 20 bucks and maybe were in the military, et cetera. The alphas were covered in scars and bitten tails from constant fighting. These males had perfect, healthy fur. You can see Tyler's hair. He's got perfect, healthy fur behavior. They withdrew completely from society. So again, you see these streamers? They're just like in their rooms, you know, smashing their. Smashing their face with. With hammers. They spent their entire lives doing only three things. Eating, sleeping and grooming themselves. Asexuality. They lost all interest in mating or interacting with females. Again, you see these with the. The looks maxing. Guys, they're. They're not looks maxing seemingly for, like, women. They're looks maxing to try to mog other dudes, right? This is clavicular. Talking about Gavin Newsom, mogging jd. And so anyways, something to think about with this. So the lessons. Become the Beautiful Ones, like in that colony. You want to be the beautiful one? Absolutely not. I think Tyler's on board. Absolutely not. You want to be the scarred alpha? Okay, the scarred alpha. You want your tail to be bitten? Yeah, well, I've always said I want to be wizened. I want to be old man Max. I want to look like Warren Buffett, because I feel like there's a lot of people that are doing the younger things.

From Boston. Obviously, this is written to be dramatic, but I think it is. There's lessons from it. There's lessons. And it's hard not to feel that insane pressure right now in California sort of just descending on the technology industry. And this goes to. I mean, this goes to what I was talking about over the last couple days, which is the tech industry broadly needs better narratives. Right. We were talking on the way in today. How would Steve Jobs. Oh, yeah. How would Steve Jobs pitch AI? Like, imagine an hour of talking of Steve Jobs on stage, talking about the potential of AI. Right. He'd be saying, you now have a. A free doctor in your pocket. Yeah. That can diagnose, you know, a wide range of conditions. Right. You would be painting this, like, optimistic, empowering. Yeah. Sort of real potential for AI that's already here today. He wouldn't be. You can imagine all the things he wouldn't be talking about. And I don't think we have a lot of people that want to be seen as the Steve Jobs of AI, and yet it doesn't feel like that character exists today. And you need somebody that is larger than life, that when they talk, people want to listen and lean in and believe and get excited about some of this technology. And I just. I don't think we have that today at all. Totally. We have a Steve Jobs video in the timeline that we should play. Let's watch this. You know what? Stock options are very interesting. Yeah, yeah. No. Okay, very quickly, what you could do is if somebody came to work for your company, you could let them buy some stock in the company. The problem is they might have to shell out $100,000 to buy stock in your company. If your company went broke, they'd lose all their life savings or whatever. And so that doesn't work. So what you do is, when somebody comes to work, let's say the Stock's trading at $10 a share, you give them the option to buy 1,000 or 10,000 shares at $10, but they have four years to exercise that option. So if the stock goes down or stays the same, they never exercise it. They don't have to put up any money. They don't lose anything. But if it goes to $100 a share, they can easily go out to a bank and borrow the money to buy it at 10 because it's worth 100. In exchange for that privilege of not having to have them put up any money and take any risk, we only dole out their ability to exercise that stock option 25% a year, thereby locking in people, really for four years. If the stock goes up, it's a pretty standard thing. A lot of people are doing it. Look at this casual. Before we went public, like imagine 80%. Of Apple is owned by the employees. Say over 50% of Apple is owned by the employees. There's some larger blocks in there, but still. And again, I don't think finance. When you look at the leaders of when, when people, when normal people that don't work in tech, even if they use AI tools, when they see Elon talk about AI, when they see Sam talk about AI, when they see Dario talk about AI, they just get rude. Like the, the reaction is almost always terrible. Yeah. Like if you look at the comments section of any content on them, that is broken containment and that isn't in the tech industry. It's just like f this guy, stop it now. Like there's no. Even if they're saying optimistic things, it's not getting through at all. Yeah. I think my formulation of this was that Steve Jobs cornered the market on earnestness. He's very earnest. Like this is a somewhat technical tax question about why stock options are used instead of just granting stock directly. And he's explaining it in very plain terms, being very earnest about it. And when he talked about the role of the computer and stuff, it would be very interesting to hear. I've seen a couple posts that are like, imagine Steve jobs today, iPad kids and AI slop and all this stuff. But I think it would still hit. And what I mean by he cornered the market for earnestness is that because he was so larger than life and then he passed away. Anyone who wanted to play the earnest tech optimist was seen as doing a Steve Jobs impression. And that was seen as hack and like low brow. And not really everyone was like, why are you doing that? Do something new, do something different. And so everyone fell into different roles. Whether it's a little bit of childish humor or more like rationalism or more nuance in how they talk, they don't really paint the same type of picture, certainly not in the same way. And it's left a big hole in tech narrative production. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, I think if you think of like AI as being broadly influenced by like rationalism, a big part of like rationalist culture, whatever you want to say is like there's this strong sense of like in group and out group. Right. So if you have all the people in the in group, right. They in some sense like already understand that AI is going to be great in all these ways. So the real thing you need to do is you need to convince them that it's bad. Yeah. So it's like you assume that people in the in group already have this prior that the people that, you know, the layman does not have. Yeah, yeah. Their understanding of AI is from Terminator. Yeah. Where it's like, oh, this is going to kill me. And then also the leaders are saying this is like going to take your job. Yeah. It's kind of all bad news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It jumps straight to the consequences. Instead of actually dwelling and spending enough time in the tactile. Tactile, like impact of a technology like Steve Jobs was uniquely good at. He could talk about the future and the long term implications, but would spend a lot of time just talking about the bicycle for the mind. And he had these great metaphors that really stuck with us for a long time. Yeah. He'd be saying, he'd be talking about how this chatbot in your pocket seems simple, but it will teach you languages, it will help you become an artist, help you become a musician. It will diagnose a condition that you have. It will diagnose a condition for somebody that actually can't afford health care wherever they are in the world. Right. Like these are magical, magical things. And yet. But even if you go and you say those exact words, people will say, oh, he's being too earnest. It's some Steve Jobs impression. Like it's hard for that to land. I think it's just not. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it just never. I think there's space for it. It's going to take. It's going to take a future hall of famer. Yeah, yeah, maybe. And I don't know, it's also interesting because I mean, the business of Apple was different.

Get on the train, get on the. Railway, get on the boat. Skooks. I had this pulled up. I kept seeing it and laughing at it over the last two minutes. If I was cracking up at the wrong time, this was why Skooks has been using Gemini as a calorie tracking app. Oh, I didn't. Even see that comment. I just thought he just went to Gemini and said, another beer. And it's just funny that you see the little thinking thing and it's like thinking about how to process that that alone was funny. Just imagin imagining the chat. Just another beer, another beer, another beer. Fifteen beers, another beer, another beer. Yeah. You know, a lot of people are doing dry January other side of that. Drunk January. Potentially underrated. Everyone says if you can do dry January, that's. The real contrarian move. Yeah, you prove to everyone, oh, I'm not in the pocket of big alcohol. I'm not boosting the alcohol stocks. But if you can do drunk January, drunk the whole time, hold it together, and then go back to normal life, that's potentially even more willpower. Potentially. I don't know. There's so. So I saw a picture yesterday. Apparently there's a college.

But fortunately not. I'm off the sauce. Back on the wagon. Doing Dry January. Off the sauce. Colin Fraser says, I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis. This is an interesting take. And I could see this being actually what's happening. Typically, if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off a ledge or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, et cetera. But an LLM's just like, I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's. Let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your. I had a friend in high school that was going through this and he thought that deers were. Deers were like gang stalking him. Yes, yes, actually. And so he started telling. He started talking with people about that. They were like, let's figure this out and let's go hunting. He's back. He's fully, fully. I feel like a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in that scenario. Super. Just reclaim the authority. And then you know who's in the driver's seat? You're like, yeah, they might be stalking me, but they should not be. The whole house is like deer's mounted trophies or whatever. That might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things. Deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad. So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from. Or smartphone penetration, it went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 2015 or something. And basically everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them and you get all that and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients. And you get all the good. But then also all the crazy people are using them and everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. And so you really need to look. Or if the Bayesian product, grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere, you'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stores and people would be like, well, our grocery stores making people go insane, right? They'd be like, we're seeing all this where there's all this evidence that people are going insane and you know, acting insane in grocery stores, it must be that the grocery stores are causing. So you have to look at like the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the, what's the, what's the incidence of psychosis with lms? Is it higher then you have a problem? And I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that some of the models were sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything. Like the Glaze Gate was a real problem. They sort of fixed it. It seems like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no. And that's like a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down. And also just some of the newer that I've been interacting with, they do push back, they hallucinate even less. They just, they feel like way. There's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown. Like there used to be a time when you could go and say, explain to me the definition of the time. Old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day keeps the doctor away. And it was nonsense. But the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the user seemed to me saying this, saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing, so I have to make up a definition and they would just make up a definition. But now I've seen screenshots where people have come to it with these weird tests and the models will actually say, ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real and that doesn't exist and you should, if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something. Anyway, Railway Friendly says correlation is not causation. Yes, yes, yes. Railways Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases.