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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 01/05/2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have many updates for you. But one that's not changing is that this show is still brought to you by Ramp.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We are very happy that Ramp is staying with us on the journey.
Speaker 2:That's right. Massive New graphics package. Yes. If you haven't noticed, we worked with John Palmer and Luke over at Area Technology. Updated the overlay, the logo, whole lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:The globe in there telling you we're taking you all over the world.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:The news every day.
Speaker 2:That's right. It is so good to be back.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:This so Yeah. We met this morning at the gym with the whole team. And I hadn't seen you for more than two weeks.
Speaker 1:It has been the longest
Speaker 2:time we've gone
Speaker 1:I'm fired.
Speaker 2:Without hanging out since Yep. We started the show.
Speaker 1:I mean, last break was was crazy. We were still doing we weren't even live yet. We were doing it just as a podcast, but we still I was in Yosemite once and we did like a twenty minute episode that was recorded locally and we had to sync them up and like edit it together. It was a very odd show.
Speaker 2:We did a show on the eve of Christmas Eve. We did. It's very that felt really unnecessary, but at the same time, was so much news over the last two weeks. Yeah. There were a lot of moments where we wanted to be Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like there were three or four, maybe five really big stories where we could have had great shows. But there were a lot of days where, you know, it probably would have been us just hanging out, which still would have been fun.
Speaker 2:And there were lot of situations to monitor too There were were kind of outside of our domain,
Speaker 1:but but still interesting. And we'll take you through some of those. But fortunately, we have a ton of content and a ton of stories to get through because so many things have built up. The Grock deal, the Manus deal, Dan Wong's annual letter. There's so many different things that we're gonna take you through today.
Speaker 1:We have a very light lineup today, just Justin Maers from TrueMed joining. We have
Speaker 2:Pull it
Speaker 1:up. Let's see. The linear lineup
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Which explains the run of show. So we're gonna be building this out for
Speaker 2:you I'm not to keep you guys
Speaker 1:in the you exactly what we're doing when, so you know when to tune in. But we should kick it off with Dan Wong's letter, his 2025 letter. He skipped 2024 apparently. This sort of rocked the timeline. Dan came on his show during his book tour for his excellent book that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition.
Speaker 1:He uses this phrase AI he doesn't like the phrase AI race. Yeah. He likes he doesn't think it's something that you can win. A race has a a definite ending. There's a finish line.
Speaker 1:Whoever crosses it first wins. That's where a lot of super
Speaker 2:Prefers to say that The US and China need to win the AI future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like he
Speaker 2:And this echoes what Gurley has said too. True. Obviously, at the time he was coming out in defense of Manus and Benchmarx Investment in Manus. Totally. He was saying, don't he's like, I don't know what the AI race is.
Speaker 1:I mean, he looks great now, but Manus is an American company. It's a meta property. So and I mean, the Manus team, of course, it was from China, but quickly moved to Singapore and now Menlo Park, presumably.
Speaker 2:No. Think they're gonna stay there.
Speaker 1:But still, mean, you have to imagine that a lot of the talent migrates, and it's like a fully American controlled asset essentially now that it's controlled by America and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Let me tell you about public, still with us, investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service. You can see we have a new ticker.
Speaker 2:Let's take it over to Tyler. Let's check-in with Tyler.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. What what what what are we checking in with Tyler?
Speaker 2:The the chat misses Tyler.
Speaker 1:Oh, they just missed Tyler. How are you doing? Also, we signed
Speaker 2:a massive contract extension with Tyler. He hasn't He's not technically a college dropout yet, but he may as well be It's a gap year. A gap It's a gap decade. It's a It's a gap century. Tyler Tyler's parents, if you guys are watching, I'm just joking around.
Speaker 1:It's the age of gap years. We're in the age of gap years. We're in the age of research and we're also in the age of gap years. And so we thank Tyler for sticking around, hanging out with us. We're going to have a lot of fun this year.
Speaker 1:So the Dan Wang piece, we should read through some of it. I wrote it inspired me to think about what am I really looking for this year. We've seen sort of benchmark saturation. AI can kind of do everything now. We'll talk about the Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code sort of sensational takeover of the timeline.
Speaker 1:So many people clearly hadn't really tested Opus 4.5 when it came out, which was a couple weeks before the break. But they got their time off. They were, you know, with their families and probably stepped out to the laptop and fired off some Claude Claude code prompts and had really good experiences. Yeah. Because it is really magical the first time you go to it and you say build this website and it just does it.
Speaker 1:It's it's actually remarkable for
Speaker 2:small hackers. Throwing around the Claude AGI thing. Fortunately, we picked up a goal post. Oh, yes. We have a camera view that we can put on.
Speaker 1:Maybe if I go over.
Speaker 2:Just pull it over. So we picked up a goal post. So as we continue to see AI progress, we can actually move this goal post ourselves physically here in the studio.
Speaker 1:We're physically moving the goal post now.
Speaker 2:There you go. There you go.
Speaker 1:Because my new definition of the AI is it needs to be able to smell.
Speaker 2:It It needs to be able to
Speaker 1:smell. Needs it can't smell, it can't do all white collar work because I regard the job of a sommelier as white collar work. AI Certainly disagrees with me. I actually went to one of the models and I and I said, is a sommelier considered a white collar worker? And I said, no.
Speaker 1:And I think that's all just a sigh hop. I consider it I consider it white collar work.
Speaker 2:You often drink wine wearing a white collar.
Speaker 1:Do sommeliers not wear white collars when they're serving wine? Absolutely, they do. They should be considered white collar workers. And in order to fulfill the AGI promise of automating all white collar work, it must be able to smell. It must be able to decant.
Speaker 3:I sent you that paper, though, that Yeah. Actually happening. Olfactory sense of training models to have olfactory senses.
Speaker 1:Well, as soon as it gets baked into the next version of Claude, we'll need to come up with a new benchmark, and then we will move the goalpost once again because that is the nature of the show. We continue to move the goalposts endlessly. But you know what doesn't move the goalposts? Gusto, our latest sponsor. It's the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 2:We've both been using Gusto for a decade now?
Speaker 1:I went through YC with them or they they were like right either right before me. I think they were 2011 or 2013. And, amazing, amazing platform.
Speaker 2:Actually used it for over a day. My entire career
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have been getting paid via gusto. Used it
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:At my first company. Yep. I still get paid through it.
Speaker 1:Yep. Highly recommend.
Speaker 2:Continuous. Very, very excited about it.
Speaker 1:Serious, serious endorsement. Anyway, back to Dan Wong, the GOAT. He is reflecting on the AI future, what it takes to win the AI future. And the thing that stuck out to me was that we've seen this amazing just this remarkable march of research. The models are getting better.
Speaker 1:All the benchmarks are getting completely dominated. Then we're seeing the massive hyperscaler build outs. We're we were reflecting on like what does reindustrialization mean? What does American dynamism mean? What does this idea of like America needs to build big things?
Speaker 1:We need to be able to build big things, new bridges. We need to build high speed rail. And we've failed at a lot of that, obviously. But we've we've succeeded at building multibillion dollar data centers. No.
Speaker 1:I I mean, Podcast. Yes. I mean, truly truly, media has been a a a cultural export of America for a very long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But But yeah. No. So Dan
Speaker 2:saying, we're good. We're very good at making data centers. Yeah. Haven't been so good on the energy side.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so and so I I tried to pull some of the data on, you know, my big question was like, we've been talking a big game about energy being a bottleneck for AI for a long time. It wasn't truly the bottleneck. The bottleneck was chips and then data centers and then just moving the energy around. But it feels like the last year, we were just kind shuffling energy assets around the board, and that's why we saw energy prices go up where if just supply and demand, if we've been building a ton of energy infrastructure, well, supply would have gone up and actual prices would have fallen or at least stayed flat because all the net new the net new data centers would just be using the new energy infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's not exactly what happened. So so the from 2008 to 2021, America's annual growth in energy production was 0.1% annually. Really, really bad. Not good.
Speaker 1:But it is getting better. The EIA's December 2025 short term energy outlook projects generation growth of 2.4% in 2025 and one point seven percent in 2026. That's like, you know, what, 20 times higher? That's great. But also, that doesn't feel like, oh, fast takeoff, we're going to be doing 10% jumps.
Speaker 1:We're going to be really, really ramping up here. So it feels like there's something that still needs to change. And then simultaneously, you have this massive political backlash to rising energy prices. And I think most importantly, like we've identified some of the characters that drive AI. We know Dario.
Speaker 1:We know Demis. We know Sam, right? We also have identified a lot of the people who are running the neo clouds or doing build out of new data centers. We don't really know the characters. Who's the Elon Musk of energy is something I keep coming back to.
Speaker 1:And we've talked to some of these people. Doug from Radiant is like a contender in the sense that he's building nuclear power plants. Isaiah is also getting in the race with with data centers. Blake Scholl from Boom is Yeah. Sort of pivoting or or expanding into energy generation.
Speaker 1:But there's no one who's really become like the main energy guy or gal. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would say, like Chase at at Crusoe Yep. Is potentially a contender
Speaker 1:unclear Totally.
Speaker 2:Yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. And I feel like when you think about who the Elon of energy Well it's somebody that can go Yeah. And throw down on a three hour episode with you.
Speaker 1:Yes. But but also, like, Chase and, like, the rest of the Neo Cloud founders are are are, you know, marshaling energy resources, but not really driving the underlying infrastructures, which is I think they're more like, let's go find where the energy is cheap, let's build there, let's do the construction project. So other crazy stats. So while we're growing at like 2.4, 1.7%, China is consistently putting up 6% growth. So not great by comparison.
Speaker 1:China now accounts for onethree of global electricity consumption and contributed 54% of global demand growth in 2024. So more than half of the growth in demand came from China. So stack that up over a few decades, and it feels like the AI future is basically in the bag because if energy is a bottleneck, they'll have a ton of it. Now I guess the wild card is maybe you go to space. Dan has an interesting point where he let me let me actually find this exact thing.
Speaker 2:You see semi analysis? Dylan was sharing that Venezuela has a bunch of underutilized gas turbines.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:He was showing satellite imagery.
Speaker 1:Did you see their Instagram? So so I don't know if they if they have like a bug or something, but they posted the same video to Instagram like 50 times. And I think they might just have like automated it and it just like went haywire or something.
Speaker 2:Semi analysis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Semi analysis. Like the official semi analysis Instagram. Maybe they the code.
Speaker 2:Maybe like the trough wants
Speaker 1:It's a funny video of like all these guys in this like bar. I I don't know. And then it has some comment. It's just like a funny thing. But I was just like, why did they post this seven times in a row?
Speaker 1:Anyway, so what Dan says, he says, I think that so he says, I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception. He says that China's obviously caught up in so many different technologies, drones and EVs. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the West, semiconductors and aviation. The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions. Meanwhile, China's answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway.
Speaker 1:I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological leadership almost every anywhere everywhere else, and I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their Western competitors over the next decade. Quickly, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password requests and password resets. So there is one that I think he missed. And maybe you put it in aviation, but I think I think space travel.
Speaker 1:Like, they're way behind on on rocketry.
Speaker 2:SpaceX is like Boeing Airbus. They don't they don't have that Yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe you put SpaceX and Blue Origin in the same category as Boeing and Airbus. I particularly don't. I think of them as separate technologies, and I think of this as potentially, like, the third category that China's way behind in. And if you I still weighed it with somewhat low probability. Like, I'm still somewhat convinced by Deleon's take that it's gonna be really hard to actually get a ton of data center capacity in space on a short time frame.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, it's like never bet against Elon. He's got to figure something out. There's like it just feels like something that could happen. And I don't understand enough of the physics to really figure out like what timeline it happens.
Speaker 2:That was also before people went on break and were using Claude code. You know,
Speaker 1:maybe updating
Speaker 2:their data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now you're I getting
Speaker 2:was going to put this up there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But, like, if the end game really is, like, you got to do to do compute in space because the math just works so much better up there over a decade or two, well, then the advantage kind of flips back to America. But something needs to change clearly. We're not asleep at the wheel.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of companies working on this in America. Some public company stocks have already mooned. Lots of people are tracking the gas turbine market. Risky startups that could never get funded a decade ago are pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars now. And we are taking the problem seriously, but I'm interested to see how quickly things can actually change.
Speaker 1:As the big AI labs mature and probably go public this year or next year, the neo clouds and hyperscalers build ever larger clusters and energy prices become more of a political issue, I suspect discussions of what we're doing to make more energy to dominate the conversation in 2026. Let's get this growth rate up. So I'm optimistic it can happen, but I feel like it's the new benchmark that I want to be tracking. Obviously, we were tracking the performance benchmarks of the models. Then we were tracking the diffusion.
Speaker 1:What's the actual revenue? Is it sticky? Like, there was a lot of risk of like, oh, this company comes up with some AI app. They ramp to $100,000,000 Will it stick around or will they just swept by the wayside and people will go back to doing it the old way or they'll use something else or they'll pay way less? All of those, I feel like we kind of beat all of the bubble allegations over 2025 for the most part.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 2:I I I don't think that that is a public perception. I would say, like, the most popular topic.
Speaker 1:Well, beat the bubble will pop in 2025 allegations. Like, at the start of the year, people were predicting that OpenAI would not be would not do an up round, for example. And that just didn't happen. It was all up rounds for basically all the major players. There were a few that got kind of stuck in quagmires.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would say that we've never In general, has stabilized since the infamous podcast. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Totally. Like, you were long AI broadly in 2025, you did very well. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you did not see some sort of collapse. Yeah. Tyler.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's actually a a cool chart that Axios put out about, like, the 2025 news cycle, and it's like, oh, yeah. Distribution of, like, how Totally. Often the search was around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I really like that chart.
Speaker 3:So you can look at the AI bubble. And, yeah, it did peak and we're, like, definitely not at the peak right now. We're way down.
Speaker 1:Tyler I'd already vindicated. Yeah. Vindicated. Never lost faith over there. Jordy was skeptical.
Speaker 1:I was maybe a little skeptical from time to time. Tyler never lost faith and that's why he's here sticking around, riding up
Speaker 2:the Max contract.
Speaker 1:Contract. Let me talk about linear, still with us, meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. So in in other in the other section of the Dan Wong piece, he talks about competition, and I thought this was just an interesting element to read. He talks about Sputnik moments, and we we we got to read a little bit of this.
Speaker 1:So Yep. One might have expected The US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war, but there have been too many declarations of Sputnik moments without commensurate action. I I I hadn't thought about that, but we we we we at one point, we were memeing like Sputnik moments for Sputnik moments. Remember?
Speaker 3:Do you remember Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was super. That must have been like a year ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was like a year ago or something. But but you you know when it becomes like a meme that we're like, you know, everything is a Sputnik moment. Like, really is overused.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China's high speed rail. Mark Warner repeated with Huawei's five g. Marc Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.
Speaker 1:It's a good point, right? So he says, I think The U. S. Continues to systematically underrates China's industrial progress for several reasons. First, too many Western elites retain hope that China's efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord.
Speaker 1:Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, or maybe even a political collapse. I won't rule these out, but I don't think they are likely to break China's humming tech engine. Dan has so so many interesting insights. He had this one where he talks to people and he reflects a lot on like talking to people in San Francisco because I think he just moved from Yale to Stanford and spending a lot of time in SF. And he was saying that like everyone he talks to about Taiwan thinks that China only wants to invade Taiwan because of TSMC and semiconductors.
Speaker 1:And he has to be like, no, no, this goes back like sixty years.
Speaker 2:Multiple, like Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, back to the civil war that led to the exile and whatnot. Like, this is not some, like, new trendy thing where, like, oh, they need this particular resource this day.
Speaker 2:This is not about chat GPT, little bro.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Truly.
Speaker 2:Deeper than that. Yeah. I mean, there were this this I mean, yeah, was interesting because you could say this was a 2025 Mhmm. Letter, but this felt like the best possible summary Yes. Of the geopolitical Yes.
Speaker 2:Economic dynamic between China and The US. Totally. There was a a paragraph here that stood out. He said, third, Western elites keep holding on to a distinction between innovation, which is mostly the remit of the West and scaling, which they accept that China can do. Jiang says, I wanna dissolve that distinction.
Speaker 2:Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor by being the site of production. They have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas, but American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. And so, again, there's some interesting commentary, in here as well. I forget the exact section.
Speaker 2:Every everybody should go read it. Yeah. But, he basically says, like, in s in SF or within our world, it's become popular to just say, like, oh, yeah. We need to figure out how to build things again, but it's okay because
Speaker 1:AI will solve it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like, the thing that I would say you can be most sure about right now Yeah. Is that AI is not operating with like, you know, you have all this intelligence, all this this intellect, this horsepower, but it doesn't have any agency.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, it's not just sitting there in the background, like, fixing American manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? And while we have this idea that AI will automate manufacturing and create these sort of, like, feedback loops that allow us to start making stuff again in The US, Currently, like, manufacturing jobs in The US are actually declining.
Speaker 1:Declining. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Month over month. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, at the same time, there there are a bunch of people in SF who make a somewhat convincing argument about, the software only singularity and and and bootstrapping by kind of everything off of it. I I agree. It's a little bit more of a sci fi scenario, but there there are somewhat there are some good arguments on both sides. But he does make this point about manufacturing that even when you you how do you do an apples to apples comparison? Well, you look at Tesla and how they operate the Gigafactory in America and then how do they operate the same Gigafactory building the same vehicles in China.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he says, I hear I sometimes hear that The US will save manufacturers through automation. The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation. That's a big part of the reason why Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than California Tesla workers. And and he says wait.
Speaker 1:What does he say? Gigafactory? Is that in here? He says, according to Tesla's corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year. A worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20.
Speaker 1:That's like a huge gap, more than twice because they have more automation over there. And you think of it as like a copy paste thing, like the Gigafactory here should be the same as there. But there really are like more machines, more automation just, you know, walk across the street in China and there's some sort of, you know Yeah. CNC factory that has 10,000 CNC machines or something like that. So there there's just a lot more to build off of there.
Speaker 1:So China's automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else. I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers. Quote, most of what German Mittelsland's firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well, said a consultant to the Financial Times. Quote, in my sector, they look at the price point of the market leader and sell for roughly half that, the boss of a medical device maker told The Economist. It's never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans.
Speaker 1:More than ever, it looks like their core competencies are threatened by Chinese firms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, go read it, but he called Europe cooked and chopped.
Speaker 1:Well, know what's not cooked and chopped? Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. The last section here. So Beijing has been working relentlessly to build up its resilience.
Speaker 1:While The U. S. Talks itself out of Sputnik moments, Beijing has dedicated immense resources to patching up its own deficiencies. It's not a theoretical fear that Chinese companies might lose access to American technologies. So the state is pouring more money than ever before into semiconductor makers and research universities.
Speaker 1:It is investing in clean technologies not so much because it cares about the climate, but because it wants to be self sufficient in energy. And that's a huge, huge just economic incentive. And it's rewriting the rules of the global order with caution because it's been a giant giant benefit.
Speaker 2:We gotta try to get Dan on again. I'm curious to ask him, get his read on everything that happened in Venezuela Oh, yeah. Over the weekend just given that the Chinese delegation was there on the ground Yeah. Meeting with him effectively the night before Yeah. What what crazy story.
Speaker 2:Wild weekend.
Speaker 1:Let me let me finish reading this. So Beijing has been preparing for a cold war without eagerness for for waging it, while The US wants to wage a cold war without preparing for it. So here's a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing's goal is to make nearly every important product in the world while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self sufficient and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi Jinping might hope to make China resilient.
Speaker 1:He is building fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary. Beijing doesn't have to replicate American diplomatic cultural and financial superpowerdom. It might hope that its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter The U. S. And its success in manufacturing might directly destabilize The U.
Speaker 1:S. By delivering the coup de grace over the Rust Belt. The U. S. Might shed a million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade.
Speaker 1:The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse. Black pill? But then he says, I don't think this is going happen, which is good. Yeah. Anyway, Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:Should we talk about Manus?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Manus.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about Manus.
Speaker 1:This all started because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manus. And he
Speaker 2:And I think Bill Gurley has the best voice in venture.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree. The best voice in venture hands down. Who's got a better voice than Bill Gurley?
Speaker 1:It's it's amazing.
Speaker 2:He's got pipes.
Speaker 1:He's got pipes. He he does have a he does have a good voice for podcasting too. It's it's great to hear.
Speaker 2:Well, he's going he's going on a podcast tour. Yeah. And we're we're We're gonna get him. We're I think we'll be a part of
Speaker 1:it. Fantastic. I can expect to
Speaker 2:to hear him on.
Speaker 1:So this all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, formerly Scale AI. He says excited to announce that Manus AI has joined Meta to help us Jack build
Speaker 2:Randall in the x chat. Did anyone check on Deli?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's funny because Jack Jack worked with with Deli.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it it really it really is
Speaker 1:Hey. Hey. Deli might be taking a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing, Deli totally
Speaker 2:Also and Patrick Hollison Yeah. Was bulbous.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:So did Deli capitulate? Did they capitulate
Speaker 1:too early? No. No. He he gets to play musical chairs. He's like, what?
Speaker 1:I I never said anything about Manus. I I I don't know about that. It's a fine a fine investment. It makes sense. Did I mention that, Facebook was a Founders Fund backed company?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:mean, was so I mean,
Speaker 1:the company acquired Manus.
Speaker 2:The moment in time that Benchmark invested in Manus Yeah. It it was a really was crazy move. I was like, what's going on here? It it was just it was just very strange.
Speaker 1:It was it was truly like It was truly contrarian. It was very contrarian. It was
Speaker 2:truly contrarian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the vibes were like, it was the most it was the most intense like part of the trade war. Trump was really putting the screws. He's back in, so he's gonna go extra hard. And it's not like Biden took the the the his foot off the gas of, you know, the trade war with, with China.
Speaker 1:Like, the initial volley of chip restrictions happened under Biden. Like, the Yeah. Like, Chris Miller writes chip war during the Biden admin, and and everyone really wakes up. All the Andoril folks are talking about it. Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here's the other thing. So AI twenty twenty seven was released in April 2025. Yeah. Benchmark did Manus in Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:April 2025 Yeah. Yeah. Same month.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, obviously, a lot of people process AI 2027 as like, cool. This is like sci fi Yeah. Kind of like, you know, let's just extrapolate a bunch. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was kind of a thought exercise. But at the same time, this was kind of the peak in some ways of like the AI war narrative. Yeah. And so to have a famed American venture capital firm backing a Chinese AI firm Sorry. We got
Speaker 1:to go back to Dan Wang. There's so many good things. He talked about AI 2027. Want to read it. But first, let me tell you about Figma.
Speaker 1:Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code backed prototypes and apps fast with Figma. So Dan Wong says, the most read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027.
Speaker 1:The five authors who come from the AI safety world outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027. A decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form after the AI reconstructs creatures that are, quote, to humans what corgis are to wolves. I somehow missed this. I I listened to the Dorkash podcast.
Speaker 1:I read most of AI 2020. Did you pick up with the Corgi line, Tyler? You read this. Right?
Speaker 3:I don't remember that.
Speaker 1:Somehow the Corgi line just got completely missed by me, but I love it. It's so funny. It's such a funny detail. I'm gonna control that for Corgi.
Speaker 2:I'm not it's not pulling anything up.
Speaker 1:No? I don't know. Okay. Maybe maybe Dan's taken some some creative
Speaker 2:Oh, you have to like choose the ending. Okay.
Speaker 1:Oh, you have to find the Corgi ending. Yeah. That's key.
Speaker 2:We'll take the golden retriever ending.
Speaker 1:It's hard to know. Yes, turn us into golden retrievers. We're ready. We're ready
Speaker 2:for Already did.
Speaker 1:I'm not. Who's trying to be a wolf? I'm not trying to be on the wolf the lone wolf sigma grass.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to be a golden retriever on performance enhancing drugs. Yeah. It's a golden retriever with four d delts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we've been growing our hair like golden retriever is working on looking good. Everything's everything's lined up for a golden retriever 2026. It's a good time. It's hard to know what to make of this document.
Speaker 1:He's talking about AI 2027. He says, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening. But even at the start, their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me.
Speaker 1:Sort of an interesting I know why they put it in there because it's engaging. It's entertaining and it makes for good banter. Anyway, he goes on to talk a lot about the dynamic of how Silicon Valley works, how New York finance works, how it's different. It's very interesting. We should read a little bit more of this since we have time today.
Speaker 2:He says You want to go back to Dan?
Speaker 1:I want to go back to Dan.
Speaker 2:We got a Dan addict over here.
Speaker 1:What do you say about finance? He said like they're wrong before breakfast or something. Finance. Let's see. One thing Okay.
Speaker 1:One thing I One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast, so they relentlessly seek new information sources. Consensus is rare since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herd like in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time.
Speaker 1:Startups don't need dissent. They want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins taking shots. That contributes to a culture I think of it as Silicon Valley's soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embrace the right.
Speaker 1:So he calls San Francisco a very insular city. He still has a of nice things to say about it. Anyway, let's
Speaker 2:go back to Since you're back here, I thought it was thought talks about humor within tech and the CCP. Yeah, yeah. I want to gives a line from Sam Altman that is Sam says, I think that AI will probably most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning. Mean, that is
Speaker 1:It's so good. It is fun.
Speaker 2:That is really fun. I'm intentionally That's really fun.
Speaker 1:It's great. It's also maybe true. I don't know. It's like a whole No.
Speaker 2:And I think this is the key problem for the tech industry in 2026. Is like, how do you need to paint a more op Like, the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:For AI Yes. Because it's not working right now. Yeah. Because people see their energy bill going up or they even hear about the idea of their energy bill going up and then they see some of the slop in their feed and the the slop is getting better. Right?
Speaker 2:You look at some of the videos coming out of the slop Venezuela debacle. Right? Slot videos from that. Mean, there's
Speaker 1:Well, I saw Maduro like face
Speaker 2:Yeah. Swapping to a lot of I guess that would the On that slot. The video is higher definition, etcetera. But people are people in all types of roles Mhmm. Are worried about job loss.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And, you know, they see the investment going into AI and they're just scared. Right? Yeah. And so when you you do quotes like this, whether they're serious or not, saying, I think that AI will probably lead to the end of the world, people are starting to ask, like, wait, why are we automating all of this in the first place?
Speaker 2:Can we just stop? Actually, I don't want my job automated. I'll keep doing it. So the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimist Yeah. Because there's a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of very opt I think Dan talks in here about what is the line he says around young people, people maybe in ten years reminiscing about a time when young people didn't just have shelter and an income provided for them. They had to fend for themselves. Yeah, yeah. So Yeah. So anyways, I think that's real.
Speaker 2:He he also talks about CCP humor which was Oh yeah. Xi saying the PM 2.5 back then was even worse than it is now. I used to joke that it was PM two fifty.
Speaker 1:What is that? What is
Speaker 3:that?
Speaker 2:Like, he's just saying, like, PM two five is 2.5 is a measurement for air like, air quality. Oh. Oh. Okay. So you're saying, yeah.
Speaker 1:Particles per million.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like PM 02:50.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let me I have a few rebuttals, but first, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:So first rebuttal on humor. Some of the tech people are funny, and I was noticing this. I I was remembering this as we watched our year in review video that Jackson and our team put together. And in there, one of the clips is is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as, like, famously humorless because he's, like, trying to speak in many levels of and it's this That
Speaker 2:Sam Jo cover? Him coming on our show? Yeah. Mean, he was making the joke on the timeline Yeah. But nobody got the joke.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was saying, I'd never buy a car for for 200
Speaker 1:Yeah. 50 It was hilarious.
Speaker 2:So was like one
Speaker 1:So someone someone posted this this, like, what is was g t three r s or something? And
Speaker 2:And they were like, would you buy this?
Speaker 1:It's for $250,000. And Paul Graham says like, oh, what a waste of money. Like, would never buy this. And and Sam just said, I would never buy it either. And and everyone was like, oh, like, he's so out of touch.
Speaker 1:He has a Koenigsegg. He has a f one. Like, he's he's ridiculous. Of course, you buy it. And and then he came on our show and explained that, no.
Speaker 1:The joke was that he would never buy a car for $2.50 because he wants a multimillion dollar car, which is hilarious. And a lot of people that I've talked to who've interacted with Sam a lot behind the scenes, like, in the right context, he he is truly very funny. But it's just hard because he's trying to speak seven different languages anytime he's on screen because he has to speak to politicians who want to regulate him, to people that might be losing their jobs, but to people also who want to come work for him and also to investors who wanna return.
Speaker 2:I think it was so much easier. It it it you know, in the in the twentieth century Yeah. It it it was like, you know, it was easy mode being a politician Yeah. Or a CEO Yeah. Because you could go into a room of business executives Yeah.
Speaker 2:And said, okay, you currently spend like if you were running like an AI company Yeah. Before the internet Yeah. Before everything was recorded and before everything hit Yeah. You know, every single distribution point immediately, you could go and say like, hey, you currently spend, you know, a billion dollars a year on payroll. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna be able to reduce that by 80%. Yeah. Yeah. There's gonna you're gonna be able to conduct lots of layoffs and then you could go on TV and say like, AI is gonna create an abundant Yeah. You know, future.
Speaker 2:And that and the and the the clips wouldn't kind of No. Across all. Could go talk to Yeah. A labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:And then you just I
Speaker 1:mean, we see this on our show where where people come on and we're all having a conversation and we're all like, oh, yeah. This makes sense. We all have the context. And then a clip goes out and people are quote tweeting like out of context and being like, oh, I hate this. I hate what they're saying.
Speaker 1:And we're like, well, we weren't trying to get them to say something controversial,
Speaker 2:but they you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TBP I of 2025. You just us. To get some context.
Speaker 1:Yes. There was oh, there was more thing. I wanna go to this Dan Wang thing. He he has a great line in here about about feedback he got on his book. Obviously, there's criticism and stuff, but he has this great quip.
Speaker 1:He says, I learned of Leo Rosten's quip that it is the weak who are cruel and gentleness to be expected only from the strong. I thought that was a very good quote. Just very interesting just saying that like like the the if you're, you know, like like the negative comments usually come from a from a place of weakness. But that doesn't mean that there should be empathy. There's one more thing about the It reminds me of my future.
Speaker 1:And the
Speaker 2:positive future. This reminds me of my one and a half year old who will bite my three year old
Speaker 1:There you go. Weakness.
Speaker 2:Has to take the cruel action of trying to chomp the three year old. Three year old's like, hey, look, I'm a little mask monster over here.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. Let me tell you about the two AI features that are sort of dueling right now that I think are interesting.
Speaker 2:And then we gotta go back to Manus because you still haven't given your take on Manus. We're gonna
Speaker 1:do Manus. But let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, to save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts, move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:To to be partnered
Speaker 1:So we lenders will have to dive into these pieces in more depth at some point. But basically, I do think that even though Dan says that tech is very insular, it's less contrarian, there's only everyone aligns themselves around one vision of the future and just like runs at it. And I think he is correct in some ways. There is some dissension and at least conversation back and forth, mainly between Dwarkash right now and Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson wrote a piece on AI and the human condition, where he sort of reacts to Dwarkash's piece with Philip Tremell Trammell called Capital in the twenty twenty twenty second Century.
Speaker 1:And Duarkash is talking about capital accumulation, inequality, how things might need to be redistributed in the future. It's unclear exactly the timeline. And if you go out really, really far, it becomes much more much easier to wrap your head around all of this. Like, at one point, they start talking about buying galaxies, which is sort of like a funny thought experiment. And and at that point, like, you were to just say, hey, we're going full communist with the galaxies.
Speaker 1:We're distributing them equally. It's like, well, there's there's trillions of galaxies. Like, you personally would get a thousand galaxies. And it's like, yeah, that's probably, like, enough. Like, it takes twenty five thousand years to get to the nearest galaxy.
Speaker 1:Like, imagine the life imagine the life you're living where you're immortal and you're like, just to go between my two my two galaxies that I own, it takes twenty five thousand years. Like, I don't know that I'd be so pissed off that, like, oh, I I wasn't able to get more than the one one six billionth of the galaxies out there. I I don't know. It just feels like such crazy.
Speaker 2:Tried to kinda stake a claim. I know America, we the moon's ours. It's not legally Yeah. Yet, but it's ours. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's somewhat inevitable.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's crazy no one's been to the moon. Like, we went there, like, fifty years ago more and everyone was just like, we're good.
Speaker 2:Lost art. Art. Art.
Speaker 1:You'll send some robots. But but literally, this is a crazy thing. No no other country has landed a man on the moon. I I I don't know why. What what are you waiting for?
Speaker 1:Get somebody up there. Anyway, are you saying about acquiring galaxies? You want one? You want more than one? You want more than a thousand?
Speaker 3:I want more than a thousand.
Speaker 1:You want more than a thousand? Just say
Speaker 3:you're say you're not a say you're a
Speaker 1:A communist? Yeah. Like, I want more. You you want you want 2,000 galaxies?
Speaker 3:But so I I think that quote was actually referencing
Speaker 1:Leopold.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was Leopold. Yeah. And and people are arguing whether Leopold was being serious and he was.
Speaker 1:It's sick. Yeah. It's a great quote. I love it. I I I I I it it is it is sufficiently sci fi for me.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm very very excited about that quote. And it's and it's thought provoking. It's it's truly it's truly thought provoking to think about what what property rights look like in a world where it takes you twenty five thousand years to get to the place that you own. Like your vacation home. Unless I don't know I don't know if the AGI pill people are so AGI pill that they think we're going to defeat the speed of light.
Speaker 1:Every, like, physicist I've ever talked to has always said like, no. The the the the like, that one holds forever. That's not like, oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple decades away or fusion or fission. Like, all these other things are, somewhat engineering problems. I think the speed of light is, like, gonna be around forever.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Just need a faster horse. It's the year of the fire horse.
Speaker 1:It is? Yeah. What does that mean? Wait.
Speaker 4:I thought they 2026
Speaker 2:Chinese year of the fire horse.
Speaker 1:Are they adding superlatives to the animals? I thought it was just horse, snake, dragon, and then they rotated through those. You can
Speaker 2:see It's the year of It's we upgraded animals. It's amazing. It's fire horse.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. I'm I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Manus is acquired. Think
Speaker 2:Okay. Back to Manus.
Speaker 1:Great great Chinese century coming up. I think we're gonna be be putting on those hats soon. Ramp Labs modeled it out. They of course, Ramp Labs is AI agent for spreadsheet software. So you can give it a prompt, it will build the spreadsheet for you.
Speaker 1:Very, very cool. And they did a little analysis on the meta acquisition of Manus AI. They said the estimated price is 4,000,000,000 to $6,000,000,000 based on AI M and A comps. It's the fastest to 100,000,000 ARR in history, just eight months. Wow.
Speaker 1:And benchmark likely eight to 12 x in under a year.
Speaker 2:So Good. Again, they're of estimating here. I think people were kind of putting the deal between 2 and 3,000,000,000 Yeah. Is is what I had heard. Buy that.
Speaker 2:So again, yeah, mean, I guess, let's get in let's get it what what was I guess, what was your immediate reaction? The thing that I was excited about is this is Zac buying a product that people love.
Speaker 1:Well, that's
Speaker 2:a debate. But
Speaker 1:but I I like your take. But but there there Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what that's what I'm saying. So so he just went he just went through a talent acquisition Yes.
Speaker 1:Era.
Speaker 2:Yes. He he they they they're the, you know, biggest investor in
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Scale, right? Yeah. But they didn't acquire the product. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Still And and I think they're actually acquiring data
Speaker 2:from And other historically Companies as Zuck has been saying
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, drum you know, beating the personal super intelligence drum. Yeah. It's been very unclear what that means. Yeah. Manus has been building high quality agents.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. They're sort of time and time again, I talk to people that are just very excited about Manus. They're like, just use Manus.
Speaker 1:Like,
Speaker 2:it's the year of the agent. Yeah. Right? Like, use it. You'll see the future.
Speaker 2:Sure. And so just given Zuck's history from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what their like, one version of personal super intelligence is you have AI agents that can go out on the internet and do things for you. Yep. They can go, I think in the context of meta, I think about like shopping. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? You see something on Instagram
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That you like and you can you could trigger an agent effectively like, go find this product.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Like you see a car that you like, go find this product.
Speaker 1:The elusive GT3 RS that
Speaker 2:GT3 bench.
Speaker 1:Can't find.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you see a make any image or video shop of all.
Speaker 1:And and in fact, I would I would probably argue that LLMs in the chat form where you have a bunch of information with a, you know, knowledge cut off baked into a into some big model, a llama four, and it's vended through the Instagram search box that you chat with, that just it it can never fully satisfy the the vision of personal superintelligence, a personal assistant, something that actually can take actions for you. It feels like it's incredible. It's amazing. Like, obviously, for knowledge retrieval, it's great. But it was never going to fulfill the real vision there.
Speaker 1:So this does feel like I don't know. I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way. I wonder if we are talking about going out and shopping for you off platform or if it's more doing things within the meta ecosystem. I don't even know what that would look like. But a lot of the image models that they're training, you can imagine that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystem.
Speaker 1:So if Meta trains an amazing image editing model, a nano banana, right? Yeah. Direct nano banana competitor. What's that going to look like? It's probably going to look like you take a photo, you put it in Instagram, then you say, hey, change the background.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Make the sky less gray,
Speaker 4:right?
Speaker 1:And it'll just do it really, really well. And that would exist purely in there. And maybe they open source it, maybe they put out but that's not the that's not the product.
Speaker 2:I also thinking of, I guess, one way that I am thinking about Manus in the context of Zak and and the AI team at Meta are saying, which personal super intelligence. Right? They're talking about they've they've they've talked about integrating AI into Ray Ban Metas. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:So when I think when and if you're using Ray Ban Metas, can say, hey, Meta, and then you can give it a task or or ask it a question or things like that. And so I I expect that Manas type workflows will be heavily integrated into a hey, when you say, hey, Meta, and you're wearing glasses, like, hey, build me a slide deck Yeah. To help me prep for my final later. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:And I can imagine, like, effectively, the the same product experience that Manus has today will be integrated into, like, Meta
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. It's the leading AI trust management platform. I I agree with you. At the same time, there's a lot of areas where it feels very natural for Google to expand into.
Speaker 1:It feels very natural for for Microsoft to expand into, Apple to expand into. Like, Apple has a spreadsheet app. Right? They have a word processor. They like, Meta doesn't really have those.
Speaker 1:They did Meta for Meta for Meta at work for a while, but they they it it it doesn't this whole idea of, like, go to an open Instagram to do your homework feels crazy to me. And the same thing with open Instagram to build a slide deck, that feels crazy to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but everything that they're doing in AI, they're Yeah. They're piping through Meta AI, the new standalone app.
Speaker 1:So maybe one
Speaker 2:So that's a bunch of sort of like to me, I look at that as like experimental area that you can just put anything into it. I was told by someone close to the action that apparently like the meta AI trough,
Speaker 1:cool vibes?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Vibes. Yeah. Meta vibes. Actually, the usage is actually insane.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. No way. So trough? Wait.
Speaker 1:No. But but I mean, it's it's it's terrible in the App Store. Right? It it cannot be ranked. Even even Sora is not ranking well.
Speaker 1:Like, can you just look this up? I don't know. While we're looking that up, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. You see that ticker down in the bottom telling you the crypto prices?
Speaker 1:That's thanks to Phantom.
Speaker 2:Legends.
Speaker 1:Let me try and find I I I don't think Meta Vibes is gonna rank, but at the same time, they might have gotten a bump over Christmas because when you get the Ray Bans, you unbox those, you have to download the Meta AI app to integrate with the Ray Bans. So maybe they got a pump from that? I don't know. Sora, let me see what
Speaker 2:It's not in the top 25.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson recently wrote, It's also worth noting the relative popularity of human generated content versus AI generated content. Sora is down to 59 in the App Store. And I count double digit human denominated social apps that rank above it. Yet I get the argument that this is the worst AI will ever be, but it will also never be human, which is what humans want most of all. There's a bunch of great posts about content and where all this goes.
Speaker 1:And I think Ben Thompson offered a very, very compelling white pill. Dwarkash is a little bit more like this is going to be extremely rough, so it requires aggressive maneuvers and rethinking the entire social contract and potentially the entire economy. Ben Thompson is a little bit more like things can continue as they have been for the most part. At least that was my
Speaker 2:One thing with Manus, the is maybe the first acquisition of in the billion in the billions for a company with a Isle Of Man domain. They're manus dot I m. I am. You don't you don't see a lot of multi billion dollar .im acquisitions.
Speaker 1:Isle Of Man. Tyler, is that where you're from?
Speaker 2:Isle Of Chad?
Speaker 3:You Did you get in did
Speaker 1:you get into Luxmaxing over the break?
Speaker 3:I've been bone smashing.
Speaker 1:It looks like you got into Luxmaxing, doesn't it? Doesn't his mid face ratio look different?
Speaker 3:I gotta fix my Yeah. Recessed maxilla.
Speaker 1:I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better. He doesn't have the filter on. Do you wait. Do you guys have the filter on?
Speaker 2:I think yeah.
Speaker 1:Think they do. I think they do have
Speaker 2:the filter on. Because Wait. Tyler, go go like this.
Speaker 1:Do the The double josser.
Speaker 2:I got definitely they definitely have the filter
Speaker 1:on. Definitely. Definitely. Well, speaking of Dwarkash, he's sponsored by Labelbox. We're sponsored by Labelbox.
Speaker 1:Labelbox, we're delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. We love Labelbox. We're considering making a physical Labelbox.
Speaker 2:And putting Tyler in.
Speaker 1:We will see. We don't wanna leak it. We will figure out if we if we can figure out how to physically put
Speaker 2:Tyler in a box.
Speaker 1:I just like boxes. So Signal asks, can someone explain why Meta bought Manus? What's the one pager for Zuck other than we have an f ton of money, so why not? And Lucas Beyer, Metas List, researcher says, they know how to build they they know really really well how to build good agents. And maybe that's enough.
Speaker 2:Nick Dobo says best tool set on the market. They bought a Swiss army knife to hand any AI model, wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder connectors. So, yeah. They're just good at product. I give them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gotta give Eric them Maher says head in the head in the box. His his handle has box in it. He says, I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to be commoditized and the value would be in the products on top of the models. But MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized, sucking up all the oxygen in the room.
Speaker 1:As always, I was right. He's taking a
Speaker 2:look through my Hilarious line. As always, I was right.
Speaker 1:Ex ex Meta people are getting spicy. Do you see the Yan Lakun Financial Times deep dive? We we should dig into that. But he took a bunch of shots at a lot of different people, basically just saying, like, you can't tell a researcher what to do, especially not me. He was very, very salty over Alex Wang coming in and and becoming his boss effectively.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it feels like
Speaker 2:You got leveled.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. It is an odd I mean, it's a bold choice to put Jan Lecun on the bench. He's a, I think, touring award winner. He's like one of the greatest AI researchers in history.
Speaker 2:Where did he land on the Metis list, Tyler?
Speaker 1:Jan Lecun. How did he do? But he's back with a $3,000,000,000 fund raise valuation. But the interesting thing is, like, I think there's two ways that you can read into the Ilya Sutskever, We Are in an Age of Research story. Tyler, do you have Jan on the mix?
Speaker 3:Yeah. He actually wasn't on there.
Speaker 1:He wasn't on
Speaker 3:there? I think we were trying to rage bait him or something. No. Yeah. He wasn't on there.
Speaker 1:Wow. We are so bad. But anyway, you can read Ilya's
Speaker 2:To be clear, you were trying to get it. Don't we don't participate in rage based.
Speaker 1:We we don't we don't have anything to do with the rankings. The you can interpret the Ilya Setskiver age research concept as, hey, we we we if you're a hyperscaler, you need a really, really solid research team to go extra hard into research because you wanna be the first one to to have that research breakthrough. So you need a lot of you need a lot of true researchers. Or you can read into it as, like, hey, this is kind of an AI winter, and the research is sort of stabilized, so we can pull in all the best research. Yeah, we need to get to the frontier, but we can be a month behind.
Speaker 1:But if we productize really well, we can win, and we can have a really great outcome here. And then, you know, when Ilya comes up with something great, it's gonna get copy pasted all over the industry because of the, you know, SF house parties and, you know, papers that get written and, you know, open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. Maybe. Maybe not. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely siloed. But typically, it doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Ali from Databricks was was at the end of the year was talking about how He's great. He he's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gotta have him back on. He was talking about putting people in different buckets. So like, there's a super intelligence. Right?
Speaker 2:There's a super intelligence bucket. I think that when you look at like, Zach can say, we are trying to build super intelligence. Yeah. That is much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising Yeah. And commerce.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around. Around. Right? In some ways in some ways, OpenAI is doing the exact same thing.
Speaker 2:Right? Are there are different groups that are that are taking, you know, maybe Anthropics taking a taking a different approach in terms of saying, like, yeah, we're we're actually trying to build super intelligence and we're doing it in a very opinionated way. Yeah. But anyway, so I I just I just like to see I will be very excited to see Mhmm. Hopefully see them try to take what has built and dramatically scale it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Quick shout out to two point six in the chat. He says he's down 99.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Woah. He
Speaker 1:says he's up 20 k. And he says life is good. So what an amazing start Congratulations.
Speaker 2:I also saw Sam Schefer in the chat earlier. He launched a new product Oh, over over the break called timelines. It's like a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. Oh, that's fun. Excited to
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Check this out, and congrats to to Sam.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We like Nicey.
Speaker 2:Potentially the best tag tagline of all time, the best marketing copy. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the Nicey.
Speaker 1:That's that's how it works. Yeah. Anyway, Grok. So there were two major blockbuster deals before the end of the year. Unclear, I mean, I were both sort of these zombie acquisitions or were any of them just clean normal deals?
Speaker 1:I guess we don't fully know. We know that the Grok Nvidia deal was very much a sort of ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some the IP license, pay out the investors.
Speaker 2:$20,000,000,000 deal. What should we do with that, John? Should we hit that you hit that app loving Gong?
Speaker 1:We can hit that app loving Gong. We have a new Gong. Everyone look at this Gong.
Speaker 2:It's bigger than ever. It's bigger than ever. We actually it's it's so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of, careful with it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's it's a John sized Gong. So John is six eight, if if you're just tuning in for the first time.
Speaker 1:It's a massive gong.
Speaker 2:It is a massive gong for a massive company. Fantastic company. Yes. AppLovin, which we're, incredibly excited to partner with for 2026.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna believe this, but AppLovin's next in the stack. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business. So there's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Premack, about how Grok employees made out in the NVIDIA deal. He made some calls to find out.
Speaker 1:And in short, they did very, very well, even if not fully vested. We did we did hear that if you were there a very short amount of time and you were not senior at all, you might have had a bad run, but we'll have to dig into that a little bit more. But it seems like in general, they did it was everyone sort of got paid. It sounds like Chamath did very well on this. He was very early
Speaker 2:Oh, mean, Chamath haters were in shambles.
Speaker 1:We need to check on
Speaker 2:them. We need to check If on one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them. If you haven't heard from them Wellness I would be worried.
Speaker 1:Are you doing okay? Call Let's just go hang out. Let's Call your friend. Play some golf or
Speaker 3:something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take him
Speaker 1:out. Mind off.
Speaker 2:Touch grass. Yep. Touch your grass.
Speaker 1:Because it's gonna be rough for a while. Charmoth is on a on a tear. And what didn't he like didn't he basically give back the LP capital right before? So it's like 100% of his own money or something. I saw some take about that.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure if that's when that happened. But I know social capital kind of converted to a family office.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that was way after.
Speaker 1:That was way after? Okay.
Speaker 2:At least the first. I mean, the haters will hate to see that he invested Molt back to
Speaker 1:back I mean back
Speaker 2:So with conviction, with authority, Yeah. So And to give him credit.
Speaker 1:So Alex Heath over at sources. News has new details on the NVIDIA Grok deal. The whole process took less than two weeks and was personally driven by Jensen Huang. No other bidders. Huang wired money early and wanted the deal to close before the new year.
Speaker 2:What chat. Wow. What a chat. Send the $20,000,000,000 wire. Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs.
Speaker 2:I have good for my 20,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That was actually crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very interesting. Grok is we were talking about this, like, why is NVIDIA buying Grok?
Speaker 1:Is it a response to the TPU? We'll have to get some of the semi analysis folks on the show to dig into it. But I think that there is Grok has been they've been on this, like, super crazy roller coaster. I think not a lot of people expected them to wind up at $20,000,000,000 A lot of people assume that the Yeah. Because, I mean, there's two sides to it.
Speaker 1:One is like when if you read the actual social capital the actual social capital, like, memo that Chamath put together, it's it makes so much sense to invest at the valuation he did because Jonathan, the CEO and the founder, was early on the TPU team, the father of the TPU. Like, the guy understands how to make a chip that does one thing really well. But
Speaker 2:This was, what, seven years before people in tech broadly knew what the TPU was?
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. Very, very early. Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But the the so so so there was always, like, that sort of bull case that it was, like, it was a real team, real expertise, building something real. But with a lot of the custom silicon, the custom chips, you could you sort of like point your bow and then you release the arrow and then you just like wait like five or ten years because like tape out, just just tape out, just, like, going from the design of the chip to actually getting the first one made takes, eighteen months or something like that. Like, it takes years and then and then you're sort of locked into the specific spec and you're building an ecosystem of developers that can run on your chips. And so, like, there's this you make a bet on a certain architecture, and there's other firms right now that are betting on like, we're going super long the transformer architecture.
Speaker 1:We're going super long Cerberus, like wafer scale. Want to put the whole model on one chip instead of a rack instead of a rack of a whole bunch of chips. Or we want to be really memory constrained or or have a ton of memory or something like that. So you make your decisions about what trade offs you're making, and then you kind just wait. And you hope that people come up with a use for what you made.
Speaker 1:With Grok, people were like, oh, okay. It's fast. When when Llama came out, people were like, oh, we can stream tokens really, really fast. It's very cool. Some of the demos are really cool.
Speaker 1:But there was there were also a flip side where people were saying, well, it was very expensive to do those demos and maybe it wouldn't scale properly. But I think there was a little bit of like like, the the the team is great, obviously. And I think Grok was probably getting comped. Like, you you were effectively looking at, like, Grok v two versus, like, TPU v seven, necessarily accounting for like, okay, if you continue to invest in this, like Jensen will, obviously, and the team's great and they have somewhat of a direction, and there's also some sort of bifurcation of the models where sometimes you need a really big model, sometimes you need a really small model, Sometimes you need a model that's in your phone. Sometimes you need a model that's in a data center.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you need a model in space.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you need a chip company that sponsors the winner of the Constructors' Championship. Grok sponsored McLaren.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Which they won. I didn't ask. It was a good omen.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Jensen saw that. Yeah. He's like, I got a lot of cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not buy a winning I mean, they're the the the chip company that's sponsoring the winning team
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Pretty compelling.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Meanwhile Yeah. Red Bull, loser No chips. Works with Oracle. Oracle stock Yeah.
Speaker 2:Been down in the dump.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. Just doing Just the just one based analysis.
Speaker 2:Sponsorship based analysis of markets. Anyways, continue.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean, think as this I heard an interesting take that one of the wafer scale bull cases that if compute does go to space, you don't necessarily want a rack in space because not only does that take up more space, but you there's so many different points of failure of like, is this connected to this? Is this connected to that? Whereas if you just have like one big the entire model just on one chip, you could potentially put that in space much easier. But Grok made a specific bet, and and it's still it's not like it it totally panned out and it's like they're winning right now. Like, TPU is the hot thing, but then there's NVIDIA GB200s are still like flying off the shelves and there's all these debates about Blackwell and stuff.
Speaker 1:And NVIDIA is doing great, but I think if you look to the future where there's different models for different things, sometimes you need something really fast, sometimes you need something really Then you want to be able to control, you know, all of the different chip architectures, all of the different And I remember, didn't Jonathan tell us he doesn't fav at TSMC? I believe he told us that. And I'm pretty sure that's true. And so there is also
Speaker 2:Where would he
Speaker 1:Maybe either Samsung or GlobalFoundries, I believe. And then I think
Speaker 2:By the way, we gotta give a shout out to Ryan Ryan Siebert
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:LinkedIn chat. He says w stream best content on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Let's go, Ryan.
Speaker 2:You One for of our two. We typically will have like three viewers on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Thanks for Restream.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. Thanks for Restream. We are there. So thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 1:So closing out Grok, there's a few different takes. Tyler Hodge says, it appears Groc will return over $4,000,000,000 to Social Capital and Shammoth. I don't know how big the fund was, but it's safe to say this is one of the best venture outcomes of all time. Unbelievable. Power laws rule everything around.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just getting so did you did you read this as like defensive at all?
Speaker 1:This? Tyler?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I'm saying I'm saying just buying
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh.
Speaker 2:Like, is this offense or defense for Jensen? Clearly, he's got the he's got the he's just got a lot of cash. He's gotta do something with it. Divide he's not gonna just dividend out cash. He's willing to take bets with it.
Speaker 2:He's investing in all the labs, all the neo clouds.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:I I mean, I think he's like almost like even though he's not literally the richest person in the world, he's run the biggest company, so he has the most capital like fire around at places. And I think
Speaker 2:to put to put this into perspective Yeah. This is like us saying investing in a nice camera, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like it's not the kind of like it's we take like Jensen personally let this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would you would do the same thing for for a nice camera.
Speaker 1:But I don't I I I guess the bigger question is like is is NVIDIA spread too thin? And they don't even own a social network. Every other every other mag seven company owns a social network. Right? Facebook, Amazon has Maybe they should.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA chat, just for AI researchers on Rumble. Something like that. I don't know. But, but it it it feels like it feels like the the the cloud that was competing with some of their customers feels like they sort of pulled back on that. It feels like they've remained as much of a pure play as you can at that scale.
Speaker 1:And so this feels like, I don't know, maybe it's a little defensive, but feels just like a very natural extension of what they already do, which is It selling would be very different if we were seeing them like, oh, they're buying power assets and they're gonna build their own data centers and they wanna into or they wanna step on Oracle's toes and they wanna step on Crusoe's toes or anyone else's toes. So I don't know. But let's go into Gavin Baker and what he says about NVIDIA buying Grok. He says NVIDIA is buying Grok for two reasons. Inference is disaggregating into pre fill and decode.
Speaker 1:SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. RubinCPX, Rubin and the putative Rubin SRAM variant derived from Grok should give NVIDIA the ability to mix and match chips to create the optimal balance of performance versus cost for each workload. Rubin CPX is optimized for massive context windows during prefill as a result of super high memory capacity with its relatively low bandwidth GDDR DRAM. Rubin is the workhorse for training and high density batched inference workloads with its HBM DRAM striking a balance between memory bandwidth and capacity. The Grok derived Rubin SRAM is optimized for ultra low latency agentic reasoning inference workloads as a result of SRAM's extremely high memory bandwidth and at the cost of lower memory capacity.
Speaker 1:In the latter case, either CPX or the normal Rubin will likely be used for prefill. Two, it has been clear for a long time that SRAM architectures can hit token per second metrics much higher than GPUs, TPUs or any ASIC that we have seen yet, extremely low latency per individual user at the expense of throughput per dollar. It was less clear eighteen months ago whether end users were willing to pay for the speed. SRAM, more expensive per token due to much smaller batch sizes. It is now abundantly clear from Cerberus and Grok's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed.
Speaker 1:And so we've seen this with a lot of the meme of like you're sitting there waiting for a deep research report in ChatGPT or you're firing off Cloud Code and then you're just waiting and you're scrolling or you're doing something else. And there's just there's a lot of like sitting around, waiting around. And now the really good developers are able to orchestrate six different Cloud Code instances all at once, but everyone would be happy with faster responses. And most people are in this weird in between where they're paying $200 a month for something that they're using constantly and is doing like all of their job. And so would they pay $2,000 a month for something that's 10 times faster or even two times faster?
Speaker 1:In many cases, yes, if they're doing extremely economically valuable work. And so anything that can offer a different dimension of optimization on that Pareto frontier is going to be interesting.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 1:think that's why you're seeing folks try and become not just GPU rich, but like ASIC rich on a particular scalar vector of performance trade off curve.
Speaker 2:We should get Andrew from Cerberus back on the show, because he came on for five minutes. Yeah. It's really one of those days where we had like 20 guests.
Speaker 1:And we were like, this guy's like, he's a legend. Dollar I'm glad we could ring the gong for you, this feels disrespectful at this point. Anyway, let me tell you about vibe.co where d to c brands, b to b start startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like Meta.
Speaker 2:So Super pumped to partner with Vibe. We love advertising.
Speaker 1:We love advertising. I
Speaker 2:have some insight into their metrics and this is a company that you should potentially join. If you love advertising, I would I would be excited to go work there.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:Pumped to partner with them. So Should we talk about DoorDash. DoorDash. No. We're talking about we're not talking about DoorDash.
Speaker 1:What are
Speaker 2:talking about? We're talking about a post that Alright. People assumed was about DoorDash.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. And Okay. So the the the post is titled holy effing ass.
Speaker 1:Not swearing really really hurts the quality or you can read it on the screen. But he's very sensational. So it's a screenshot from Reddit. It has 36,000,000 views and 207,000 likes. It's a massive post.
Speaker 1:It got 11,000 upvotes on Reddit. So, it says, I am a developer of a for a major food delivery app. The priority fee and driver benefit fee go 100% to the company. The driver sees 0% of it, $0 of it. So here's where it gets conspiratorial.
Speaker 1:It says, I am posting this from a library WiFi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don't care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I've been sitting on this for about eight months just watching the code get I
Speaker 2:hope they sue me, but I'm on a library WiFi with a burner
Speaker 1:We're gonna dig into all the different aspects of this, but this is crazy. Some people in the chat already read this, but we're gonna go through it. So just watching the code getting pushed to production, I can't sleep at night knowing I helped to build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but reality but the reality is actually so much more depressing than conspiracy theories. I'm a back end engineer.
Speaker 1:I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings with where product managers PMs, thanks, discuss how to squeeze another 0.4 margin out of human assets. That's literally what they call drivers in the database schema. They talk about these people that, like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the priority delivery is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a psychological value add.
Speaker 1:Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99 it changes a Boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an AB test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders. We just purposefully delayed non priority orders by five to ten minutes by making the to make the priority ones feel faster by comparison. Management loved the results.
Speaker 1:We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. Wait. So it does this is this is incorrect because he says it is it does nothing to speed you up, but, like, you are getting a faster delivery there. I mean, it's like it's even in this scenario, it's like maybe unethical but like this is actually a bull case for paying $2.99 because like if the default service is actually slower and $2.99 gets me five to ten minutes faster.
Speaker 2:This made me think they should
Speaker 3:add a
Speaker 2:feature that's whenever you get around I'll take it whenever you get around to it. And so it's just like it's just like Surprised. Really really
Speaker 1:I'm feeling lucky.
Speaker 2:I mean, no. It's just like the lowest cost version. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You might not get the pizza Do three
Speaker 1:you remember that? Or Uber Pool, those?
Speaker 3:Amazon does this for packages too.
Speaker 1:So you get
Speaker 3:you get a credit if you, like, take it in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You get, like, a Kindle store credit or something on Prime. It's kind of interesting. But, yeah.
Speaker 1:So so I use DoorDash pretty regularly. I never pay for priority delivery because the time always seems about the same, and so I just don't care, and I never push that button. But this makes me feel like the button works even though he's saying it does nothing to speed you up. And so that's kind of odd. But anyway, it goes on that to much darker places.
Speaker 1:He says, but the thing that makes me sick, the main reason I'm quitting is the desperation score. We have a hidden metric that driver for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at ten p. M. And accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high desperation.
Speaker 1:Once they are tagged, the system deliberately stops showing them high paying orders. The logic is why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he's desperate enough to do it for $6. We save the good tips for the casual drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience while the full timers get grinded into dust. That feels like that might not work. Like, either it might just wind up putting, like, a like, a strain on the entire system and just slowing.
Speaker 1:Like, you feel like you would just wanna, like, optimize for the fastest possible delivery at all times, but I don't know. Anyway, theoretically, this could be happening. Then there is the benefit fee. You've probably seen that $101.50 regulatory response fee or the driver benefits fee that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like it's you're helping the worker.
Speaker 1:In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for policy defense, and that fee feeds directly into it. That's so that's so interesting. I I I feel like
Speaker 2:That's not really how money Money works.
Speaker 1:Works. Right?
Speaker 2:It's not like it's like route, you know
Speaker 1:This is the earmark for this.
Speaker 2:It's not a guy in linear being like tag the, you know, revenue from this product
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Send it to that.
Speaker 1:No. No. You know what this is? This is this is like dude logic for being like, oh, oh, I got I got a I got a $5,000 bonus. Like, this is watch money.
Speaker 1:I should buy a watch or something like that. Like like, this this money is for this thing. Right? It's like Dude. Oh, I got a bonus.
Speaker 1:I I'm buying a car with this with this money. Instead of just being like, no, you have a pool of money that is that is Yeah. Completely fungible and liquid. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. If you spend say so so in restaurants Yes. Around LA Yep. You'll see like an employee well-being charge Mhmm. Which is like one, you know, one to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Three, four Yeah. Sometimes 5% Mhmm. Is going And I would assume that is going entirely to the employees. Right? Like the place we go for breakfast Yeah.
Speaker 2:Has a charge
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that they advertise as going to the health care Yeah. For the employees.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, if it turns out that restaurant owner Yeah. Was taking that money and kinda putting it towards rent, I would be very upset.
Speaker 1:Yes. Well
Speaker 2:So so that I can understand the general Yeah. The general framing here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All all of this is mean
Speaker 1:The well, so so so the key difference is like, is the money actually fungible or or is it a function? Because in theory, like, tips go to the service workers. And if the restaurant has a great year and lots of people come in and they all tip a lot, then that money goes directly to the workers as a bonus. Right? And so they they they get that delivered to them.
Speaker 1:If you say, hey, the tips go to the workers
Speaker 2:Just say you haven't worked in a restaurant.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? Oh, they because it pooled?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, when I when I worked in a at a at a restaurant, we'd get the tips. I mean, most of the tips were daily. You get paid out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But it is a function of the business.
Speaker 1:It's directly aligned with the business progress. Yeah. And so you would expect that if this delivery service, which everyone is alleging is DoorDash, if there are a lot of deliveries, there are a lot of people paying $1.5 for driver benefits, and so that creates a larger pool for driver benefits. If the amount of drivers stays flat, then the amount of driver benefits should increase. If that's not happening, then that is a violation of this promise, right?
Speaker 1:Basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In reality, the money goes straight to this corporate slush fund, they say. So and regarding tips, we're essentially doing tip theft two point zero. We don't steal them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a high tipper, you'll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay.
Speaker 1:If you tip zero, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver. It's subsidizing us. You're paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and angry.
Speaker 1:Ask me anything before this gets taken down.
Speaker 2:I mean, really I mean, first of all, gotta feel bad for this person who if it's real, they just quit working at delivery app. Yeah. It's a software and back end software engineer. Now they're drunk in a public library Oh, no. On a burner laptop.
Speaker 1:Are allowed to be drunk in a library? That feels like shouldn't be drunk.
Speaker 2:Drunk and angry in a in a in a public library on a burner. Imagine, did they when did they buy the burner laptop? Did they get drunk before they bought did they get drunk and then go buy the burner laptop and then hit the library? Or very premeditated?
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's a yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. Do. So so I I get extremely
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm extremely frustrated. I I will say this like, this feels like feels like fan. Yes. Yes. Really?
Speaker 1:What restaurant?
Speaker 2:In in in high school.
Speaker 1:Oh, I know.
Speaker 2:I worked at I actually My first job first job outside of refing soccer Mhmm. Was picking up cigarette butts Mhmm. With my hands Wow. For two hours in the morning. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I'd go at a restaurant and then I go work at a surf shop, then I actually worked my way up the restaurant picking Sure. Up the cigarette butts off
Speaker 1:the Picking up the cigars.
Speaker 2:It was just pure cigarette butts. I was like Good. I was like, I think I
Speaker 1:was Wait. People could smoke indoors or something?
Speaker 2:It was it was like a it was a brewery. Okay. So
Speaker 1:people would sit out sit outside.
Speaker 2:They sit outside late at night and so that they would go into like
Speaker 1:This is a child in this smoke filled environment. Yeah. I'd go in and
Speaker 2:like, I'd go pick up the cigarette butts It's brutal. In my hands. I didn't even wear gloves. Very very very gross. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Disgusting. And so so I so this feels like it's fan fan fiction. Yeah. There's there's certainly some truth to it. Which is the truth is that like, if you're using a delivery app, you should assume the delivery app is trying to get as much money as possible Of from you.
Speaker 2:Yes. And going to psychologically manipulate you
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Into feeling better about the order Yep. Feeling better about the value, feeling like this person.
Speaker 1:It's on its way. They're gonna do everything they can UX wise to make it a delightful Yeah. Experience or someone that's
Speaker 2:And as somebody Works. Who You keep coming back for. I appreciate the I appreciate the the art of tipping.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There's an art to it. Mhmm. It's it's something I've always enjoyed doing Mhmm. Because I'm always getting a service Mhmm. And I wanna and I multiple times in my life worked for for tips.
Speaker 2:So having this sort of digital intermediary
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is messing with that relationship sucks.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? Like if I order if I order groceries and somebody's driving all around, I want to give them Yeah. A meaningful amount of money for doing this service.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And so if if you have this intermediary that's kind of messing with that and that's super frustrating. Again, I don't I I don't know exactly where this goes. Right? This is clearly a product that
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Participants on both sides are happily maybe not happily, but they are still like, you know, you can say you hate these platforms Mhmm. But you're still using them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:Right? And people are still accepting
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:These jobs. There are people that Yeah. As much as they don't like the experience maybe of being the labor side of this equation are ultimately still like the flexibility of being able to earn $10 here, $20 there, etcetera. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. The thing that always the thing that always bugged me was when there's not enough financial education among the workers that you saw, like, Uber drivers who would be, like, renting a car or or they'd buy a car with high depreciation and they wouldn't factor the depreciation into their wages. And so they were actually upside down on the deal and losing money every month. That felt like, woah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, there needs to be something that helps that. I know that there at least with the Uber days, there were some forums where people would go and calculate the highest ROI vehicle you could possibly buy. And sometimes it was Tesla. Sometimes it was, you know, oh, you get this version of the Escalade that's four years old, so it's already depreciated. And then you can do Uber Black and it's the highest ROI possible.
Speaker 1:But but if if someone's not doing that, then they could actually not be making money, which is very rough. But anyway
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Tony rebutted this and said, this is not DoorDash and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated this kind of culture to the the the kind of culture described in this Reddit post. There's so much wrong with this post. Dashers are not human assets. Having a metric like a desperation score is an abomination. We've never had a driver benefit fee.
Speaker 1:Why would why would you charge for faster delivery but not make it faster? We're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we work every day to make our platform better for everyone who comes to it. What's described here is appalling, if true, whoever's operating in this manner should be ashamed. And DoorDash, the official account quoted as well and said that the awful claims in this post clearly hit a nerve. Be clear, this Reddit post is not about DoorDash.
Speaker 1:Given how differently we operate, we thought we'd take a moment to share what our approach is actually like. And there was a whole bunch of back and forth. Some people were screenshotting it saying that it might have been AI generated. And I think that's not a good rebuttal because, first off, just, you know, I read the whole thing. It doesn't feel like it's written by AI.
Speaker 1:But even so, if you're a whistleblower and you have a bunch of information to share, I don't see a problem with passing that through an LLM to punch it up and get it spell checked and grammar checked. Like, it might not do you any good if people feel like it's written by AI, and they feel like, oh, this is just someone trolling on Reddit anonymously.
Speaker 2:But What I would like to better what I would like to better understand is how many people, what what the actual churn is like on the on the driver side
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of these businesses because, you know, people talk about, you know, this acceptance rate and and who gets what jobs and things like that. In a traditional environment Mhmm. Like in a restaurant Mhmm. If you are like a server, let's say Mhmm. And your manager is like, hey, like, you're you're in this kind of zone.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like, what you're you're in the zone of the restaurant. Any table that comes in here, you're handling today. Yeah. And the server's like, well, I don't wanna do that table because I don't think they're gonna tip very well.
Speaker 2:Or that person always comes in and they just sort they they they they're they're needy but they don't order that much and it's not gonna be a big bill. Like, that manager probably end up like firing the person. Right? Yeah. You have to like kind of accept the good and the bad.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas for this, it's different because DoorDash doesn't actually employ these people. Yeah. The drivers, I think, like the flexibility of the work. I think that's like a big value prop. And so, again, like, it it creates a scenario where you have to use bunch of weird incentives to to make the to ultimately make the entire like, if half the time you went on DoorDash, like, food never got delivered, the service would cease to exist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because people would just be like, well, I'm not gonna I'm just gonna drive and go pick it up myself. And I'm sure some people would argue that that that that's actually good. Yeah. But anyway
Speaker 1:The big question is, did he tip his librarian? He was at the library drinking. I think if you're getting drinks at the library, I didn't even know you could get drinks served at the library. That's awesome. I wanna go to the library.
Speaker 2:So at least hit the librarian with a buzz ball. Sure. For sure. Is a life life hack.
Speaker 1:If you have a 30 rack if you bring a 30 rack into the The library. Throw it down on the desk.
Speaker 2:Throw a ball to the librarian as a sign of respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Librarian go, beer me. Beer me, brother. If you're gonna be in here posting on Reddit and and chugging beers all day long, tip me. Tip me.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. I think I think I hope that 2026 is year of the buzz ball.
Speaker 1:You're into buzz balls. I was buzz balls were post my time. I never Yeah.
Speaker 2:One. They were big when I was was before local guys. And what I appreciate now, in college, people were ready Yeah. For buzz balls. You were trained you were no.
Speaker 2:You were you were trained in the sense of like Mhmm. If somebody threw a buzz ball at you, your arms are staying at the side.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. Wait. Oh, this is a this is like a prank. I I I'm I'm completely unfamiliar with tell me the culture of the buzz ball.
Speaker 2:The culture of the buzz ball. So you get a buzz ball Yes. Obviously, like near the checkout at any type of, like
Speaker 1:Yes. I've seen I've seen them. I've seen them.
Speaker 2:And so the idea is, like, you're going to buy the thing that you're actually gonna drink.
Speaker 1:Okay. You can just pick
Speaker 2:up one of these. They have a few it's equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol. Right?
Speaker 1:It's pretty strong
Speaker 2:for a single yeah. It's very strong.
Speaker 1:It's more than a single serving amount.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very strong.
Speaker 1:It's like a
Speaker 2:one tastes terrible. So it's like a punishment. You would never drink one of these for fun. Sure. And and you go back to whatever Yeah.
Speaker 2:Your house or apartment and you you throw the ball Yes. At somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it. Got it. Normally, you throw something at somebody Yeah.
Speaker 2:Somebody and they're not expecting it, they're gonna catch it. Yeah. Because they're like, what what's going on? Of course. But in in in kind of at least the heyday of buzz ball for me Yes.
Speaker 2:You knew this was something that could a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time. It could come out at 9AM. Right? 10AM? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you're gonna keep your hands down and you're not gonna catch it.
Speaker 1:You'll Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like kinda you'll you'll sidestep it. Okay. Okay. But now What
Speaker 1:if it smashes in the TV? Are there like buzz ball disasters that happen? I'm sure
Speaker 2:there are.
Speaker 1:Results in a lot of destruction.
Speaker 2:And But now people people are not I I hit my dear friend Ben Ben Taft. He's a venture capitalist. He's my neighbor.
Speaker 1:You hit him with a buzz ball. When? A couple days
Speaker 2:Like like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared. Fully unprepared. He just caught it.
Speaker 1:Well, I would be unprepared.
Speaker 2:I feel bad that you that you caught this.
Speaker 1:Scoot in the chat says, I I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a buzz ball. This is good for.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Scoot. This is good. This is good, Scoot. See see Tice ball.
Speaker 1:Is is the is the is the culture of the Buzzball alive and well on college campuses, or do we need send you back?
Speaker 2:I'm not
Speaker 3:21. Never had Alpha.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well well, maybe we have to send you back for for for one one non gap semester day on your 20 birthday to go experience college life and and the life of the Buzzball.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multi Triple.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's, let's go to, one of the more viral posts from the last few weeks from
Speaker 1:the Kick us off. Read this.
Speaker 2:Oh, you want me to read it? Yeah. Do you want me
Speaker 1:to read I'm I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 2:kidding. This is just
Speaker 1:We can trade off.
Speaker 2:So Justin says, am I just a monster? Monster? It's been four years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers but today it feels almost legal.
Speaker 2:It's causing me a lot of confusion and and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably about seventy to a hundred and forty minutes a week. Roughly ten minutes each day, maybe two times a day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love towards them are perfectly strong, but I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about ten minutes. My blood starts to boil.
Speaker 2:I just want to be working or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9AM this morning, Saturday, January 3. It's a sunny warm day here in Austin. My four year old son is begging me to play catch in the street.
Speaker 2:I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it. But at this age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, I conceded him with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father. The problem is I only is only that I do not enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Very, very brave to post this. It's not that I'm trying to maximize But we
Speaker 1:haven't seen the other side of this. What if his son is like, yeah, bro. I don't enjoy it either.
Speaker 2:You have another What if what if this is gonna be like a generational, you know, father son rivalry where
Speaker 1:Some some patricide guy coming from
Speaker 2:the I don't know. Anyways, Justin continues. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure. It just seems wrong that I experienced so little delight when my dad friends all claimed to experience so much. It was beautiful.
Speaker 2:We live on a picturesque tree lined block. I'm even relatively relaxed from the holiday rep.
Speaker 1:Tree lined blocks. Give it
Speaker 2:for tree lined blocks. Great places to raise money. Anymore. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience yet for every single minute on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace.
Speaker 2:Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed when we're done. I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal? And it's modern parenting norms that are off whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care.
Speaker 2:Just wanna figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, a lot of people weighed in. Million
Speaker 2:views. This is 3,000
Speaker 1:repos and 5,000 mean,
Speaker 2:would I would ultimately say this is the the worst like to view ratio.
Speaker 1:It's rough.
Speaker 2:Means that a lot of
Speaker 1:And seven more replies than likes. Crazy, crazy stuff. Anyway, I I like Justin. He's been on the show. He he came and talked to us about Nick Land.
Speaker 1:He's very interesting thinker, a very interesting writer.
Speaker 2:And one thing that what that part of what he talked about was like how you can make it as an independent writer Yeah. Or creative. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is like, their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass.
Speaker 1:But also outside of institutions. Like, he's not in an academic organization. Yeah. He he he could be doing, like, writing or in house somewhere at some tech company or something. I think he was talking to us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:But but he's been very, very independent, and that obviously creates the type of work that consumes all it seeps into all sorts of Because there's no moment when when you're like, okay, I'm logging off and my boss doesn't expect me to do anything until Monday. It's like, oh, you could always be doing a little bit more when you're effectively an entrepreneur. So there's a little bit of that in here. I think in general, skill issue. Skill issue.
Speaker 1:I love Justin, but skill issue. You have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method. This is Okay. Parenting. Of parenting.
Speaker 1:The Dan Bilzerian method especially. This works especially well for four year old boys. So you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining like an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four year old. So you're like, hey. Wanna get in a really fast car and drive around fast?
Speaker 1:They're like, absolutely. That sounds amazing. Wanna go look at fine watches? Wanna go, you know, wanna go look at guns or whatever else? Like, whatever Dan Bilzerian does.
Speaker 1:Wanna learn poker, buddy? I'd be like, absolutely. I wanna play cards. Four year old boys have the mind of Dan Bilzerian, effectively. And so before you say, oh, I I can't afford a, you know, fancy car like Dan Bilzerian.
Speaker 1:A four year old cannot tell the difference between an s f 90 and a Dodge Viper. Just get the Dodge Viper.
Speaker 2:Get a red car.
Speaker 1:Get a red red car. They will they will be
Speaker 2:assume that.
Speaker 1:They will be so stoked. My son wants to have a Blackwing themed birthday party. And I'm like, dude, we're not we're not doing a Cadillac c t five v Blackwing themed birthday party. Like, it is a very weird thing. I got this car half jokingly.
Speaker 1:I know you love it because it goes vroom and it goes very fast, he's very excited about it. But truly, like, you have to return to, like, four year old boy mentality, and that is the mentality of Dan Bilzerian. And so if you adopt the mind of Dan Bilzerian, you will have a very enjoyable time with your four year old son. But I I think the bigger picture is that is that, like, Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch, and that's fine. Like, my son
Speaker 2:is I it's slightly I think it's slightly different than that. I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life Yes. As a man Yes. Whose job is to provide for your family, if you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting. Unless you're
Speaker 1:behind the wheel of a Dodge Viper that's red.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. But what I understand here is is my my reading of it is like he doesn't feel sad like he doesn't he he like, it's maybe a sense of Stress. Stress. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's hard to enjoy just playing catch or going for a walk or
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because he can't
Speaker 2:over the last two weeks, I was spending all day with my wife and kids and it's raining. Right? So you're kind of like stuck indoors and you're and our options are like going outside, like, I would go outside and we would walk around and like pick up slugs and like fox. Right? Dan Bilzerian.
Speaker 2:Dan Bilzerian, four year old mode. Yeah. And I I felt at peace. I was enjoying that in part because we worked so hard last year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was like, you know, norm historic historically on Christmas breaks, was like, I would be annoyed that it was the holidays because I'd be like, it's inappropriate for me to email somebody and say like, hey, let's Right? Yeah. It felt like Yeah. Hitting it, you know, needing to slow down for like this couple speed bumps
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:When you're trying to go a 100 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, I think that's I I I I ultimately think that's that's just a huge part of it. It's like the more satisfied you are by your life as a father, the more satisfied you'll be just doing the simple things of life with your kids. The other thing the other thing that's that that I've noticed is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is. It's actually like
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:If if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend, you know, ten minutes, you'll get that sort of endorphin Yeah. Rush and that's that's enjoyable, and then it kinda drops off from there. Yeah. But the more, like, it it there's an increasing returns to scale.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I I I've been playing Mario Kart with my son, and he beat me for the first time ever just yesterday.
Speaker 1:And it was like this, like, very interesting moment, very cool. It felt very fun. But also, it's like, I just I enjoyed playing Mario Kart. So Yeah. And same with like when we do Legos now.
Speaker 2:And so now you guys can start
Speaker 1:I feel like it gets better and better.
Speaker 2:You can start gambling his allowance on Mario Kart. Introduce him to
Speaker 1:He's not Maybe maybe you get an allowance. Every once in while, he, like, acquires coins randomly somehow and, like, he's very proud of that. But, yeah, I I do think that there's there's something to be said for trying to find activities that align because a four year old, specifically a four year old boy, I think, I mean, that's not my only experience, but a four year old boy with with a father is like the most memetic creature possible. Like, he's literally just looking to you for everything. So you can say, I like dinosaurs, and he'll be like, I'm so into dinosaurs.
Speaker 1:But you but if you're not into dinosaurs, you can be like, actually, I wanna go look at horses today or something. Whatever you're into, like, they will be alongside, like there there's times when I can, like like like, whenever we're in the car, like, he he doesn't request
Speaker 2:Get ready to read Wall The Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Get ready to read the Wall Street Journal, buddy.
Speaker 2:I actually am I actually am excited. I'm excited
Speaker 1:for that. I'll I'll I will read I will read all sorts of stories to him. And, yeah, I have to stop and, like, explain them in, like, I'm five. Literally explain them like I'm four. But it's still fun.
Speaker 1:And same thing with the music. Like Yeah. He he wants to listen to my playlist. Like, he wants to listen to rock music and, like, the songs that I like. Yep.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I do I do a light filter so that there's no, like,
Speaker 2:extra Yeah. Part part of that is almost leadership. Think my son loves dinosaur is probably you know, if there was a if Spotify wrapped
Speaker 1:a class on dinosaurs.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. No. But what I gonna say is if there was, like, a if there was, like, a kid's book Spotify wrapped Yeah.
Speaker 2:He'd be in the top point 0001% dinosaur enjoyer. The problem is, like, I read I read to him before bed every night. Right? Yeah. Seven days a week, we're reading.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If if he was just, like, deciding what we were gonna read, it'd be dinosaurs every night.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's so hard to pronounce.
Speaker 1:Dude, give me some dinosaur book racks because we No. But but let me finish.
Speaker 2:So where I got to is I'm like, okay, like, I we gotta we gotta introduce more books because like Mhmm. If if we're there there are like kids oriented books Yeah. Even for like the four year old range
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That are more that are, like, interesting parables, stories, etcetera that are just, like
Speaker 1:Timeless.
Speaker 2:Timeless and worth reading. Yeah. And so I've, like, enjoyed massively over the break, like, switching it up a lot. We got, like, a comic comic book style, like, action comic of the Bible. Right?
Speaker 2:So we're reading that. Right? And that's like, he enjoys it. I enjoy it. It's just like, you you gotta be like switching it up Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not at the same time, like, you wanna be leaning into their interest, but not not overly just doing whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, generate your own ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Turn this semi analysis deep dive into a children's book so that I can read it to myself, not the TPUV seven.
Speaker 2:There's something there.
Speaker 1:Something there. Something there. You gotta give me some recommendations for dinosaur books because my son found a dinosaur toy, took a picture of it, ID'd it with one of the LLMs, and and then he was like, I wanna know more. I wanna read books. And I I realized I'm actually like woefully under resourced when it comes to dinosaur books.
Speaker 1:Like, I have like two, and none of them are particularly good. So anyway,
Speaker 2:there's a lesson. Breaking
Speaker 1:news. Breaking news?
Speaker 2:We got some breaking news.
Speaker 1:What's breaking news?
Speaker 2:Department of Energy just announced that it awarded general matter 900,000,000 for uranium. Wow. Hit that app loving Gong, John. It shakes it shakes the camera. It shakes the camera.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:I think we gotta figure out how to hang the gong from the rafters. We do. Yeah. Yeah. We're We're refining.
Speaker 2:We're gonna Let's let's pull this.
Speaker 1:Well, while we do that, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Let's move on to our breaking news.
Speaker 2:What you got for me? Let's see. So The US awards 2,700,000,000.0 worth of orders to boost uranium enrichment. So it sounds like there's a few players here. Department of Energy announced Monday it was wording orders 2.7 to three companies to boost domestic uranium enrichment over the next ten years in a broader effort to reduce US dependence on Russian supply.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, no. No.
Speaker 2:Never knew this.
Speaker 1:A lot of the a lot of the uranium Uranium. Comes from decommissioned missiles and stuff. So it's already been processed and then they they they break it apart and and and and we, you know, just buy it from them because they're like basically denuclearizing, I believe. Pretty pretty
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's American Centrifuge Operating General Matter and Orano Federal Services secured the order.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:The department said in a if you wanna sell to the government, maybe put federal services in your name.
Speaker 1:Well, I I I I think it's I think that might be not a startup. I think that might be owned by the
Speaker 2:government or something like that. Is it or is it a private? Is it a private? It's a Is
Speaker 1:it private?
Speaker 2:Says it's a private company. But the contracts would require the companies to meet specific milestones, provide enrichment services for low enriched uranium and high assay low enriched uranium for existing nuclear power plants and new smaller modular reactors. Today's awards show that this administration is committed to restoring a secure domestic nuclear fuel supply chain capable of producing the nuclear fuels needed to power the reactors of today and the advanced reactors of tomorrow, said Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. Russia is currently the only country that makes HALEU Uranium. Uranium enriched to between 520%, which is said to make new high-tech reactors more efficient in commercial volumes.
Speaker 2:Funds to make the fuel domestically in The United States were included in a law to ban uranium shipments from Russia fully by 2028. So big big news.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches in the tracks.
Speaker 1:Check out CrowdStrike. So the the Dwarkish piece, it's it's it's sort of big. We might wanna go through it.
Speaker 2:Let's save it for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Let's save it for tomorrow. Let's skip through this. The the the big shift to Miami. Miami is back. This was from Teddy Schleffer in the New York Times.
Speaker 1:He writes, News, Larry Page and Peter Thiel are making moves to leave California by the end of the year to avoid a possible billionaire's tax that could hit them where it hurts. And
Speaker 2:Patrick Halston said yesterday, Miami posting might be a phenomenon whose time has passed, but having just spent a few days visiting, it really does feel like a boom town in a way that no other American city that I've spent time in over the past few years does. In some way, it reminds me of Chinese cities. Why was he in Miami? Was he just there for the Soho Beach House? Was he there to Maybe.
Speaker 2:F one?
Speaker 1:F one. F one. It it takes place in Miami every year. Oh, you think he was in there like this week?
Speaker 2:He said having just spent a few Okay.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Because I mean to clear like Patrick Collison would be subject to
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:The the billionaire tax that Ro Khanna Ro Khanna
Speaker 1:Former guest of the show.
Speaker 2:Former guest the show. Was burning up the time funny. So so Ro came on the show and I asked him about something that he had said like a week prior and he was like, I don't agree with that. Really? It's like, it seems he seems to be a guy that does it's weak beliefs, weekly hell.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:So anyways, but yeah, it was Yeah. David Sachs announced the David Sachs announced that he was going to Austin. Yeah. PT. Great press release.
Speaker 2:PT clearly
Speaker 1:press December release thirty first. Respecter. December 31. Ray Conno said, Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for health care for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists.
Speaker 1:When they threaten to leave, will miss them very much. So Ro Khanna will not be missing everyone that leaves. There is the the debate the sort of shifted back to like, okay, if if billionaires do leave successfully, what will the impact be on the technology industry? And I'm wondering if the question is not like Silicon Valley exists in San Francisco and Silicon Valley or like, you know, the Delian idea of like, let's move Silicon Valley to Miami. Like, that didn't really happen.
Speaker 1:But is there is there a world I I had this theory that Miami could become you you're not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, you're moving Sand Hill Road to Miami. And like, no startups move to The Bay and are like, need an office on Sand Hill Road. They're like, I'll get an office in San Francisco. When I wanna raise money, I'll drive down to Sand Hill Road.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But almost every venture capitalist also just got a presence in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:No. But but what I mean is that, like, there is a there is a fundraising hub that that founders go and visit. And whether it's in Sandhill Road or The Presidio or Miami, it is accessible if you're doing a road show. Like if you're taking a series b seriously, you're probably going to spend a week in New York. You're probably gonna spend a week in Miami at this point and maybe Austin too.
Speaker 1:And going around to different locales for fundraising doesn't seem that hard
Speaker 2:And Yeah. In in 2021 Yeah. People were doing Miami Road shows and they were Yeah. Pretty effective. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You could go to Miami and get around them.
Speaker 1:Miami Tech Week was in many
Speaker 2:ways that. Yeah. And you were you were sometimes just calling back to the West Coast doing Zoom calls. Yeah. But you could meet a bunch of VCs
Speaker 4:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know, tight And then also, like, most of these funds have like one or two billionaires at them. And then the vast majority of employees of the fund would not be employed. So you could have the founder or the core GP somewhere else, and then the entire team there on the ground taking a ton of meetings. And if it's time to meet the big guy, you fly out or you do a Zoom call.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so so I don't know that this whole idea of, like, transplant everyone I guess it is a question it is a different question for the founders because, like, Sam, Dario, these guys, like, they they cannot be in Miami and actually run an organization in San Francisco. I would imagine they just have to pay this. And, it'll be very odd. Well, I guess not Sam because he's like, who knows where he is in terms of equity. I mean, he's probably above it broadly, but
Speaker 2:Every definition that a
Speaker 1:He's like, would you like some non profit credits?
Speaker 2:No. Every every Yeah. I'm sure Sam is close to a billionaire just off of his Stripe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just off of other stuff. For sure. For sure. Okay.
Speaker 1:The car collection alone.
Speaker 3:Here's a theory. Okay. Sam is actually behind this Oh. Because it's gonna force Dario either to pay a massive fine or or they're gonna have to move. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? That's better for OpenAI because he doesn't have
Speaker 1:the Yeah. Get the tinfoil hat on.
Speaker 3:So is actually behind this.
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 3:He's getting everyone out of Silicon Valley so he can stay there.
Speaker 1:I maybe. I somehow don't I somehow don't think that's gonna that's what's going on. Anyway, Rokhani
Speaker 2:funny thing that this whole wealth tax debate was happening almost at the same time as the Somali daycare thing. Somali daycare thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which was very odd because it's it it there's a question of like how effective is government like once you get the money into the government, it sounds very nice that it's like, oh, it could be redistributed but if it all gets like stolen
Speaker 2:Which was funny which was funny because we we've had a recurring bit on the show Yeah. Where we said like, is PT really a billionaire? Like, I've never seen him in Chrome hard.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then the guy
Speaker 2:with an RM, a racing machine on the wrist. Right? And the Somali daycare founder was actually rocking Chrome
Speaker 1:Yeah. For a press conference. That's crazy. You know, on on the question of like of like, is the government effective at just redistribution broadly? I I was reflecting on this fact that there you can kind of put the billionaires in two camps.
Speaker 1:There's like, let's call them like the bleeding hearts that like they sign the giving pledge, and they say, I'm gonna give away half my wealth or all my wealth. And then there's, like, the the ruthless capitalists say, I'm not giving away anything. I'm just gonna pass it on to my kids. Right? And and so there's those two camps, and and let's let's call the bleeding hearts, like, they really do wanna give away.
Speaker 1:They wanna do they they wanna leave their their capital behind with other people in better ways. They want it to be given away. Right? No one that I'm aware of, of the giving pledge, folks, has ever just said, I'm going to give my money to the government. Like, they've never just been like, oh, actually, I should just give it to the federal government because the federal government is an efficient way to
Speaker 2:Pay down the debt.
Speaker 1:To distribute pay down the debt or just, like, distribute it to people in a tax rebate or something. Like, it's always been, okay, I got to go and do this health care and this cancer research and this doc it's always something more specific.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bill Bill Gates' new pledge is specifically gonna deploy a lot of capital into Africa.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's never it's never just, okay. Yeah. Like, built my wealth in California. I'm just gonna give my money to the state of California, which is odd.
Speaker 1:But Rokana puts a lot of context here. He says, my district is $18,000,000,000,000, nearly one third of US stock of The US stock market. In a 50 mile radius, we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar, and we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar companies. This is not AI written, but maybe should be. If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other members or 100 senators.
Speaker 1:Those saying we would not we wouldn't have a future NVIDIA in the bay if this tax goes into effect are glossing over Silicon Valley's history. Jensen was at LSI Logic and his co founders at Sun. He started NVIDIA in my district because of the semiconductor talent. I do I do sort of agree with this. Like, I I I I think the the effects would it would take a very, very long time.
Speaker 2:No. No. The the the issue I have is the is it's just a slippery slope down the the the asset seizure Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mountain. They really they really gotta build the high speed rail. Like like, all of this is just so like, the high speed rail is just such an easy dunk on all of this. Like, high speed rail, you know?
Speaker 1:Like, oh, you want more? High speed rail. Like Yeah. High speed rail didn't work. So, like, nothing you do works.
Speaker 1:If I was Gavin Newsom, my feeling I'd just be like, okay. I'm actually gonna go finish the high speed rail thing, then you can't say that anymore because I did it. Yeah. But it's still and it's like we were even talking about the high the high speed rail thing was a meme like three years ago. It's like you've had three years to go build more high speed rail and like it just hasn't hasn't happened.
Speaker 1:And and I think that's like it's I mean, it was the it was the cornerstone anecdote of Ezra Klein's book, Abundance, with Derek Thompson. It's like the main anecdote for like a new order among like liberal Democrats. And I I thought it I thought it did it broke through really well because it met people where they were, which is dissatisfaction with the lack of progress, lack of building, lack of abundance
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On on the left. And and and Ezra sort of, like, reset the discussion a little bit. So I don't know. I'd be interested to see where he weighs in on this particular is he a fan or
Speaker 2:Friedberg does he think this is a good had some of the best commentary on this. He absolutely mauled Roe, Conner. It was brutal mocking. There's a quote from the All In Pod X account. They say, Freeburg, California's billionaire taxes Trojan horse to go after the middle class's private assets.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Freeburg, the reason they're calling it a billionaire tax is to make it easier for people to vote for it and sign up to this entirely new tax system that they're proposing to put on all Americans at some point and for the first time ever degrading our private property rights. Forget how much wealth you have. Forget about how rich you are. Forget about the term billionaire, millionaire, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:We're creating or proposing the creation of a new tax system that allows the government for the first time ever to come in and audit everything you own, all the jewelry your grandma gave you, the value of all the couches in your house, the value of your car, the value of all your stocks and bonds, and the government can come in and for the first time look through the veil into your personal property and say, here's how much all this stuff is worth. I'm charging you a percentage of that. That's what I need to get paid. And it doesn't matter that it starts with billionaires. What matters is that we're giving the government the right to look into our private property and take a percentage of it every year.
Speaker 2:The total net worth of billionaires in The US is 8,000,000,000,000. The net worth of The US, the middle class, and everyone else is 170,000,000,000,000 compared to the 8,000,000,000,000 of the billionaires. Chamath says they need a way to open the doors to think after the real honeypot. The real honeypot is not 200 people. And Friedberg continues, just so everyone understands what the real goal of this is not to tax billionaires because there are other ways to tax billionaires.
Speaker 2:You could charge them a capital gains tax if they borrow against their assets that they haven't paid capital gains tax on. Very simple. That can resolve this. Another thing you can do, you can raise the capital gains tax rate. Sounds unpopular.
Speaker 2:I don't agree with that, but that's another way to deal with this, which is to take the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 30. You could do that. The real goal of this is to create for the first time in American history, a private property asset seizure tax because they're going after the 170,000,000,000,000, not the 8,000,000,000,000 that the billionaires have. So, yeah. Again, the founding fathers would be absolutely disgusted Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With the state of our current tax structure. They would be throwing up.
Speaker 1:Because the New York Post would be crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I just think people need to realize like how how far this can go. And I think that the political story of the next of the next seemingly decade, two decades, potentially as our lifetimes is politicians running on, I will raise taxes. I will take assets from people. I will take the assets from private citizens and I will redistribute them to you if you vote for me.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that feels like an incredibly vicious cycle that I don't I don't see how it how it ever stops. So I'm so black pilled on it, I don't even wanna talk about it anymore. Well, the number Unfortunately
Speaker 1:number of billionaires has grown globally from a 140 in nineteen eighty seven to over 3,000 in 2025. With enough inflation, everyone will be a billionaire eventually. If we go through a period of hyperinflation, you could see everyone making billions tax,
Speaker 2:print Yep. Hyperinflate. Hyperinflate.
Speaker 1:I mean Everyone's a billionaire. Know, there's, like, countries where, like, you you there was so much inflation that people would be making billions of dollars for a loaf of bread basically, a
Speaker 2:quadrillion dollars reading a book on the banking system Yeah. In in the fourteenth and fifteenth century right now.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And they introduced various governments would introduce wealth. They were always like going to war with other city states, and so various governments would like introduce a wealth tax. Mhmm. And then so people were just constantly trying to argue like, well, this isn't worth that. Or they'd be putting, you know, they'd be putting assets into a bank under a bunch of different names.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. There was tons of tons of mean tons of fraud and Yeah. But ultimately, people do not enjoy earning earning dollars, buying assets, and then having those assets confiscated. It
Speaker 1:does feel like it will create an immense amount of jobs, like, assessing all these assets. I mean, like, the the family offices of these billionaires themselves employs, like, dozens of people to track everything. And then you have the the flip side of that, which is the private the the the state effort to monitor all those assets
Speaker 2:it it just becomes yeah. It's it's it's gonna be truly it's truly an impossible, like, you know, we we spend all of our not all of our time. We spend a lot of our time covering the private markets. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:And so if you're a business owner and you have a a some somebody in the government coming and saying like, hey, you made x amount. You made you made a million dollars. Yep. We're actually looking at public comps right now and companies in your category are trading at between twenty and thirty times earnings. So actually, you're worth, you know, you're worth $50,000,000 and and we have this tax where if you're worth 50,000,000 or more which which Elizabeth Warren has has proposed a wealth tax, I think like $8.08 per she's talked about doing like 8% above 50,000,000, something And like and so, yeah, you're you're actually you you qual congratulations.
Speaker 2:You qualified for the wealth tax. And the person's like, well, we only had this much net income last year because of this one time thing and suddenly you're having to argue against the value of your own. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It'd very weird because a lot of startups wanna get the valuation as high as possible Yeah. For recruiting purposes. And then you have, like, for tax purposes, they wanna minimize the valuation. There's already
Speaker 2:a Yeah. Little bit It's never it's never gonna work. I I was talking I was catching up with a portfolio company founder over the break. And technically, I have shares in the company that are marked at close to 7 figures.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:he's considering a pivot right now, which means that like the value of the equity is is worth like a tiny fraction. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. It's tiny fraction. Right? Because it's like completely changing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's starting over start basically like starting over from zero. Also, there's a scenario that he just shuts it down. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:And so it's like I I kind of put the even though even though like investors in the company have that equity marked
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At tens of millions of dollars
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I value it at effectively zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the government will not. The government will be like, oh, look at this reputable VC that backed that that that backed the company. And they just did it. They did it in the last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course, how can you say this is not worth that this is worthless stock? This looks like it's worth quite a lot. And and anyway, so
Speaker 1:Shopify and then let's move on to some outlooks for the future. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store
Speaker 2:The backbone on
Speaker 1:mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI.
Speaker 2:The backbone of the Internet economy.
Speaker 1:Backbone of my career, I've been using Shopify since 2012, I believe, 2013. So, yeah, over a decade on Shopify. Wow.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let's talk predictions.
Speaker 1:Okay. What did Scott Belsky predict for the future slash 2026? Number one, he said massive amounts of talent arbitrage. There is much fear and discussion about job losses as a result of AI, but the often young and fearless AI native talent that is most aggressively engaging with new tech has a fascinating advantage in the current workforce. People with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses.
Speaker 1:For example, companies want to hire answer engine optimization efforts or experts over search engine optimization practitioners, most marketing leaders are
Speaker 2:Shout out.
Speaker 1:Still not conducting old fashioned focus groups rather than using AI breakthroughs and market research. Twenty twenty six provides a precious work window for younger overlooked talent to gain an advantage as early adopters. Two, the buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by the reality of what audiences increasingly crave craft, meaning, and shared experiences. The industry this is particularly interesting because, of course, he works at A24. The industry will start to realize that there's a stark difference between content creators, those who who willing those willing to trade control for speed using AI to make ads and social media content, and artists, those not willing to trade control for speed who only favor emerging technology that preserve control and precision to help new and better stories be told.
Speaker 1:The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood while the prompt based slop tools will focus more on social content creator use cases. Finally, the idea of personalized personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people fair favor shared experiences. Ben Thompson's talked about this a lot, the shelling point. Like, Taylor Swift is a specific event and when you go to that when you go to that Taylor Swift eras tour and you run into someone else who also went to the same show, you can talk about that and it's the same thing. And people, even though they like personalized content, they also like being able to say, oh, do you do you agree with Duar Keshe's take?
Speaker 1:Not just do you agree with what AI told you specifically today and you saw something completely different. People do like that shared experience. I think that's something that's a little more tractable than people give credit to. Finally, the idea of so people want to be inspired by craft and they want a common experience to discuss or even share in theaters with friends. Did you see any movies over the break?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is this is why people enjoy watching TBPN is they can debate is Tyler using the Gigachad filter
Speaker 1:Yes. Right now.
Speaker 2:It provides a shared experience that that you can have a conversation around. What did what did
Speaker 1:you say? Did you see any movies over the break?
Speaker 2:Sicario one and You did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go. I recommended Give me your review.
Speaker 2:I mean, masterpiece. Masterpiece. Goes in my top five films Yeah. Ever. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Did you like That's because You know,
Speaker 3:I've seen four. That's that's right.
Speaker 2:Top it's still
Speaker 1:five by default. Top five by default. Did you like you know the difference between one and two? Like, completely different team. So so one one is regardless But
Speaker 2:Taylor Sheridan didn't do two?
Speaker 1:I I forget exactly the the the difference. I need to look it up. But Sicario two, I I believe it had a different I believe it had a different team. The director wrote
Speaker 2:Sicario two but didn't direct it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. And and I think I think it got it got worse reviews than the first one. But did you like one better than what?
Speaker 2:Zootopia He's no recommend Zootopia. Just skip Zootopia one.
Speaker 1:Zootopia one is great.
Speaker 2:Go straight to two.
Speaker 1:Great movie.
Speaker 2:Another great
Speaker 1:movie with your forties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, what what what movie do you recommend I watch next?
Speaker 1:Oh. That's a tough one. There was a there was a list of movies that was going viral from was it Bill Simmons movie list movie list? This one
Speaker 2:Did you watch the Ping Pong Marty Supreme?
Speaker 1:I didn't. I didn't get to see. You watched it? What you
Speaker 2:think? What's your view?
Speaker 3:It was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I I like Safdie Brothers movies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Me too.
Speaker 2:Okay. Here's the thing. The marketing was so good and so intense that I it feels very likely without having seen the film that the marketing overshadows the film itself. Do you think that tracks?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I maybe
Speaker 2:Like what will we remember more in five years? The marketing or the film?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's definitely an argument you could have which is like not you don't usually like say that about movies. So Yeah. Just by saying that it's like, yeah, probably the marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe it's a lesson. It's like you don't make your marketing too good. Otherwise, people
Speaker 1:They feel like they got the experience. This is something Derek Thompson talked to us about and Dan Wong called called out again to go back to his piece. He he said that like a really really short TV hit would sell more books than going on a really big podcast for an hour because if somebody listens to someone lay out their thesis for their book over an hour
Speaker 2:Tell the most interesting stories.
Speaker 1:Exactly. They're like, well, it was it was I got one hour of this. Do I really want another six hours of this on the audiobook? I kinda got the audiobook version, the summary. Whereas if somebody sees like on, you know, some daytime TV show, somebody shows up for two minutes and it just gives, like, one take, you're like, oh, like, I could go more.
Speaker 1:And then also, demographically, the TV watchers are more likely to buy books. But we're not talking about books. We're talking about movies. And there are some recommendations here from Bill Simmons. He calls these the most the most rewatched movies of the century.
Speaker 1:Devil Wears Prada, Social Network, Anchorman, The Town, The Departed, Miami Vice, Hangover, Superbad. Have you seen Superbad? I think that would be a good one for you. It's very funny. It holds up.
Speaker 1:I think you'd like that. Stepbrothers? You've never seen Stepbrothers? Stepbrothers? I feel like we don't need around Stepbrothers.
Speaker 1:The the movie that I think you might like if you like Sicario might be Taken. Have you seen Taken? Liam Neeson? Yeah. Great movie.
Speaker 1:Great movie. Team team loves it.
Speaker 2:Studio goes wild.
Speaker 1:Studio goes wild. John Wick. If you haven't seen the original John Wick, that's a great movie.
Speaker 3:John, have you seen Prisoners?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Prisoners is great. For sure, Prisoners. Any Denis Villeneuve movie is good.
Speaker 3:Jordy, maybe you should go like Art House. Have have you tried any of those?
Speaker 1:Art How
Speaker 2:about Capital House? Do you have any recommendations?
Speaker 3:Margin Call?
Speaker 1:I saw I saw Sicario as a double feature. I went to the movie theater, bought two tickets, saw Sicario, walked straight into The Martian, saw that. It was great. Great
Speaker 2:well, this is the year of the social network too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I somehow think it's not gonna be as good as the first one. I I it just feels like it's gonna be mired.
Speaker 3:I think it depends who plays Dwarkash.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I hope I hope that they really go into that.
Speaker 2:It's about it's a it's a free
Speaker 1:entirely on Yan Lakun's hot takes around the llama four overfitting of the benchmarks. That Yeah. That should be where where it's where it's
Speaker 2:Anyways, back to back to Scott. He says, behind the scenes, proof of crafts content will enter the mainstream of advertising and entertainment. Mhmm. As more AI generated content fills our feeds, we will develop a membrane of doubt. That's fake.
Speaker 2:We'll become a default reaction as we become That was kind of the slower reaction to this company pickle.com Yeah. That came out. Was interesting. People at first were like, wow, this is super cool. And then people started being like, wait, is this real?
Speaker 2:Is this fake? We can get to that later. Scott says, that fake will become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention grabbing content. This is how I've been with AI generated kind of launch videos and vibe reels. I just I haven't I haven't watched a single one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I assume you'll tell me if one of them is good.
Speaker 1:AI generated launch Vibreals.
Speaker 2:Maybe you're not watching them either. Tyler probably watches them still pure AI purist over here.
Speaker 3:Andy, 2¢. That was pretty good. Thought that was AI generated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that had that had like great ideas. Comparing it. Was it was a lot more it wasn't just here's a bunch of cool images that that are trying to make you feel something. I'm skipping over those.
Speaker 1:We got a couple recommendations from the chat. Glengarry Glen Ross, highly recommend. That is a fantastic movie. Also, famous watch movie, if you're into Rolexes. Alec Baldwin's character says, look at this watch.
Speaker 1:This watch costs more than your car. It's a president. Like the sound of Margin Call. I feel like I saw that a long time ago. It's been wild.
Speaker 1:Lioness, I haven't seen that. That looks pretty good. I'll have to check that out. There's a couple others here. Anyway, cognition.
Speaker 1:They should make a movie about cognition. Thank you. Let me tell you about the software engineer, Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:Gotta get we gotta get Scott back on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Up date on how things look in 2026. He had some crazy predictions that came 100% true this year. He came on the show very early and and predicted the IMO gold medal from AI exactly as it played out. That was a great call.
Speaker 1:And he's he's always been incredibly tapped in there. So Scott continues, says multiple industries from insurance to health care will be impacted by the implications of materially better lifespan, health span and joy span. That's interesting. Well, have Justin Mares from TrueMed coming on the show in just twenty five minutes. And he's obviously deep in all of this and can tell us more about this particular trend.
Speaker 1:Scott says, As health wearables, routine blood testing, increasingly accessible preventative body scans and AI health coaches proliferate the population, humans will have materially more insight and impact over their own health. As we begin to live longer, multiple industries will change. US life insurers with de risked annuity exposure that are most impacted by mortality like Global Life among others are poised to benefit from the insured policy living longer. We will also see growth among the underlying plumbing companies that manage blood testing like Quest Diagnostics, biomarker detection and preventative scans of the major consumer apps and WHOOP like devices proliferating our lives. We will also see shifts in travel, entertainment, dating apps, and beyond as the societal implications of longevity become a mainstream conversation.
Speaker 1:I you gotta get on TruMed. We're having Justin on the show in just a little bit. We gotta get on TruMed and figure out the ultimate lux maxing stacks and make sure you're paying for your lux The maxing
Speaker 3:the peptides?
Speaker 1:Yeah. With pretax dollars. Gotta You be lux maxing on pretax dollars. That's key. That's key.
Speaker 1:And thanks, TrueMed, it is now possible to lux max with pretax dollars. Hardware becomes a more popular moat amid amid a surge of hardware startups. Interesting reflecting on this year, there was a surge of hardware startups. We demoed a lot of hardware in 2025. I was I was asking you about the X Reel, those, AR, VR glasses.
Speaker 1:I was super bullish on those, but you churned. I churned. Haven't really
Speaker 2:been Wait. Were you actually bullish on them?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because when I used the Apple Vision Pro, my the one experience that I really liked was watching movies in it. So I watched Citizen Kane, another great movie you should watch, from start to finish. But Citizen Kane is an extremely difficult to film to watch by modern standards. Like, Sukari was like boom boom boom boom boom.
Speaker 1:There's always something happening. It's really exciting. You know, you're watching the tactical stuff, the camera's moving, those sweet shots of, like, the SUVs moving from the area. It's amazing. Like, it's so visually stimulating.
Speaker 1:The color grade's amazing. The sound mix is amazing. Citizen Kane is so slow. It opens with these, like, really slow title cards. And, like, it's just the easiest movie ever if you're not locked in and really into it to like pull out your phone and just get and just get, you know, just like tuned out.
Speaker 1:Is Tyler watching a movie now?
Speaker 3:I mean, Citizen Kane, there's much more boring movies, I will say, than I've seen.
Speaker 1:No. I agree. I agree. It's great. It's a great movie.
Speaker 1:But but it's just like any movie that's even more even before the eighties, I feel like has a slow start. There's lots of exposition. It's just less it's just less TikTok ified versus like a modern Fast and the Furious movie. Even if it's not a good movie, it's gonna hold your attention because there's always something happening. And so Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's probably true. I mean, Citizen Kane is known for having like the I forget what the term is, but it has like the the thing that starts the whole story. Right? The like rosebud? Yeah.
Speaker 3:It like is supposed to like get you
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a good it's a good hook. It's a good hook. You you know what it is? The the the initial rosebud where he drops the it's the the snow globe. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Isn't it? The snow globe. Have you ever seen those those brain rot TikToks where it's throwing the bottle of, like, marbles down the stairs and it smashes and they bounce everywhere? No.
Speaker 1:You've never seen those? Oh. It's like the most brain rotty content possible, and it's kind of like that. Somebody So should make a version of that where it starts out and just smashes and just completely goes everywhere. Anyway, but I was bullish on this because my experience in the Apple Vision Pro was extremely positive when it came to watching films.
Speaker 1:Like, I enjoyed watching movies in it. You could put on avatar and it's in three d in an IMAX screen, which you just can't get at home otherwise. So it was basically like a home theater just for yourself. Now, I never had any time to do to to use it, and so I returned it. And it was not something that was gonna go into my, like, daily driver.
Speaker 1:But we tested a lot of these on Guinea pig Tyler over there. We gave him a Quest three s Ultra Xbox edition. Didn't play that much. Didn't get you didn't prestige, right, in COD?
Speaker 3:No. I didn't have prestige.
Speaker 1:Skill issue. And and the X rails, you wore them on one flight. You enjoyed it for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. On one flight, it was great.
Speaker 1:But you just took a flight and you didn't bring them. You didn't think, oh, I gotta put those in my backpack.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, that was
Speaker 1:Not even aspiration.
Speaker 3:That was in the summer, I think. Yeah. I last used them.
Speaker 1:Rip. And the rabbit and the humane.
Speaker 2:Well, the only the hardware that I care most about this year Yeah. Is getting a couple great racing sims
Speaker 1:here in
Speaker 2:this here in the studio. We gotta see if we can get one on true med.
Speaker 1:I wonder is a it is a sort of a lifestyle creep. I I wonder what is the current meta? I've been watching a lot of Instagram reels about sweet racing sim setups, and I've and I was wondering what the is the meta is the best is the best racing sim VR, or is it physical screens these days? I wonder which one is, the true
Speaker 2:Still physical screen.
Speaker 1:Still physical screens. Like, the f one drivers use physical screens. Yeah. They don't do VR. Because I've I've done some racing in VR and it's really cool.
Speaker 1:Like, it's it's amazing, but it is it is a heavy thing on in your Yeah. On your face. Anyway, there there will
Speaker 2:Scott be more continues. Ordinary data becomes a less valuable mode. These days, it feels like every company is trying sync everyone's data, and doing so is becoming easier than ever before. Soon enough, your products will have all of your data, whether it is via connectors now or computer vision plug ins later. As connectors of data between apps become ubiquitous, you can expect, one, the growing importance of proprietary graphs, who knows who, who works with who, who has access to what, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Two, more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers. And three, real time data sources, whether x or the weather or ocean tide patterns becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots. Mhmm. Graphs, portable memory, and real time data are the new proprietary data moats. It says seven, ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream.
Speaker 2:While many teams use services like granola or Zoom to record and annotate their meetings. Not me.
Speaker 1:I talked to people that that loved the granola wrapped because it had all the context on every like, they they they
Speaker 2:You said nothing on my end. Thanks. 400 times.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, there were some really interesting insights because it had if you run a remote start up and the vast majority of your day is spent in recorded Zoom meetings, you kind of have a record of every word and you can compress that down, summarize it. And it can actually give you some at least entertaining insights. I don't know that it's gonna completely reinvent your business, but people it definitely delighted a lot of people. So that was cool.
Speaker 2:What if granola this year just has a pop up and it's like, do you know you can automate this entire role? A thousand dollars a month, can replace this.
Speaker 1:Brutal.
Speaker 2:You can I I have to imagine that's part of like their
Speaker 1:Maybe?
Speaker 2:Their pitch to investors. Right? It's like we're gonna understand like what work is actually getting done at these companies and who does what.
Speaker 1:And how how things get made and how things get
Speaker 2:Kind of far fetched.
Speaker 1:But yeah. You never know. I mean, Will Minitis was posting about about the like, it was in like corporate It wasn't like corporate espionage, but it was some post about like about like corporate, like, backstabbing and, like, Machiavellian behavior within corporations. And and I think his point was just, there there are there are so many secrets within businesses about, like, how things actually get done that don't typically get documented. And so you can get closer to that.
Speaker 1:Just because, like, like if if you're running some business and and the and the secret to your brand is that you do things a specific way and that's not documented. I mean, noticed this with we'll we'll go on podcasts and get interviewed and we'll explain exactly the thesis of TBPN, like how it works. And and even then, some there's still some like lost in translation when we lay it out. It doesn't just come out of just watching it. And I'm sure that that's and I think that's clearly true for a lot of businesses regardless.
Speaker 1:Like, there's just secrets that are kept within internally. And if Granol is, a way to access that, like, it could be valuable. I don't know. What's the next one?
Speaker 2:The power in consumer AI will shift to tightly coupled hardware and operating system providers. The desire for local AI, like ambient listening and summarization, will coincide with the shift to AI privately running on your device. As one, open source models that you can download, change, and run locally on your device become more capable. Two, consumer hardware, Apple and Android phones, whatever OpenAI is brewing, and our computers become capable of running powerful LLMs locally while the world is going to change yet again. Implications for the AI stack are tremendous from the chips that become valuable, the evolution of operating systems, the devices we use in the role of open source AI.
Speaker 2:I suspect these changes will be a major area of focus over the next year. I'm very excited to see what Apple releases this year with Gemini. I I I expect it to be if it's better than the photos app, if it if if if it can be.
Speaker 1:I have noticed that the text to speech feature has gotten better. I feel like they updated
Speaker 2:They listen.
Speaker 1:Model at some point. And if I'm if I'm on a blog post and I click like read this to me in the car or something, it will do a good job and it sounds very human, and they clearly updated that model. I haven't tested a lot of other stuff. But but the thing that strikes me as crazy is just that Apple really seems still stuck on this annual release cadence. And in the boom cycle of AI, it feels insane not to just be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Gemini deal's going live tomorrow. Like, it's like, the the okay. You did the deal. Like, just put Gemini in Siri today.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, people have been talking about there were some some research paper about whether, like, AI tools are are actually benefiting companies. And then you you look and, like, it was the models that were out in October. It's like that's already, like, too late.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Opus is is much better than the previous Yeah. Plot model like.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and you think just getting like actual customer feedback, starting to troubleshoot these things. There's also like just a benefit to I I feel like Apple is in many ways very very cautious with their brand. They're very thoughtful thoughtful. And and they they don't don't want like like, you know, when Google launched their first image model, now they're loved for Nano Banana.
Speaker 1:It's remarkable. But remember the first launch, people were doing like the the the accurate nineteen forties soldier, and it was very controversial because it got the the the the race wrong. And and that was sort of like a backlash that Google was, like, moving fast enough that they got through that and it was not that big of a deal. And, obviously, they had no negative intentions with that. It was just a mistake.
Speaker 1:But Apple's not really in that in that mode of, oh, yeah. Like like, let's release things and then deal with, like, the backlash of things that aren't fully polished. But it feels like there's a little bit of an advantage to actually releasing so fast because, like, OpenAI over 2025 probably had, like, seven different crises of, like, AI psychosis and adult mode and all these bad there were so many bad headlines, but then there were, like, twenty two really great days where people were like, this is amazing. Thanks so much. This cool new model.
Speaker 1:And so like it sort of netted out whereas Apple was sort of like at this low din of like, oh, what are they doing forever? But I'm very optimistic about the next version.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna skip over a few. One more from Scott. He says, we'll see the rise of internal development teams as companies replace single purpose bloated SaaS products with their own apps that collapse functions in magical ways. New internal application development teams will be spawned in large companies and they'll vibe code tailor made software and agent driven solutions for functions around the company. At first, these efforts will replace SaaS products, especially those that are expensive private equity owned clunky solutions.
Speaker 2:We we support private equity here
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:And their clunky solutions, but I can see many of them getting replaced. Over time, these homegrown tools and workflows will start to collapse functions into one another. For example, why must legal and finance tools be so different in in an era where the distinct functions of social marketing sales and customer support are blurring together? Shouldn't new solutions collapse these functions into one? As companies build their own solution, they'll be optimized for a higher level of cross functional work.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for cross functional work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, the Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation Software was sort of talking about this. Right?
Speaker 2:It's great. He just came out, sat on a on an investor call. It's over. It's a good run.
Speaker 1:But I mean tired. Like, I so so I was I was wondering this because, on it was January 2 or something the the the market opened and, all the SaaS companies were selling off. Did you see this? And and people were sort of like, oh, everyone's waking up to the Claude code moment. You'll be able to, you know, vibe code any app and replace all your SaaS.
Speaker 1:And so it's bad news for all the SaaS companies. And I was trying to think about that, so I pulled some stats on the actual revenue of the large SaaS players, and I have some here. I mean, they're all growing. So Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Palo Alto, Shopify, Workday, Atlassian, Zoom, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, Datadog, HubSpot. These are basically the biggest sort of pure play software companies.
Speaker 1:And they're all growing revenue somewhere between 530%. And and for this year, I mean, they're all still up. I guess the question is, like, if one of them has a down year, that would be a real indictment, but it would be it would be my initial thesis was, like, it'd be hard to justify this idea of, like, vibe coded software truly replacing SaaS. If all of the big SaaS companies are still growing, then it's, like, clearly a Jevons paradox thing. We're just getting more software.
Speaker 1:But maybe it's the PE backed small point solution thing that's actually going to get ripped out, and that might be more of like a collapse that we see. And sure, the big software companies, they're so big and they do so much that, yes, you're not going to one shot it with Claude, so you're not gonna do that. But you do need to be worried about this, long tail software that just sticks around and just raises prices and doesn't add any features.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the threat to some of these, I guess, more, if you think about like the Joe Lamont Mhmm. Style companies Yeah. Where Built
Speaker 1:to die.
Speaker 2:Built to die. Yeah. Right? You have the software that, you know, an investor allocator like Joe would be comfortable buying knowing that the revenue is just gonna decline Yep. And eventually cease to exist.
Speaker 2:And you could imagine this being like somebody that makes software for large vending machine companies to manage inventory. Mhmm. Some something like that. Right? And a kind of overlooked category not big enough for venture.
Speaker 2:The question is like, will those companies like be super quick to adopt? Mhmm. Will they be super quick to adopt AI products themselves? Or they will they be using will they be like vibe coding? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, it goes The question is
Speaker 2:you potentially get this sort of, like, like, explosion of, like, web developers Yeah. That just were, like, thousands, millions of people globally that are gonna I'm gonna go to business owners, and I'm gonna make them a website. Right? And you could see something like that happening with, like, vibe coders Yeah. Like freelance vibe coders.
Speaker 1:Literally his first point is massive amounts of talent arbitrage. People who with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses. So there'll probably be a lot of people that understand these tools and then can go into a mid sized enterprise and say, hey. We're paying so much for this old piece of software. Or they'll go into that company and say, hey.
Speaker 1:We can improve it and keep our customers. We can go back into growth mode economically, and maybe this thing doesn't need to die. Maybe maybe with just a little bit of extra work, we can make it great again or we get bigger. I want Tyler's response, but first, I wanna tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedded models and re rankers.
Speaker 1:MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Tyler.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I think there is some distinction. Like, you you mentioned of the of the software companies, it's like Snowflake or MongoDB. Mhmm. Like, people aren't vibe coding their own vector databases.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like a tool. It's not like the full solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I would be very surprised if those, like, are the the chief, you know, if those are hurt a lot by by vibe coding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I know. I I agree. Also, I mean, anything with regulatory, anything with proprietary data involved, there's just a lot of different moats that companies build up.
Speaker 1:And I think that even companies that seem simple where they it it feels like something you could vibe code, but, you know, they've been aware of moat building for twenty years and they've been doing it. And you might not know that, oh, they actually have some really solid relationship with this legal decision and this thing, and they they they can navigate this for you. And it feels just like a SaaS app, but there's something else going on behind the scenes. I think that that creates more durability.
Speaker 2:Yep. Anjaney has twenty twenty six group chat consensus. One, capabilities progress from Anthropic and Google. Mhmm. Leaving out
Speaker 1:Leaving out opening. Hi. What's going on there?
Speaker 2:Two, sovereign. I mean, he he's he's he was an angel in Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:He's he's got his team. Sovereign nations as largest customers of open source models. Three, compute scarcity at unimaginable levels. Four, violent public backlash against perceived AI job losses. Hopefully, no violence.
Speaker 2:But I I the perceived AI job losses is notable.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I saw there there was a pretty viral video that popped up on my ex this morning, and it was like a montage of, like, big tech layoffs. Yeah. Yeah. And they were positioning it like it was all AI job loss.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I think that is gonna that's the story right now. On one hand, it's it's CEOs management team saying, hey, maybe I should do more with less. Mhmm. In some it's I'm doing more with less because of AI. But in a lot of cases, there's just like, you can just exercise willpower.
Speaker 2:Right? This was the Twitter story, which was like, hey, let's do the same let's provide the same platform with 75% less people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment.
Speaker 1:Web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Which I got right away. Thomas says 11 predictions for 2026. We got a bunch of prediction posts here. Every year, make a list of predictions and score last year's predictions.
Speaker 1:2025 was a good year. He scored 7.85 out of 10. Here is here are his predictions for 2026. Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time. That's a bull.
Speaker 2:I don't know that he's saying all businesses. He's saying I think he's saying some business.
Speaker 1:Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. We saw blacked out Uber, which or Waymo, which was iconic. I wanna get to that one.
Speaker 2:Murdered Waymo? It was a real murdered out Waymo?
Speaker 1:It might have been AI. I don't know. We gotta dig into it. Vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack. 2026 becomes a record year for liquidity.
Speaker 1:I saw something interesting where so he's predicting SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, IPOs with SpaceX and OpenAI ranking among the 10 largest offerings ever, the pent up demand. And so a lot of people were saying like this will drive a lot of liquidity into new companies. I mean, it doesn't seem like new companies are having trouble raising right now. But in theory, if you're a venture capital firm and you return $50,000,000,000 to your LPs, they probably want to sign up for the next fund, and the next fund probably gets bigger. And we've seen a couple of charts where it looks like venture dollars are declining the number of funds are declining, but you could see sort of LPs become a little bit more cash rich, where they over the last five years, they've been really, really allocating towards venture.
Speaker 1:They're finally to get their payoff if they're in the right funds. And now that they have liquidity, maybe they go and do something else with it. Maybe they go fund new managers. Maybe they go double down on the growth funds that have been providing them returns
Speaker 2:they as far. Buy land. Maybe they buy land. There is They're into land maxing.
Speaker 1:AI models execute tasks autonomously for longer than a workday. According to Meter, AI task duration doubles every seven months. Two current frontier models reliably create complete tasks, taking people about an hour extrapolating this trend by late twenty twenty six. AI agents will autonomously execute eight hour work streams. That will be crazy.
Speaker 1:You will be able to just say, hey. Go spend a full day on this project. Come back to me, and it will come back to you when it's done. It now, it will come back to you before eight hours. Right?
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so
Speaker 1:It's the equivalent work time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think there was this there's a good blog post that came out, I think, a couple days after the the break started. It was like critiquing the the meteor evals. And the main thing was like, if you actually look at what the eval is doing for the I think it was I think it was for for Opus. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The the the headline was like, it can do four and a half hours or four or something. Yeah. And and so the way you do that is, like, you give it tasks that take people on average four hours. Yeah. But it's pretty hard to find tasks that that do that.
Speaker 3:Right? So Sure. If you look at it, they only had, like, 14 actual tasks that they gave that benchmark. So it's a very small sample size. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's it's it's pretty hard to, you know, reliably see if if is that actually
Speaker 1:true or At the same are you laughing at the chat?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bobby says that you guys hear about OpenAI's quote pen. And Gold Rock says, is it a vape pen you can gamble on from?
Speaker 1:I'm saying.
Speaker 2:That's the most
Speaker 1:It's the most
Speaker 2:That's most $20.26 pen.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't be surprised. I there are a lot of vape pens that have full on LED screens and microcontrollers, so people will like run Doom on them or run Tetris on them and VibeCode on them and stuff. There's a lot of fun fun stuff there. Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software
Speaker 2:faster. Cursor.
Speaker 1:This is wild. Well, if you want a vape pen, maybe you should try and pay with it with pretax dollars using TruMed. We have Justin Mayer's. He's gonna tell us that you can't do that. I'm gonna tell him I absolutely can.
Speaker 1:Just I will. Me. And I will. I will be buying a vape pen on this. We were Justin, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1:Great to see you. Happy New Year.
Speaker 2:John wants to vape Chinese pep time.
Speaker 1:No. No. So I don't. I actually don't. But I do want to I want you to tell me how I can use TruMed to build the ultimate Luxmaxing stack.
Speaker 1:I wanna pay for with my Luxmaxing stack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are you used? What are you what are you what's your stack?
Speaker 1:You've clearly been since you've been on the show,
Speaker 2:you've I could your cheeks are red. I can see you've been bone smacking. You're
Speaker 4:here talking about the
Speaker 1:fit. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is saying
Speaker 4:it looks
Speaker 1:so good. Your mid face ratio is completely different than the last time we saw you. Something's clearly going on. TrueMed clearly helping. Anyway, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's new?
Speaker 4:I'm I'm doing phenomenally. Doing so well and you know, one of the things that that I've been using from a health standpoint is obviously bone broth and Oh. You know, all of the health benefits that come
Speaker 2:One hand washes the other.
Speaker 1:Wait. So Exactly. So you literally smashed the bones to make the bone broth. Correct? So you've been in bone smashing for a decade now?
Speaker 2:His family actually made their money in bone smashing.
Speaker 1:They made they it is a bone smashing company. Might be the best pure play bone smashing company there is, arguably. We we
Speaker 4:were decades ahead of clavicular.
Speaker 1:I think you were.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need a Luxmax index. For sure.
Speaker 4:For sure. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Kettle Kettle and Fire can be when when you guys go public, we'll put it in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, just reset the story for us. What's the news? You you picked the worst possible day to announce it, but, but give it to us.
Speaker 2:Maybe the best. Guys struck through the there wasn't a
Speaker 1:lot It was sort of a quiet day. Yeah. Yeah. Take us through it.
Speaker 3:Very quiet day.
Speaker 1:Take it through it.
Speaker 4:I mean, so so we we finally announced that we raised $34,000,000 for TrueMed as part of the series a. So
Speaker 1:I almost hit him.
Speaker 2:You gong. Hit it. I love that I love that shakes shakes the whole camera. It's so good.
Speaker 4:It's a
Speaker 1:bigger gong. The first
Speaker 4:2026 is gonna be a big year for you guys.
Speaker 1:The first 2026 Gong hit. Anyway, so Love it. $34,000,000. Yeah. Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. So so when did the deal happen? What what was the thesis around launching it, the announcement when you did?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it it happened, like, earlier last year, in the first half of last year.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:But we we basically had a bunch of different things happening at the company level. We wanted to tie it up with a bunch of different announcements. We grew three times Yeah. Which was fully baked by the end, which which was great. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so kinda, like, packaged everything up and decided to announce and kind of mention that, you know, this thing that we're doing and this movement that we're building around incentivizing people to invest in prevention and invest in their health while they still have it is a big thing and it's a thing that tech and other people are are paying attention to and waking up to. The wanted to announce it later in the year.
Speaker 1:And and and has the elevator pitch changed to consumers or the the companies that you're working with? Like, how are you positioning the actual value prop of TruMed, like, getting people on board?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Mean, so so to brands like Peloton, Eight Sleep, Lifetime, those are our partners, you know, it's it's quite easy.
Speaker 1:For
Speaker 4:many of these brands yeah. Like for for many of these brands exactly, Eight Sleep. For many of these brands, like, they they're they realize that they are selling a product that oftentimes is expensive. Mhmm. And so if someone can use pre tax funds and save 25 to 50%, you know, you're like in the max tax bracket and live in California, you can save 50%.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Buying a getting an Eight Sleep or a Peloton at 50% off is like quite a material thing. And so we have we have merchant partners where we're doing 20% of their total sales are going through TruMed. And for the individual, you know, if if you're someone with an HSA or FSA account, historically these accounts have been used under this idea of like wait until you get sick, get cancer, need surgeries, need like pharmaceuticals late in life and then you have a tax advantage account that can pay for everything once you're sick. And you know, the IRS has been clear like the average American is sick today. We should be spending these these dollars on things that studies show are effective at treating or preventing different diseases.
Speaker 4:And so that's what TruMed enables.
Speaker 1:And what's the status of the of, like, HSA? It's usually, an option and you have to pick a specific health care plan to be eligible. Is that right? Like, HSAs booming? Are people adopting them?
Speaker 1:Like, what's the actual flow to get one in school?
Speaker 2:I maxed out my HSA this year That's not a because great of TrueMed Yes. On our TBPN plan. Yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, HSAs are growing quite a lot. They grew around 11% last year. Think over the last three years, that's been about right, like 10 to 15% growth. Our thesis though is that, you know, you ask the average person like you Jordy before Truman came along like what is an HSA?
Speaker 4:Do you have one? Why should you care about it? The average person just has no idea. Like they just do not care. It's considered almost like a boomer savings account.
Speaker 4:And so one of our hypotheses is that these accounts historically have been high friction and you can't use them on anything that you actually want to prevent disease. Like who cares about buying band aids tax free?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so our hypothesis is like if you can buy something, pay for lifetime membership, pay for AIDS leave, pay for these different things that you know, assuming that you qualify, that many, many more people will actually sign up and fund these accounts. And like, I I think that over the next decade, there could be a trillion dollars in HSA and FSA accounts even without any regulatory changes or any anything like that.
Speaker 2:Is it possible to pull a PT and put startup equity in an HSA? I throw out few shares?
Speaker 1:Do you have any availability, like trade in the HSA? Is that a thing people can do?
Speaker 4:That's definitely a thing people can do. Okay. It's not something that TruMed necessarily supports yet, but it's a thing people can do. Mean, I don't know if, like, there's an HSA PT out there yet, but Why
Speaker 2:do think we can move so TrueMed is a company that to me is shockingly political. Like, some people hear about what TrueMed does and they get angry. They're like, no. You should only be able to spend your HSA funds once you're deathly ill. You shouldn't be able to use an extra You shouldn't be able to use it to buy something that helps you exercise that even though we know exercise extends your lifespan.
Speaker 2:So it's like it's just like crazy crazy that we're in a place that, you know, spending HSA funds is like political and people are angry about it. Do you have any Do you have optimism around that changing over time? Is is this just kind of the nature? So much of health is just deeply political.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, honestly, one of the one of the biggest disappointments that I've had in the last couple years is seeing health become political. Like, somehow you have a former, you know, Democratic candidate for president that is now part of the Trump administration who's talking about health and it means it's a it's a right wing issue somehow. I think that there's always gonna be people that look at this like within the industry, you know, I I came as an outsider from the industry. I started Kettle and Fire before this.
Speaker 4:And within the industry, it's still like controversial somewhat whether like bug spray should be HSA or FSA eligible. Like the industry is just very very behind and very stuck in the ways of and under the assumptions that the average American is healthy and HSA and FSA accounts are there and exist to help people pay for health care when they're sick, on the rare occasion that people are sick. That was true like twenty two years ago when these accounts were were started when, you know, when Congress basically created these accounts. I just think those default assumptions are no longer true. Like, you look around and the average American today is sick.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, seventy percent of Americans are are overweight or obese. Ninety three percent have at least a metabolic marker of of dysfunction. Like, we are an incredibly sick country, among the sickest countries in the world. And in my view, HSAs and FSAs are one of the best tools that we have in our admittedly very broken health care system to try and direct funds towards prevention and towards root cause interventions that can actually make people healthier and treat and prevent many of the chronic conditions people struggle with. And so Is
Speaker 2:there is there a lot of volume happening on TruMed that's going towards Wegovy and people paying out of pocket for weight loss treatment products or is that is that separate?
Speaker 4:No. So so as of right now, we don't support GLP ones. Like, what what true you know, would say that the healthcare industry as a whole, the payment rails are relatively good at allowing people to pay for pharmaceuticals. Like, if you wanna pay for pharmaceuticals, you can use an HSA today.
Speaker 2:But aren't a lot of people paying for GLP ones out of pocket? Or is
Speaker 1:it Yeah.
Speaker 4:They can, but but HSA for many people is considered out of pocket as well. And because it's like they they can direct where they where and how they spend these funds. They're their own funds, just they're tax free.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so what what we are basically doing is we are trying to make it legible and bring online a bunch of effective lifestyle interventions, exercise, sleep, supplements, things like that, that the traditional health care system, like, right now doesn't really know how to think about, and people don't really know how to pay for it.
Speaker 1:So is there, like, a big road map for you on new verticals that you wanna bring online? Is there a process for, like, actually getting something approved to work with TruMed? Like, did you start with Eight Sleeps and then you added and it was like a different process or is there just one bucket and you can throw whatever you need into it and you just sign the companies as they come up?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we basically, we have a medical advisory board and a medical team and we basically look at when an intervention comes to us, when a brand or a merchant comes to us and they say, hey, we want to work with TruMed. Mhmm. We basically look at a couple things like what what do the studies say about how effective a certain intervention is? Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Based on that, like what conditions will that intervention be effective for? You know, like you can't get exercise to treat like a toe fungus or something like that. Like that would be a bad intervention. Like a doctor would never prescribe that. And so what we are basically looking for is something like exercise.
Speaker 4:What are the conditions that exercise as an intervention can treat, reverse, or alleviate? That's the IRS standard. And assuming that there's a good amount of data, research supports that intervention, and then we talk to our clinical team and we decide can we support or not a specific intervention. And so we have a bunch of things, exercise, sleep supplements and the like that we support today. A big
Speaker 3:thing that I want to
Speaker 4:unlock this year is food. Like if you look at the data, like medically tailored meals have incredible efficacy, incredible ROI, but they're very complicated to you know, it's very complicated and the IRS frankly has like a heart attack when they hear people are using HSA or FSA to to spend on food because like
Speaker 2:Chicken fingers. Chicken finger dream. I have it. My chicken finger dream is chicken fingers via my TrueMed account. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. No. You're you're talking about, like, actual, like, you know, properly portioned meals.
Speaker 1:There's been, like, a whole history of companies that have tried to do sort of like portion control, meal prep. There's been a number of different kits. Obviously, there's varying levels of efficacy. But in theory, that's a really great intervention. I mean, it just seems so obvious.
Speaker 1:Like, you go to any health and wellness influencer, and before they tell you about the six different types of magnesium or something, like, they're going to lay down the law, which is to sleep, diet
Speaker 2:and exercise.
Speaker 1:Sleep, diet and exercise. And so it feels like those three should be on TruMed first before, you know, even the creatine gets on there or something and the supplements. But but obviously, like, food, it feels like it's a challenge, so you're working on that. So is that is that a goal for 2026 or
Speaker 4:A 100%. I I would say that is one of our big goals for this year Yeah. Especially as, like, tens of millions of Americans are gonna be on GLP-1s. Sure. Things like eating more nutritionally dense food, getting more protein.
Speaker 4:Protein, right? Like these things really, really matter
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Or even things like GLP-1s to to work over any long period of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's something we want watch too, right? 100%. Place where people people miss out if they're on GLP ones.
Speaker 2:How are you, how big is the team?
Speaker 4:We're 51 people now.
Speaker 2:51 people. And, like, what's your kind of, like, personal ethos as a CEO around, building a company like this as, you know, every single day we have more and more AI progress? Are you pushing the team to to to are you pushing everybody on the team to to, like, you know, use the tools as effectively as they can? Like, where where are you getting the most leverage? All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we're we're certainly pushing the engineering team to to use things like clock code and whatnot all the time. I think that where we are getting the most leverage and where we have started to focus is leveraging a lot of these tools specifically on the like prototyping side of things. Mhmm. Like we recently stood up a a team within TrueMed that it's basically me and like two other people where we're calling it like the venture bets team.
Speaker 4:It's basically the team that just like moves fast, tries things, prototype stuff, sees and if it works or not. And the goal there is basically to unlock a new line of revenue, you know, over the next twelve to eighteen months. And for that, we are basically doing using almost entirely AI tooling to spin up let you know, landing pages, mini products, like all these sorts of things that are not exactly built to like scale. They're not built for, you know, six nines uptime or anything like this, but just with the pure goal of like get as many shots on goal and many as many iterations as possible. And so that that's how personally we're we're starting to use it a lot.
Speaker 1:I feel like do do you identify with the label like fintech? Is that a fair category? Or do you think of yourself as like a different category?
Speaker 2:He'll he'll say he's finance tech.
Speaker 1:Finance tech.
Speaker 4:I I would say definitely we're a fintech company right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. The question I ask is because do you like do you have any, like, are you at war with people that are trying to do fraud on the platform? I feel like that's like a permanent background noise if you're a fintech company. But I don't know if you operate at like an abstraction layer where that's kind of like, oh, you're it's not a headache for you.
Speaker 2:Why do
Speaker 1:you think or
Speaker 2:Most pay like, a company that does payments online typically is incentivized. Yeah. It's set up in a way it's like business joins platform, moves money. Yeah. You want more businesses joining the platform moving money.
Speaker 2:I think that you guys are I'm sure people have tried stuff but feel pretty insulated from that kind of like large Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's I mean, it's not a payroll company. You can just do money laundering. But but is there is there a like a like a fraud fighting team or how have you addressed that? Is even a problem?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, it it has been a small problem but it's been a thing that like honestly, Stripe's tools are pretty darn good. Yeah. And like we we build on top of Stripe, they're quite good. Sure.
Speaker 4:And so it hasn't been a thing where we're like throwing personnel at it or anything like that. But yeah, mean, a a the most possible boring explanation of TruMed is like we're a b to b SaaS company that does compliance for HSA and FSA. Mhmm. You know? Like given that, like, that we're definitely a fintech company.
Speaker 1:New Year's resolutions. Do you have any? Do you think they're effective for living a healthier life? What do you think of New Year's resolutions?
Speaker 4:I personally, I find them great. I I actually just had my first kid though, so I'm sort of like resolutions out the window.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Figuring out the Just just keep on keeping on.
Speaker 4:A 100%. Yeah. But
Speaker 2:we were talking we were talking a few days ago and you said, it's amazing and super underrated. Yeah. Which is which is wildly different than another person that we were talking about earlier. Oh. The show that said
Speaker 1:go. Similar missing something? Yeah. Yeah. Similar name.
Speaker 1:Similar name. What about what about, like, big trends in 2026? I feel like you have seen basically every health trend between two and six years early. What do you think we're gonna be talking about this year?
Speaker 2:Well, let's get into let's get into I think the thing that that's been going the most Looks smacky. Most talked about.
Speaker 1:I mean, that that is in my world, that's
Speaker 2:Tied the most to that, but peptides.
Speaker 1:Oh, peptides. Sure. Okay. Let's start
Speaker 2:with peptides. Linked to my first peptide cycle probably five years ago at this point. I'm now at the point where so many people are trying so many different things and there's I did this at a time and I did this at a time where I was like, there's there's really no like large scale studies on this. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anecdotally, I knew people that had done it. Sure. And they done they they tried them for, you know, you you do it as a cycle. Nobody even back then was saying, take this and never stop taking it. Right?
Speaker 1:It was There were also some really big high profile acute like the Hugh Jackman Wolverine. Like, everyone saw that and we're like, oh,
Speaker 2:whatever he did. Was Peptides or just anabolic steroid?
Speaker 1:I think that was BPC one five seven. I don't know. Anyone know? Anyone know? I don't think so.
Speaker 2:I don't know. No. That's the Wolverine peptide.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. I just mixed them up.
Speaker 2:It's Wolverine. It's a Wolverine peptide because it like
Speaker 1:Oh, Recovering. Okay. Anyway. Maybe it was just gear. But
Speaker 2:but but my concern with peptides is like you basically I just look at them as like slightly toned down like anabolic steroids that are more targeted in in terms of what they do. So when you have millions of people that are just trying to buying them from random sites online, they can be contaminated. I have a lot of red flags around that. I'm not kind of diving in any deeper.
Speaker 1:So peptides, Faustian bargain or not?
Speaker 4:I I think that these are going to be incredible tools. I think that the FDA is probably gonna release much needed guidance around them this year. Like, there's just too many Americans that are buying cheap for research purposes only peptides right now. It's just gotten too big that the FDA has to do something. Like I personally know a bunch of people that swear by these things.
Speaker 4:The efficacy is
Speaker 1:Yeah, same.
Speaker 4:And you know, they're certainly they're endogenous, like your body makes them in many cases. I'm very bullish on them from an efficacy standpoint. I have tons of questions about quality. And I think for me, the thing that you just have to wonder on all these things is like one thing that our current FDA does a very good job of with pharmaceuticals is figuring out, are there any sort of like side effects? So like does pancreatitis risk go up twelve percent you know when you take this thing over a year period or whatever?
Speaker 4:And like no one is looking at those sort of long tail effects of peptides. Certainly not when you're looking at staying on these things, combining them with other peptides over you know, some long period of time. So I would say that I'm like bullish but cautious. Whereas I think most of the people in peptides right now are sort of like ripping
Speaker 2:it Purely bull. Options. Exactly.
Speaker 1:It does it does feel like we're in a new era of just experimentation and just like, I don't know, like like a couple decades ago, like like a like a TRT or something was something that was like just way less risk. I mean, we've seen this with all sorts of substances and just activities where, you know, we've we've productized them in in the way America does best. It becomes a button.
Speaker 4:And I mean, that that's totally true. I also think to be fair, this is like the health stuff is the biggest problem in the country in my mind. Yeah. The average American is sick. Average American has bad sleep.
Speaker 4:They have bad energy. Like the demand for something that can promise you feel better, your joints feel better, you're sleeping, you're losing weight is like off the charts, has never been higher. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think given that, there's just infinite demand for products that can make someone feel better, give them more energy, lose weight, sleep better, whatever, which is why I'm just I I think peptides are going to be one of the biggest trends in the next five years.
Speaker 4:Certainly, are gonna come with side effects and downsides Yeah. But they're they're gonna be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Underrated story about American competition, the whole story of how Novo, like, came up with all this stuff and then just got, like, kind of beat in the public markets by Americans just being like, we're we're like, the American biotech industry, like, really ripped it. Anyway, other trends? Novo happened in series.
Speaker 1:I mean, basically. I mean, they had that problem with, the the they didn't file the the IP rule or something.
Speaker 2:What What's the what's the state of Austin? We've had
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We Saks is is opening an office.
Speaker 1:Lots of people are getting out of California. Make the
Speaker 2:pitch for Austin. Yeah. Give us on Austin.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Look, Austin's great. I I think that Austin will do well to the extent that California decides to self immolate. It seems like right now, California is like just pouring gas
Speaker 1:So, on
Speaker 4:you know, we'll we'll see. If the wealth tax thing actually goes through or even gets a a medium amount of popular support
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Then, yeah, like, there is going to be a huge exodus from Silicon Valley, from LA Yeah. To other places all over the country.
Speaker 1:Is it Austin or Bust? Is it Austin or Bust or or are there tech people that are going to Dallas or
Speaker 2:Highland Park. What about the I I could see some allocators ending up in Highland Park. Don't know either.
Speaker 1:Highland Park's in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:No. No. Highland Park is a neighborhood in Dallas.
Speaker 1:Oh, it is? Okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I've only been to Dallas once. Okay. I don't think anyone's going to Dallas.
Speaker 1:No one's going to Dallas. So if a tech person's leaving San Francisco, they're going to Austin.
Speaker 4:I I I think it's basically Austin Yeah. Maybe Boulder or Denver, maybe Miami. Although I think the Miami thing was kind of not
Speaker 1:a real thing.
Speaker 2:I personally personally I'm more of an Abilene guy.
Speaker 1:Abilene. Straight to the data center. I love it. I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm an Alaska guy. I I I say get up there, it's nice and cold.
Speaker 4:Geno tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're locked in. But anyway, any any other are there any other predictions for just health trends or foods or anything that's like rising and falling? Are we have we finally reached peak Slop Bowl?
Speaker 1:Are we going in a different direction?
Speaker 2:No. I'm gonna go get a protein cup from from Chipotle later.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is that real? Are the restaurants really like downsizing in reaction to GLP ones or is that just like, you know, some random organic thing that's happening? You you are
Speaker 4:seeing certain grocery chains, especially ones that sell a lot of junk food are starting to downsize or see like junk food sales go down. Okay. Mainly because people are less hungry Yeah. And most of junk food is predicated on like people eating them infinitely while snacking Sure. There.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so I I do think there's gonna be a renewed focus on nutrient density on protein on things like this. I think you have to imagine, like a big trend that I'm I'm bullish on is these GLP-1s are gonna be everywhere, you know. We have the oral version of Ozempic coming this year. There's gonna be fifty million Americans on these things in the next five years.
Speaker 4:I think there is going to be a backlash where people start to see what are the downsides. They start to, you know, get caught up in like micronutrient deficiencies
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And other sorts of things that just come from, know, if even if you're eating a bad diet but you're eating less of it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You're still gonna have health problems even if you may be less overweight or less obese than you were previously. And I think we'll start to underwrite that more over the next couple years.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Well, it'll be interesting to track. Well,
Speaker 2:this is your second time on the show? Yeah. Let's make it a monthly thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Next time you're in LA, die.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to talk about and we love you.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic.
Speaker 4:Guys. Thanks for the merch.
Speaker 1:Talk soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about eleven Labs build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11.
Speaker 2:Or in our case.
Speaker 1:Theme song.
Speaker 2:Theme song.
Speaker 1:Our theme song is generated by 11. Do you wanna do some timeline? How how long how long do you wanna go? Because we could close this post. This very optimistic post from Elon Musk replying to Marc Andreessen.
Speaker 1:Marc Andreessen says, it's time to grow. This is in response to 4.3% year over year GDP growth in q three. Kinda crazy. Didn't see that coming, says Calleb Hammer. And Elon says double digit growth is coming within twelve to eighteen months.
Speaker 1:If applied intelligence is in proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple digit is possible in five years. Let's pray for tip triple digit GDP growth. It would truly be a golden era. Lot of bottlenecks to that, but let's hope it happens.
Speaker 2:I like the sound of that, John. That's a good place to
Speaker 4:end.
Speaker 1:I think that's great place to end. We'll cover Lulu's post tomorrow. Lulu's actually coming on the show this week. Tomorrow. And also yeah.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow. So Gabe, you you got exactly what you're what you're looking for. And also we'll have to discuss the the prediction about OpenAI buying Pinterest. That's an interesting one to to to kick around. It was very funny because it was a it was just a prediction post from the information, but people were reporting on it like it's a rumor or like it's a it's like a like a fact or something.
Speaker 1:There's a lot to dig into there. But anyway, thank you so much
Speaker 2:for It is
Speaker 1:so good to be back.
Speaker 2:To be back. Good be all of you. Thank you for tuning in. We seriously missed doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:As a couple of Irishman, we yearn Like
Speaker 1:work
Speaker 2:work. For labor. We learned to be on the mics tilling the RSS feed. And thank you thank you for being a part of this. We're so excited for this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1:of fun. It's huge.
Speaker 2:And we hope you have a great Monday.
Speaker 1:Talk to
Speaker 2:you soon.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Bye.