AI Needs a Steve Jobs, Meta’s Nuclear Powerplants, a16z raises $15B | Diet TBPN

0:01We have a massive show for you today folks. 15 billion dollars raised by Andreessen Horowitz. We're gonna be taking you all over the place today, but we're gonna start with Steve Jobs' Apple. We're going back into Cupertino because there's a rumor that Tim Cook might step down sooner than expected. His compensation, we've talked about it a lot, 74.29 million per year. His salary is 3 million, stock awards 57 million, non-equity incentive compensation. He gets a$12 million bonus if he does well. He gets$21 ,000 in 401k. Personal use of private jet,$800k on that. That's nice. Only$800k? Vacation cash out of$56k, security expenses.

0:48They're paying$900 ,000 a year to secure him. That's got to be a whole team of people. Probably some jacked tier one operators following him everywhere he goes. But he is rumored to be out. AppleTrack says, Apple CEO Tim Cook has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. I doubt they wanted that quote specifically to leak. But it did via the New York Times. So rumors suggest he could announce a plan to retire as early as this year. Of course, the rumor is that John Ternus might step into that role. with Tim Cook having recently turned 65 years old and a number of other senior Apple executives having already departed in recent months or heading for the exits, there has been a significant focus on Apple's plans for who will succeed Cook as CEO.

1:36I was hoping for a Warren Buffett third act from Cook. I was hoping for him to just say, I'm just hitting my stride 65 to 95. That's where I'm gonna do my best work. That's my window. You haven't seen any compounding yet. It's a completely underrated era for business leaders. If you can stay in the game and continue to compound from 65 to 95, that's where the sweet spot is. Just get ready to lock in, not check out. We love to joke about him being underpaid. I actually think he is, or he has been. Seriously, for how big of a company he is and what he's done to the stock. But the nominative determinism of Tim Cook coming in and just absolutely cooking for as long as he has, it will always be remembered.

2:20Yeah. So several recent reports have identified Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, as likely to be named the next Apple CEO. And The New York Times has now shared a profile of Ternus with some context on his expertise and how he's viewed within the company. According to sources who spoke with The New York Times, Apple has begun accelerating its planning for Tim Cook's succession last year, with Cook having expressed a desire to reduce his workload, while software chief Craig Federighi, services chief Eddie Kue, Marketing head Greg Jaws and retail HR chief Deidre O 'Brien have all reportedly been seen as potential candidates.

2:58Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack, with Cook likely to remain as chairman of the company's board of directors. Oh, so he's not completely out to pasture. He'll be in the boardroom. Ternus is known for his expertise as an engineer, having worked on many of Apple's devices through, although he is known, quote, more for maintaining products than developing new ones. Big question about what the next decade or two of Apple's product roadmap actually looks like. How many more new products do they need? Sort of have one thing in every category. If we go through a major form factor shift, that could be an issue.

3:34But in general, if you have someone who's really good at maintaining products and keeping dominant market share, driving up margins, that could be the right person for the job. Quote about John Ternus. He's a nice guy. Let's hear it. Sometimes nice guys finish first. They always say nice guys finish last. I think it's a bit of fake news. This is from former Apple engineer Cameron Rogers. Quote about John Ternus. He's someone you want to hang out with. I love it. He's just a good hang. Everyone loves him because he's great. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Take the shots at your boy. Hey, we just like hanging out.

4:10with the guy, he's just like hanging out. Has he had to do any real work ever? No. Has he made any single hard decision in his life? I'm sure that's not true. But it does characterize his role, I guess. He hasn't been in the CEO seat, so he probably hasn't had to make crazy decisions like should we launch Apple Vision Pro now or later? You know, he's not the one. He's just like, you told me to launch it, I got it done, right? That's his role. Should we make the iPhone less durable? That's a hard decision. Are there hard problems he solved in hardware? Also, no. What? This is an insane quote. Wow.

4:48Ternus and others may quibble with that assessment. However, as Ternus has been involved with a number of innovative products over the years, including spearheading effort to develop the iPhone Air and working on the upcoming foldable iPhone. That's exciting. Ternus is seen as a natural successor to Cook, even with an even temperament, strong attention to detail, and an intimate knowledge of Apple's supply chain. That's obviously very good. But he may not bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had. Will John Ternus, if he steps into the role of CEO of Apple, will he bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had.

5:28That's a tall, tall order. I think Tim Cook's executed extremely well. He hasn't even, it doesn't really seem like he's tried to bring a visionary focus. He's been the operator. He's a supply chain visionary. He's a supply chain visionary in his own way. You were thinking, and we've been discussing this need for a Steve Jobs of AI, a visionary leader in AI. We have a number of household name type CEO, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amadei, Demis at Google DeepMind. But we don't quite have that Steve Jobs. Maybe that's too tall of an order, but you still think it's necessary. So walk me through your thinking.

6:11Yeah. Everybody's worried about not having a job because of AI. Well, AI needs a Jobs too. They need a Steve Jobs. Yeah. Oh, I didn't get that. That's good. We've talked about this a little bit this week. I tried to summarize it today in the newsletter. I went back and looked at the history of the phrase tech clash. It was originally coined by Adrian Woldridge and The Economist in 2013. He correctly predicted that, quote, the big developments of 2014 will be the growing peasants' revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace. The Silicon elite will cease to be regarded as geeks who happen to be filthy rich and become filthy rich people who happen to be geeks.

6:46Over the coming years, he was entirely correct. It was actually in 2018 that TechLash was the runner-up word of the year. So he called it perfectly. Obviously, you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is actually finally going to be dramatized this year with the social network too. That's coming out this year. Do we have a release date yet for that? I don't think so. But it is in the works. And then, yeah, just growing concerns about monopoly power, privacy, democracy, censorship. Really quickly, Tyler, October 9th, 2026. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing as well. There we go. Okay, we do. Book the tickets now.

7:23It's going to be entertaining. Book it. This would be a good, we should organize, we should, we should, actually, I don't know. I'm not sure that this movie is, I expect this movie to hit like 10 % or potentially negative in comparison to the social network one. I agree. And so I think it might be the kind of thing you get a bunch of people to go and it's just like, okay, that was fun. The social network, the original movie is a really good Rorschach test for, are you going to have a good time in tech? Like if you ask someone who is thinking about working at a company or a tech startup, like, what'd you think of the social network?

7:55And they're like, oh, I thought it was like awful. And like, I hated all of it. And there were no heroes. Well, they're probably not going to enjoy tech. But if they came away from it being like, oh, well, it's actually really inspiring. I'm going to start a startup now. Because he just coded a thing in his dorm room that became really big. And yes, there was drama and fights over who gets what on the cap table. But even Eduardo Saverin became a multi-billionaire. So, you know, sort of an aim for the moon hit, land amongst the stars situation. Most people, most tech insiders, if you ask them about the social network, they were like, that was inspiring.

8:28I listened to the music all the time. It inspired me to grind harder, basically. I'll continue. So first, TechLash is all about how is this impacting our mental health? How is this impacting our democracy, the foundations of our country, society, privacy, censorship, et cetera? The second tech clash has begun. Feels like it started last year. This is one of those things like, yeah, you don't really know. Sometimes it takes a while to realize, okay, we're in this thing now that we can look back and see how public opinion has been forming around this. So I believe the average American believes that technology and now AI is now like a threat to their way of life.

9:08So I was looking at. There were rumors of the tech lash in 2024 when the image generators came out. A lot of the arts community were saying this is really, really bad. It's going to put artists out of jobs. The thumbnail community on YouTube was upset. But this year it's solidified around. There's like three or four key points, key talking points. If you talk to someone, why don't you like AI? Well, it's stealing copyrighted information. It's slop. It's putting people out of jobs. It's stealing water and stealing power. And each one of those is somewhat real. So the first TechLash was like, okay, these tech, our lives are now existing in these platforms.

9:46Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they are in some ways more powerful than the government. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maslow's hierarchy of needs pulled up. And I was just like going through and looking at physiological needs, right? Air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction, safety, personal security, employment, resources, health, right? All these different things. And then you just go up and you can see that like, there's good reason for the average American to just kind of believe like AI is going to mess all of this up, right? So starting at the bottom, Americans have heard that data centers use a lot of water, right?

10:14It's not necessarily factual. Sure, water is used in the process, but we're not like, you know, blowing through water at the rates that the public sort of receives. I was joking about this online. I was hypothetically debating with an AI doomer about water usage. Well, are they long water stocks? Because if you believe that AI is going to use all the power, and you bought GE Verona, you did very, very well. But the water stocks have not mooned. So hey, D-cells who think AI is going to use all the water, maybe you got to put on a long position. Yeah, or just privatize a public utility. Yeah. Become a monopolist.

10:51AI does use a lot of power, and there's a lot of investment theses that can be built on top of the semi-analysis energy model. Why doesn't semi-analysis have a water model? Oh, because it's actually not a bottleneck to anything. Yeah, so the power thing is more real. I have to imagine people are reading an article, oh, your power bill might be going up. If your power bill just goes up because it's a winner, you're like, oh, thanks AI. Thanks, Bob. I didn't ask for this. So they've seen Terminator 2, so they can imagine kind of like the sci-fi scenario playing out. That's one factor. If they're super online, they might have heard like the Casey Hammer or other people talking about this, like solar panels, you know, an AI system just saying like, hey, actually, this farmland, I could use it better than you humans.

11:35Remember that Ilya video? Oh, yeah, yeah. So he did an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. It was this video. It was like a video documentary almost where they were interviewing him, but there was no questions. So you never saw who was asking the questions. but he was giving his answers and he's sort of like sadly walking around on a gloomy beach. It's like very moody. I would say he was aura farming. He looked sick. He was looking over the bay. He did aura farm San Francisco a little bit. But as I was getting dressed up as him for Halloween, we were playing that video and the makeup artists who were applying the Ilya Sutskiver, you know, all the makeup to me, were watching that being like, that's not inspiring at all.

12:18Okay, yeah, and I didn't even include that in here, but that's like the reaction. Like every time people hear leaders at labs talk, they're like, turn it off. As opposed to, you could show someone an Apple ad or a Steve Jobs clip, and it would be like, oh, dancing on your wired headphones with your iPod? Like, I love music. They're making music available. Great, I love it. And there were so many things that were just inspiring. Yeah, moving up the pyramid, people have been told that AI is coming for their jobs. Some people have actually had an experience that made them feel like, whoa, I thought what I did was unique and special, but now I'm watching an agent do it on my own computer.

12:59Maybe imagine somebody that's driving for Uber and Lyft, and all day long they're driving, and they're sitting next to Waymos in traffic, and you're looking over, and there's no one in the seat. That's ominous. That's going to be scary if that's how somebody puts food on their table. And then every single CEO last year was saying, fortunately, we have increased efficiency due to AI. And so we've laid off 10 ,000 people. And so a lot of that is just kind of like spin, marketing, et cetera. But that's what people are hearing. And then you look at what the AI leaders are actually saying. So Ilya talking for 10 minutes.

13:32People are like, whoa, that doesn't seem good. Ilya is saying like... He's saying, let's not do that. He's trying to prevent that bad scenario. Sure, sure, sure. But it still reads like, whoa, I didn't realize they were taking that seriously. Yeah. So you look at the quotes, you could easily look up quotes from Dario. Obviously, he had his quote, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 % to 20 % in the next one to five years. Elon had a good quote from over a decade ago. He said, with AI, we are summoning the demon. Some people today might say the demon has been fully summoned.

14:07Fully summoned. Fully summoned. And Sam obviously said at one point, AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, they'll be great companies. And so this kind of messaging, credit to them, it's like super effective for fundraising, right? If somebody's saying like all jobs will be wiped out, the world will be destroyed. But in the meantime... There's a lot of funds that are long demon. You're just like... The demon thesis. The demon, the free cash flow from demons. Yeah, so it's like if you're sitting there being like if AI is gonna eliminate my job, I want to own a piece of it So, you know, maybe maybe I can benefit from it So the big issue is like anybody that's hearing all these Like why would they actually be excited about AI, right?

14:47Even though even though it is so incredible in so many ways It's not that they're not pitching it like Steve Jobs pitched Garage Band, which was like now anyone can be a musician Now anyone can be their own doctor is inspiring But it's just like they are fighting an uphill battle because of those other quotes Yeah, if somebody is kind of like generally scared of AI, what content do you point them towards? Typically, you'd want to point them towards the people building it. So I've just been feeling like there's this gap, Steve Jobs-sized hole, right? He had plenty of concerns about technology. He shared them freely.

15:20Somebody once asked him, so your kids must love the iPad. Then he said, my kids haven't used it. He just said we limit how much technology we have in the home. He did talk about losing the PC race to international business machines. He said, if for some reason we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we're going to enter a computer dark age for about 20 years. You can imagine Sam saying something like that around, and you've seen the internal messages between him and Elon talking about losing to Google. To Google, yeah. It's like, oh, we don't want Google to control the AI god.

15:551994, Rolling Stone's interview. the interviewer said, nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago? Steve says, oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people. Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have faith in people, that they're basically good and smart. And if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in. Tools are just tools. They work or they don't work.

16:28It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic. I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes, but not for long. I wrote the facts of the fact Steve Jobs was not one to shy away from impressive specs and massive scale, but flipping the final line from AI will cure cancer to humans will use AI to cure cancer makes all the difference. Apple put human centrality at the heart of of everything they did, even when they were talking about something like a CNC to mill an aluminum block into a MacBook Pro, the focus was not on the CNC, it was on what it allowed the human being to do. So yeah, at the end of this, I just said, I think AI has a massive narrative problem right now.

17:04The narrative is working within the industry, it's not working for people that are outside the industry, and I just don't, I really don't think it has to be this way. So there's some massive news from Meta, They are doing a big deal with Oklo to build nuclear power plants. The headline from the Wall Street Journal is Meta unveils sweeping nuclear power plan to fuel its AI ambitions. Meta platforms on Friday unveiled a series of agreements that would make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the United States, where it needs city-sized amounts of electricity for its artificial intelligence data centers.

17:40The Facebook parent said it would back new reactor projects with the developers TerraPower and Oklo, and has struck a deal with the power producer Vistra, which is up 11 % today, to purchase and expand the generation output of three existing nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meta aims to see the first new reactors delivered as early as 2030 and 2032. I just view Meta as like a nation state. Yeah, well, so the problem is the globe. It's impressive. Meta operates all over the globe, but why aren't you thinking bigger? Who's the director of solar system level energy development? Galactic energy production.

18:20Universal energy production. You should be producing energy all over the universe. Meta. Oklo and Meta making this announcement. 1.2 gigawatts is the total size of this nuclear campus in Pike County, Ohio. The agreement includes binding prepayment to support fuel procurement. enabling Oklo to advance early project work and secure fuel, adding new, clean, reliable power to the grid. So let's move on to the big news of the day. Andreessen Horowitz raised$15 billion. Why are we here? Why did we raise$15 billion? Massive suite of new funds. The haul represents 18 % of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025.

19:03A16Z is now at$90 billion of AUM. Andreessen Horowitz hears your feedback that it's too loud, that it would shut up and dribble, that it should shut up and dribble politically speaking, that you don't agree with a recent investment or two, that it's unbecoming to quote the Pope, that there's no way it will ever generate a reasonable return for LPs on such enormous funds. A16Z does hear you, it has been hearing you at this point for nearly two decades. And then he goes in to a bunch of the history and the news. But there was some spice. We got to get to the drama. So, Andrews and Horace, they put out this image.

19:37Why we raise$15 billion. We're all in on America. And what image do they use? They use Mount Everest. They're climbing Mount Everest. The metaphor is clear. It's the tallest mountain. We're the tallest mountain in venture. We got the most money. We're the biggest firm. But a lot of people are saying, hey, why'd you use a Chinese mountain? Why'd you use a Chinese mountain? It's Everest. It's over there in China. It's actually half in China, half in Nepal. White House officials have talked about a$5.7 billion payment for Greenland, right? That depending on what type of payment would be needed for a place like Nepal, right?

20:12You can imagine it being potentially less than that. We should insist that all data centers that are built are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassic style. Yeah, Shamsankar, you know, he wants data centers built that are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassical style. Have you seen those photos of the AWS data centers that back up onto Virginia housing developments? So it's just like an idyllic few houses that just look like a normal neighborhood and then just behind you, massive white box. They're like, I'm not leaving. Well, now you don't even get a box, you get a tent because Meta is now, they gave up on their previous architectural design and now it's just a tent, which maybe is more aesthetic.

20:56If you're gonna do a tent meta, I think you should make it like a circus tent, get some red and white stripes going, get some constant clown music going. Get the workers in the data center to be wearing clown. Imagine being as locked in as the Kyoto architecture community was in 1397. I cannot believe this was built 700 years ago, 1600 or 600 years ago explain what there's some lore here the lore Tyler okay so so yeah 1397 one is was built I think in maybe 1950 so it was like a temple right so there's there's monks that lived there okay and I think it was 1950 for 500 years or 600 years yeah okay the one was living there and yeah he burned down the temple whoa and then he tried to like commit suicide right outside it why what's wrong I don't know no one knows what happened but okay but then so this is actually it was rebuilt and there's a good but it was rebuilt in the same style yeah the architectural style is truly from 1397 yes I mean there's I think there's some questions about how much gold was actually used in the original original design yeah there's a good you kill Mishima book about this oh really I really want to bring back moats right the obvious thing that's missing from modern architecture people talk about the material use the form factor but the obvious the elephant in the room is a lack of moats in modern architecture we need to bring back moats gators in the moats potentially sharks yeah people have like koi fish you know ponds but why not just go size it up a little bit go for the shark shark pond imagine you know people go out they like the being relaxed and kind of like feeding the uh yeah feeding the the the koi but uh imagine just you throwing chicken breasts into the water for a shark, how relaxing that would be if you needed just a 15-minute break from work before you get back to your email job.

22:54In other news, they 3D printed a Starbucks. Starbucks has a new drive-thru in Texas, the coffee giants, first 3D printed store in the United States. The way it shows up, you basically get a crane with a gantry that can move the nozzle in an X and Y axis, and it just pours cement in loops, circles again and again. Okay, I need to know how quickly they built this and how much it costs, because if this came in at 80%. They said it was two Gs, two grand. Starbucks was down to their last two grand. And they're just like, ah, just 3D print it. What does the average Starbucks cost? Standalone building cost?

23:34Tyler asks, who is the architect? And Pete says, slop GPT. So the total investment range for a Starbucks location is 760 ,000 to 2.2 million. See, that's not... It's kind of like right in the range there. Traditional Korean architecture with its visually rich, harmonious patterns produces lower levels of visual stress than modern facades with repetitive patterns, hard lines and high contrast materials, which are more likely to overload the visual system and contribute to discomfort especially in dense urban areas. There's some research that suggests that having variation in your architecture actually can reduce stress which is fascinating.

24:23Yeah try to zoom in on this picture on the left yeah again because you can see the one on the left it's way for something it just feels more organic or natural, right? I think A16Z needs to build a massive gold superstructure in the heart of San Francisco. Just carve out, you know, who knows what the fee structure is, but take half of it and build a monument. A monolithic monument. I think we should kind of look back to Charlie Munger's design for the UCSB. Yeah, pull out of dorms. Yeah. Dormzilla. He just wanted. He just wanted everyone to lock in. He wanted everyone to lock in and he was he was killed for it.

25:06It was ridiculous. Pull up this article. You can see the design and just how many just how many rooms in this place are windowless. It is very, very powerful. So on the outside, it looks like I think he just knew that people were only going to have a few. By the time this was built, people would only have a few years to escape the permanent underclass and windows would distract people. France will delay the G7 summit to avoid conflict with mixed martial arts. Really? On Donald Trump's birthday? Yeah, so they're going to delay group of seven summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump's birthday.

25:46Do you think they have a group chat for the G7? And it was like, hey, can we get together? We got to get together. We got to get together. We got to do a summit. Let's do a summit, guys. and Trump's in there just being like, yeah, I already told Dana I'm in. I'm watching UFC that day. It's happening in my house. It's happening in my house. It's gonna be really awkward if I'm not there. I gotta be there. I gotta be there. Let's plan another summit, another time. Well, speaking of Trump, Lip Bhutan is in his good graces. Donald Trump posted it on Truth Social. He says, I just finished a great meeting with the very successful Intel CEO, Lip Bhutan, LBT, as he's called.

26:21Intel just launched the first sub 2 nanometer CPU processor designed, built and packaged right here in the US of A. The United States government is proud to be a shareholder at Intel and has already made, through its USA ownership position, tens of billions of dollars for the American people in just four months. We made a great deal and so did Intel. Our country is determined... You're kind of slipping into the... Oh yeah. By the end of the year, I'm going to have it down. Our country is determined to bring leading edge chip manufacturing back to America, and that is exactly what is happening.