Dan Wang's Annual Letter, Meta Acquires Manus, Nvidia's $20B Groq Deal | Justin Mares

25:41Well - Should we talk about Manus? Let's talk about Manus. Let's talk about Manus. This all started because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manus. And I think Bill Gurley has the best voice in venture. I agree. I agree. The best voice in venture, hands down. Who's got a better voice than Bill Gurley? It's amazing. He's got pipes. He's got pipes. He does have a good voice for podcasting, too. It's great to hear. Well, he's going on a podcast tour. Yeah. And I think we'll be a part of it. Fantastic. I can expect to hear him on. So this all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, formerly Scale AI. He says, excited to announce that Manus AI has joined Meta to help us build.

26:29Jack Randall in the X chat. Did anyone check on Dellian? Oh, yeah. That's funny because Jack worked with Dellian. Yeah, I mean, it really is. Hey, Dellian might be taking a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing. Dalian totally vindicated, right? Also that, uh, and Patrick Collison was bull bus. So did Dalian capitulate? No, no, he gets to play musical chairs. He's like, what? I never said anything about Manus. I don't know about that. It's fine. It's fine investment. It makes sense. Uh, did I mention that, uh, Facebook was a founder fund back company? Oh yeah.

27:07I worked in founder fund. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was so, I mean, it's great to see a portfolio company acquire Manus. The moment in time that Benchmark invested in Manus, it was a really, it was a crazy move. I was like, what's going on here? It was just, it was just very strange. It was, it was truly like, it was truly contrarian. It was very contrarian. It was truly contrarian. Yeah. I mean, the vibes were like, it was the most, it was the most intense, like part of the trade war. Trump was really putting the screws. He's back in. So he's going to go extra hard. And it's not like Biden took his foot off the gas of the trade war with China.

27:45The initial volley of chip restrictions happened under Biden. Chris Miller writes chip war during the Biden admin, and everyone really wakes up. All the Anderle folks are talking about it. Yeah, so here's the other thing. So AI 2027 was released in April of 2025. Benchmark did Manus in April of 2025. same month. And so obviously a lot of people process AI 2027 as like, cool, this is like sci-fi, kind of like, you know, let's just extrapolate a bunch. And it was kind of a thought exercise. But at the same time, this was kind of the peak in some ways of like the AI war narrative. And so to have a famed American venture capital firm, you know, backing a Chinese AI firm.

28:35Sorry, we got to go back to Dan Wong. There's so many good things. He talked about AI 2027 I don't want to read it. But first, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast with Figma. So Dan Wong says, the most read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027, the five authors who come from the AI safety world outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027. A decade Later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons.

29:09My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form after the AI reconstructs creatures that are, quote, to humans what corgis are to wolves. I somehow missed this. I listened to the Dworkesh podcast. I read most of AI 2020. Did you pick up the corgi line, Tyler? You read this, right? I don't remember that. Somehow the Corgi line just got completely missed by me, but I love it. It's so funny. It's such a funny detail. I'm going to control that for Corgi. It's not pulling anything up. No? I don't know. Okay, maybe Dan's taking some creative. Oh, you have to, like, choose an ending.

29:50Okay. Oh, you have to find the Corgi ending. That's key. We'll take the Golden Retriever ending. It's hard to know. Yes, turn us into Golden Retrievers. We're ready. We're ready. Already did. I'm not. Who's trying to be a wolf? I'm not trying to be on the lone wolf Sigma grind set. I'm trying to be a golden retriever on performance-enhancing drugs. Yeah. A golden retriever with 4D delts. Yeah. I mean, we've been growing out our hair like golden retrievers, working on looking good. Everything's lined up for a golden retriever 2026. It's a good time. It's hard to know what to make of this document.

30:23He's talking about AI 2027. He says, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening. But even at the start, their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me. Sort of an interesting, I know why they put it in there, because it's engaging. It's entertaining. and it makes for good banter. Anyway, he goes on to talk a lot about the dynamic of how Silicon Valley works, how New York finance works, how it's different.

31:08It's very interesting. We should read a little bit more of this since we have time today. He says - You want to go back to Dan? I want to go back to Dan. We got a Dan addict over here. Yeah. What do you say about finance? He said like they're wrong before breakfast or something. Finance. Let's see. One thing, okay, one of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging 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.

31:48Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herd-like, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don't need dissent. They want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. Taking shots. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley's soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line. Most prominently this year, as many tech voices embrace the right. So he calls San Francisco a very insular city. He still has a lot of nice things to say about it.

32:26Anyway, let's go back. Since you're back here, I thought it was, he talks about humor within tech and the CCP. Yeah, yeah. He gives a line from Sam Altman that is, Sam says, I think that AI will probably most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning. I mean, that is really funny. It's great. It's also like maybe true. I don't know. It's like a hard time. No, and I think this is the key problem for the tech industry in 2026. Yeah. Is like how do you need to paint a more, like the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision for AI.

33:10Yes. Because it's not working right now. because people see their energy bill going up or they even hear about the idea of their energy bill going up, and then they see some of the slop in their feed, and the slop is getting better, right? You look at some of the videos coming out of this little Venezuela debacle, right? Slop videos from there. I mean, there's... Oh, I saw Maduro face-slopped into a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess that would kind of have fun. So the video is higher definition, et cetera. But people in all types of roles are worried about job loss. And they see the investment going into AI, and they're just scared.

33:50And so when 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, wait, why are we automating all of this in the first place? Can we just stop? Actually, I don't want my job automated. I'll keep doing it. Right. So so the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimistic, you know, because there's a lot of way there's a lot of very optimistic. You know, I think Dan talks in here about what is what is the line he says around. Young people, you know, people, you know, maybe in 10 years reminiscing about a time when young people didn't just have shelter and an income provided for them, they had to fend for themselves.

34:35right um and so uh so anyways uh i think that's real he he also talks about um ccp humor which was uh he's saying uh the pm 2.5 back then was even worse than it is now i used to joke that it was pm 250 what is that he's just saying like pm 25 is uh 2.5 is a as a measurement for air like like air quality. Oh, okay. Particles per million. Yeah, yeah. It's like PM 250. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me, I have a few rebuttals, but first let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So first rebuttal on humor. Some of the tech people are funny, and I was noticing this, I was remembering this as we watched our year in review video that Jackson and our team put together.

35:28And in there, one of the clips is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as famously humorless because he's trying to speak in many levels. Best Sam joke ever? Him coming on our show? Yeah. I mean, he was making the joke on the timeline, but nobody got the joke. He was saying, I'd never buy a car for$250 ,000. Yeah, it was hilarious. So someone posted this GT3 RS or something. And they were like, would you buy this? It's for$250 ,000. And Paul Graham says like, what a waste of money. Like I would never buy this. And Sam just said, I would never buy it either. And everyone was like, oh, like he's so out of touch.

36:09He has a Koenigsegg, he has an F1. Like he's ridiculous. Of course you buy it. And then he came on our show and explained that no, the joke was that you would never buy a car for 250 because he wants a multimillion dollar car, which is hilarious. And a lot of people that I've talked to who've interacted with Sam a lot behind the scenes, like in the right context, he is truly very funny. but it's just hard because he's trying to speak seven different languages anytime he's on screen because he has to speak to politicians who want to regulate him to people that might be losing their jobs but to people also who want to come work for him and also to investors who want to return i think it was so much easier it you know in the uh in the 20th century yeah it it was like you know it was easy mode being a politician or a ceo yeah because you could go into a room of business executives and said, okay, you currently spend, like, if you were running, like, an AI company before the internet, before everything was recorded and before everything hit, you know, every single distribution point immediately, you could go and say, like, hey, you currently spend, you know, a billion dollars a year on payroll.

37:11I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%. You're going to be able to conduct lots of layoffs. And then you could go on TV and say, like AI is going to create an abundant, you know, future. And that, and the, and the clips wouldn't kind of cross everywhere. Politicians could go talk to a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here. I 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 treating it like out of context and being like, Oh, I hate this.

37:44I hate what they're saying. And we're like, well, we weren't trying to get them to say something controversial, But they did outside the context of our show. Before you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TBPN of 2025. Before you criticize us. Just to get context. Before you criticize us. Just to get some context. Yes. There was, oh, there was one more thing. I want to go to this Dan Wong thing. He has a great line in here about feedback he got on his book. Obviously, there's criticism and stuff. But he has this great quip. He says, I learned of Leo Rosten's quip that it is the weak who are cruel and gentleness to be expected only from the strong.

38:21I thought that was a very good quote. Just very interesting, just saying that like the negative comments usually come from a place of weakness. But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be empathy. There's one more thing about the AI future and the positive future. This reminds me of my one-and-a-half-year-old who will bite my three-year-old. There you go. Because he's weak. And so he has to take the cruel action of trying to chomp the three-year-old. Three-year-old is like, hey, look, I'm a little mass monster over here. That's hilarious. Let me tell you about the two AI futures that are sort of dueling right now that I think are interesting.

38:59And then we've got to go back to Manus. We're going to go back to Manus. Don't worry. You still haven't given your take on Manus. We're going to do Manus. But let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI. So we will have to dive into these pieces in more depth at some point. But basically, I do think that even though Dan says that tech is very insular, it's less contrarian, there's only, everyone aligns themselves around on one vision of the future and just like runs at it.

39:36And I think he is correct in some ways. There is some dissension and at least conversation back and forth, mainly between Dwarkesh right now and Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson wrote a piece on AI and the human condition where he sort of reacts to Dwarkesh's piece with Philip Trammell called Capital in the 22nd Century. and Dwarkesh is talking about capital accumulation, inequality, how things might need to be redistributed in the future. It's unclear exactly the timeline and if you go out really really far it becomes much more much easier to wrap your head around all this. Like at one point they start talking about buying galaxies which is sort of like a funny thought experiment and at that point like if you were to just say hey we're going full communist with the galaxies, we're distributing them equally.

40:29It's like, well, there's trillions of galaxies. You personally would get a thousand galaxies. And it's like, yeah, that's probably enough. It takes 25 ,000 years to get to the nearest galaxy. Imagine the life you're living where you're immortal and you're like, just to go between my two galaxies that I own, it takes 25 ,000 years. I don't know that I'd be so pissed off that like, oh, I wasn't able to get more than one six billionth of the galaxies out there. I don't know. It just feels like such a crazy story. Has anybody tried to kind of stake a claim? I know America, the moon's ours. It's not legally yet, but it's ours.

41:09It's somewhat inevitable. I mean, it's crazy no one's been to the moon. Like, we went there like 50 years ago, more, and everyone was just like, we're good. Lost art. Lost art. People sent some robots. But literally, this is a crazy thing. No other country has landed a man on the moon. I don't know why what are you waiting for? get somebody up there anyway what are you saying about acquiring galaxies? you want one? you want more than one? you want more than a thousand? I want more than a thousand you want more than a thousand? say you're not a say you're a communist I want more you want you want two thousand galaxies?

41:41so I think that quote was actually referencing Leopold yeah it was Leopold and people were arguing whether Leopold was being serious and he was it's sick it's a great quote I love it it is it is sufficiently sci-fi for me I'm very, very excited about that quote. And it's thought-provoking. It's truly thought-provoking to think about what property rights look like in a world where it takes you 25 ,000 years to get to the place that you own, like your vacation home. Unless, I don't know if the AGI-pilled people are so AGI-pilled that they think we're going to defeat the speed of light. Every physicist I've ever talked to has always said, no, that one holds forever.

42:20that's not like, oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple decades away, or fusion, or fusion, like all these other things are like somewhat engineering problems. I think the speed of light is like gonna be around forever. I don't know. Just need a faster horse. It's the year of the fire horse. It is? Yeah. What does that mean? Wait, I thought they - It's 2026, Chinese year of the fire horse. Wait, are they adding superlatives to the animals? I thought it was just horse, snake, dragon, and then they rotated through those. It's the year of the fire. We upgraded animals. It's amazing.

42:52It's a fire horse. It's amazing. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Manus is acquired. I think - Okay, back to Manus. Great Chinese century coming up. I think we're going to be putting on those hats soon. So Ramp Labs modeled it out. Of course, Ramp Labs is AI agent for spreadsheet software. So you can give it a prompt and it will build the spreadsheet for you. Very, very cool. And they did a little analysis on the meta acquisition of Manus AI. They said the estimated price is$4 to$6 billion based on AI M &A comps. It's the fastest to 100 million ARR in history, just eight months. Wow. And benchmark likely 8 to 12x in under a year.

43:37So, again, they're sort of estimating here, I think people were kind of putting the deal between$2 and$3 billion. Yeah. is what I had heard. Okay. So again, so yeah, I mean, I guess let's get in, let's get it, what was, I guess, what was your immediate reaction? The thing that I was excited about is this is Zuck buying a product that people love. Well, that's a debate, but I like your take, but Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So he just went through a talent acquisition era. Yes, yes. uh he he they they they're the you know biggest investor in yeah scale yeah right but but they didn't acquire the product yeah yeah um still and i think they're actually acquiring data and so and so historically zuck has been saying you know drum you know beating the personal super intelligence drum yeah it's been very unclear what that means yeah manis has been building high quality agents they're sort of uh uh time and time again i talk to people that are just very excited about Manus.

44:43They're like, just use Manus. It's the year of the agent. Use it, you'll see the future. And so just given Zuck's history from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what their... One version of personal superintelligence is you have AI agents that can go out on the internet and do things for you. They can go, I think in the context of meta, I think about shopping. You see something on Instagram that you like, and you could trigger an agent effectively, like, go find this product. Like, you see a car that you like, go find this product.

45:22The elusive GT3 RS that you can't find. Yeah, basically, like, you see a – make any image or video shoppable. And in fact, I would probably argue that LLMs in the chat form where you have a bunch of information with a knowledge cut off baked into some big model, a LLAMA 4, and it's vended through the Instagram search box that you chat with. It can never fully satisfy the vision of personal super intelligence, 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.

46:10So this does feel like, I don't know, I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way. I wonder if we are talking about going out and shopping for you off platform or if it's more doing things within the meta ecosystem. I don't even know what that would look like. But a lot of the image models that they're training, you can imagine that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystem. So if Meta trains an amazing image editing model, a nano banana, 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, and then you say, hey, change the background.

46:50Make the sky less gray. And it'll just do it really, really well. And that would exist purely in there. and maybe they open source it, maybe they put it out, but that's not the product. The product exists with the mainstream. I was also thinking of, I guess, one way that I am thinking about Manus in the context of what Zuck and the AI team at Meta are saying, which is personal superintelligence, right? They're talking about, they've talked about integrating AI into Ray-Ban Metas, right? So when I think, and if you're using Ray-Ban Metas, you can say, hey, Meta, and then you can give it a task or ask it a question or things like that.

47:27And so I expect that Manus-type workflows will be heavily integrated into a, hey, when you say, hey, Meta, and you're wearing glasses, like, hey, build me a slide deck to help me prep for my final later, right? And I can imagine, like, effectively, the same product experience that Manus has today will be integrated into, like, Meta AI. Yeah. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security. It's the leading AI trust management platform. I agree with you. At the same time, there's a lot of areas where it feels very natural for Google to expand into. It feels very natural for Microsoft to expand into, Apple to expand into.

48:09Like Apple has a spreadsheet app, right? They have a word processor. They, like, Meta doesn't really have those. They did Meta at work for a while, but they, it doesn't, this whole idea of like go to open Instagram to do your homework feels crazy to me. And the same thing with open Instagram to build a slide deck, that feels crazy to me. Yeah, but everything that they're doing in AI, they're piping through Meta AI, the new standalone app. So that's a bunch 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, the...

48:58The vibes? The vibe, yeah, meta vibes. Actually, the usage is actually insane. Really? Yeah. No way. So... Trough? Wait, no, but I mean, it's terrible in the app store, right? It cannot be ranked. Even Sora is not ranking well. Like, can you just look this up? I don't know. Well, we're looking that up. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card you see that ticker down in the bottom telling you the crypto prices that's thanks to phantom um legends let me try and find uh i i don't think meta vibes is going to rank but uh at the same time they might have gotten a bump over christmas because when you get the ray-bans you unbox those you have to download the meta ai app to integrate with the Ray-Ban.

49:43So maybe they got a pump from that. I don't know. But Sora, let me see what... It's not in the top 25 right now. 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, where all this goes. And I think Ben Thompson offered a very, very compelling white pill.

50:18Dwarkesh 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. One thing with Manus, this is maybe the first acquisition in the billions for a company with an Isle of Man domain. They're Manus.im. I am. You don't see a lot of multi-billion dollar.im acquisitions. Isle of Man. Tyler, is that where you're from? Isle of Chad? Did you get into looks maxing over the break? I've been bone smashing.

51:05It looks like you got into looks maxing, doesn't it? Doesn't his midface ratio look different? I got to fix my recessed maxilla. I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better. He doesn't have the filter on. Wait, do you guys have the filter on? I think, yeah, I think they do. I think they do have the filter on. Wait, Tyler, go like this. Do the double jaw surgery. Oh, yeah, they definitely have the filter on. Definitely, definitely. Well, speaking of Dwarakash, he's sponsored by LabelBox. We're sponsored by LabelBox. LabelBox, we're delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI.

51:42We love LabelBox. We're considering making a physical LabelBox. And putting Tyler in. We will see. We don't want to leak it. We will figure out if we can figure out how to physically instantiate. And wanting to put Tyler in a box. I just like boxes. So Signal asks, can someone explain why Meta bought Manus? What's the one pager for Zuck other than we have an F ton of money, so why not? and Lucas Beyer, Metis List researcher, says they know how to build, they know really, really well how to build good agents and maybe that's enough. Nick Dobo says best tool set on the market, they bought a Swiss Army knife to hand to any AI model, wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder connectors.

52:25So yeah, they're just good at product. Yeah, yeah. Eric Mehir says head in the box, his handle has box in it. He says, I left meta because I made a bet that models were going to be commoditized and the value would be in the products on top of the models. But Metamate and Gen.ai were highly politicized, sucking up all the oxygen in the room. As always, I was right. Hilarious line. As always, I was right. Ex-meta people are getting spicy. Did you see the Jan LeCun Financial Times deep dive? We should dig into that. But he took a bunch of shots at a lot of different people, basically just saying, like, you can't tell a researcher what to do, especially not me.

53:04He was very, very salty over Alex Wang coming in and becoming his boss effectively. At the same time, it feels like - You got leveled. Well, yeah, it is an odd, I mean, it's a bold choice to 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. Where did he land on the Metis list, Tyler? Jan Lacoon. How did he do? But he's back with a$3 billion fundraise valuation. But the interesting thing is, like, I think there's two ways that you can read into the Ilya Sutskiver, we are in an age of research story. Tyler, do you have Jan on the list?

53:47Yeah, he actually wasn't on there. He wasn't on there? I think we were trying to rage bait him or something. No way. Yeah, he wasn't on there. Wow, we are so bad. But anyway, you can read Ilya's. To be clear, you were trying to read it. We don't participate in rage bait. We don't have anything to do with the rankings. You can interpret the Ilya Sutskiver age of research concept as, hey, if you're a hyperscaler, you need a really, really solid research team to go extra hard into research. Because you want to be the first one to have that research breakthrough. so you need a lot of true researchers.

54:25Or you can read into it as like, hey, this is kind of an AI winter and the research is sort of stabilized so we can pull in all the best research. Yeah, we need to get to the frontier, but we can be a month behind. If we productize really well, we can win and we can have a really great outcome here. And then when Ilya comes up with something great, it's gonna get copy pasted all over the industry because of the SF house parties and papers that get written and open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely siloed, but typically it doesn't.

54:58Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Uh, uh, Ollie from Databricks was, was, uh, at the end of the year was talking about how he's fantastic. I got to have him back on. Um, but he was talking about, uh, putting people in different buckets. So like there's a super intelligence, right? Uh, there's a super intelligence bucket. Uh, I think that when you look at like zuck can say we are trying to build super intelligence that is much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising yeah and uh commerce yeah that is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around right in some in some ways some ways open ai is doing the exact same thing right um uh there are there are different groups that are that are taking you know maybe the anthropics taking it taking a different approach in terms of saying like, yeah, we're trying, we're actually trying to build super intelligence and we're doing it in a very opinionated way.

55:54But anyway, so I just, I just like to see, I will be very excited to see, hopefully see them try to take what Manus has built and dramatically scale it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. A quick shout out to 2.6 in the chat. He says he's down 99 pounds. That's fantastic. He's up 20 K and he says life is good. So So what an amazing start to the new year. Congratulations. I also saw Sam Sheffer in the chat earlier. He launched a new product over the break called Timelines. It's like a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. Oh, that's fun. So I'm excited to check this out. And congrats to Sam.

56:38Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? raised capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love NYSE. Potentially the best tagline of all time, the best marketing copy. Want to change the world? It's a really good one. Raised capital at the NYSE. That's how it works, yeah. Anyway, Grok. So there were two major blockbuster deals before the end of the year. Unclear, I mean, were both sort of these zombie acquisitions or were any of them just clean, normal deals? I guess we don't fully know. We know that the Grok NVIDIA deal was very much a sort of ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP license, pay out the investors.

57:23$20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? Should we hit that app-loving gong? We should hit that app-loving gong. We have a new gong, everyone. Look at this gong. It's bigger than ever. It's bigger than ever. We actually, it's so big. It's so loud. We have to be kind of careful with it. I mean, it's a John-sized gong. So John is 6 '8", if you're just tuning in for the first time. It's a massive gong. And it is a massive gong for a massive company, fantastic company. Yes. AppLovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026. You're not going to believe this, but AppLovin's next in the stack.

57:58Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. So there's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Premack, about how Grok employees made out in the NVIDIA deal. He made some calls to find out. And in short, they did very, very well, even if not fully vested. We did hear that if you were there a very short amount of time and you were not senior at all, you might have had a bad run. But we'll have to dig into that a little bit more. But it seems like in general, they did. Everyone sort of got paid. It sounds like Chamath did very well on this.

58:41He was a very early voter. Oh, I mean, Chamath haters were in shamble. We need to check on them. We need to check on them. If one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them. If you haven't heard from them, I would be worried. Are you doing OK? Let's just go hang out. Let's go play some golf or something. Take them out. Touch grass. Yep. Touch your grass. Because it's going to be rough for a while. Chamath is on a tear. And didn't he basically give back the LP capital right before? So it's like 100 % of his own money or something. I saw some take about that. I'm not sure if that's when that happened.

59:13But I know social capital kind of converted to a family office. Yeah, but that was way after. That was way after. Okay. At least the first. I mean, the haters will hate to see that he invested molt back to back. I know. Back to back. I mean, with conviction, with authority, really. Yeah. And got to give him credit. So Alex Heath over at sources.news has new details on the NVIDIA Grok deal. The whole process took less than two weeks and was personally driven by Jensen Wong. No other bidders. Wong wired money early and wanted the deal to close before the new year. What a chat. Wow. What a chat. Send the$20 billion wire.

59:50Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs. I'm good for my$20 billion. That is actually crazy. Yeah, I mean, very interesting. Grok is, we were talking about this, like why is NVIDIA buying Grok? Is it a response to the TPU? We'll have to get some of the semi-analysis folks on the show to dig into it. But I think that there is, you know, Grok has been, they've been on this like super crazy rollercoaster. I think not a lot of people expected them to wind up at 20 billion. A lot of people assume that the, because, I mean, there's two sides to it. One is like when, if you read the actual social capital, the actual social capital like memo that Chamath put together, it 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.

1:00:43Like the guy understands how to make a chip that does one thing really well. But - This was what, seven years before people in tech broadly knew what the TPU was? Totally. Yeah, very, very early. Yeah, crazy. but the so 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 like 18 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.

1:01:28And so there's this, you make a bet on a certain architecture, and there's other firms right now that are betting on, we're going super long with transformer architecture, or we're going super long cerebrus, like wafer scale, where we want to put the whole model on one chip instead of a rack of a whole bunch of chips. Or we want to be really memory constrained, or have a ton of memory, or something like that. So you make your decisions about what trade-offs you're making, and then you kind of just wait. and you hope that people come up with a use for what you made. And with Grok, people were like, oh, okay, it's fast.

1:02:01When LLAMA came out, people were like, oh, it can stream tokens really, really fast. It's very cool. Some of the demos are really cool. But there were also a flip side where people were saying, well, it was very expensive to do those demos, and maybe it wouldn't scale properly. But I think there was a little bit of like the team is great, obviously. and I think Grok was probably getting comped. You were effectively looking at Grok V2 versus TPU V7, and you weren't necessarily accounting for, okay, if you continue to invest in this, like Jensen will, obviously, and the team's great, and they have somewhat of a direction, and there's also some sort of bifurcation of the models where sometimes you need a really big model, sometimes you need a really small model, sometimes you need a model that's in your phone, sometimes you need a model that's in a data center, Sometimes you need a model in space.

1:02:51And sometimes you need a chip company that sponsors the winner of the Constructors' Championship. Grok sponsored McLaren. Really? No way. Which they won. I didn't know. It was a good omen. That's great. Jensen saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, I got a lot of cash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why not buy a winning? I mean, the chip company that's sponsoring the winning team. For sure. Pretty compelling. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, Red Bull, loser. No chips. Works with Oracle. Oracle stock. Yeah. Been down in the dump. right? Ridiculous. Just doing entirely F1-based analysis. Sponsorship-based analysis of markets.

1:03:28Anyways, continue. So yeah, I mean, I think as this, I heard an interesting take that one of the wafer scale bull cases that if compute does go to space, you don't necessarily want a rack in space because not only does that take up more space, but there's so many different points of failure of like, is this connected to this? Is this connected to that? Whereas if you just have like one big, you have the entire model just on one chip, you could potentially put that in space much easier. But Grok made a specific bet and it's still, it's not like it totally panned out and it's like they're winning right now.

1:04:03Like TPU is the hot thing, but then there's, you know, NVIDIA, you know, GB200s are still like flying off the shelves and there's all these debates about Blackwell and stuff. And NVIDIA is doing great, but I think if you look to the future where there's different models for different things, sometimes you need something really fast, sometimes you need something really smart, then you want to be able to control all of the different chip architectures, all of the different chips. And I remember, didn't Jonathan tell us he doesn't fab at TSMC? I believe he told us that. And I'm pretty sure that's true.

1:04:34And so there is also - Where would he - Maybe either Samsung or Global Foundries, I believe. and then I think by the way we got to give a shout out to Ryan Ryan Siebert LinkedIn chat he says W stream best content on LinkedIn let's go Ryan thank you for watching one of our two we typically will have like three viewers on LinkedIn uh thanks to Restream but uh yeah thanks to Restream we are there so thank you yeah thank you for tuning in so uh closing out Grok there's a few different takes. Tyler Hodge says the Pierce Grock will return over$4 billion to social capital and Shamath. 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.

1:05:17Unbelievable. Power laws rule everything around. Okay. Yeah, just getting... Did you read this as defensive at all? This? Tyler? No, no, no. I'm saying just buying. Is this offense or defense? for Jensen. Clearly, he's got the, he's got the, he's just got a lot of cash. He's got to do something with it. He's not going to just dividend out cash. He's willing to take bets with it. He's investing in all the labs, all the NeoClouds. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think he's like, almost, like, even though he's not literally the richest person in the world, he's running the biggest company. So he has the most capital, like fire around at places.

1:05:58And I think to put, to put this into perspective, this is like us saying, investing in a nice camera, right? Like it's not the kind of like, it's, we take like Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early. You would, you would do the same thing for a nice camera. But I don't, I guess the bigger question is like, is, is Nvidia spread too thin? And they don't even own a social network. Every other Mag7 company owns a social network, right? Facebook, Amazon has Twitch. Maybe they should. NVIDIA chat just for AI researchers on Rumble. Something like that. I don't know.

1:06:37But it feels like they did DJX Lepton, the cloud that was competing with some of their customers. Feels like they sort of pulled back on that. It feels like they've remained as much of a pure play as you can at that scale. and so this feels like, I don't know, maybe it's a little defensive, but it feels just like a very natural extension of what they already do, which is selling chips. It would be very different if we were seeing them like, oh, they're buying power assets and they're going to build their own data centers and they want to step on Oracle's toes and they want to step on Crusoe's toes or anyone else's toes.

1:07:15So 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. SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads, where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. Rubin CPX, Rubin, and the putative Rubin SRAM variant derived from 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 pre-fill as a result of super high memory capacity with its relatively low bandwidth GDDR DRAM.

1:08:00Rubin 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. 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.

1:08:38It was less clear 18 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 Cerebrus and Grok's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed. And so we've seen this with a lot of the, you know, the meme of like you're sitting there waiting for a deep research report in chat GPT or you're firing off cloud code and then you're just waiting and you're scrolling or you're doing something else. And, um, and there's just, uh, there's a lot of like, you know, sitting around, waiting around.

1:09:11And now the really good developers are able to orchestrate six different cloud code instances all at once, but, uh, 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, 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? 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.

1:09:49And that's why you're seeing folks try and become not just GPU rich, but like ASIC rich on a particular, on a particular scalar vector of the, of the performance trade off curve. We should get Andrew from Cerebris back on the show because he came on for five minutes. It was one of those days where we had like 20 guests. And we were like, this guy's like a legend. $8 billion company. I'm glad we can ring the gong for you, but this feels disrespectful at this point. Anyway, let me tell you about Vibe.co. where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like Meta.

1:10:33Super pumped to partner with Vibe. We love advertising. We love advertising. And I have some insight into their metrics. And this is a company that you should potentially join. If you love advertising, I would be excited to go work there. So pumped to partner with them. Should we talk about DoorDash? DoorDash. Well, no, we're not talking about DoorDash. We're talking about a post that people assumed was about DoorDash. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so the post is titled, Holy F-ing S. Not swearing, really hurts the quality. You can read it on the screen. But he's very sensational. So it's a screenshot from Reddit.

1:11:13It has 36 million views and 207 ,000 likes. It's a massive post. It got 11 ,000 upvotes on Reddit. So it says, I am a developer for a major food delivery app. The priority fee and driver benefit fee go 100 % to the company. The driver sees 0 % of it,$0 of it. So here's where it gets conspiratorial. It says, I am posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don't care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday, and honestly, I hope they sue me. I've been sitting on this for about eight months just watching the code get pushed. I hope they sue me, but I'm on a library Wi-Fi with a burner.

1:11:59We're going to dig into all the different aspects of this, but this is crazy. Some people in the chat already read this, but we're going to go through it. So just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can't sleep at night knowing I helped to build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I'm a back-end engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where product managers, PMs, thanks, discuss how to squeeze another 0.4 % margin out of, quote, human assets.

1:12:30That's literally what they call drivers in the database schema. They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the priority delivery is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a psychological value add. Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra$299, it changes a Boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A-B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders. We just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by five to 10 minutes to make the priority ones feel faster by comparison.

1:13:09Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. Wait, so this is incorrect because he says it does nothing to speed you up, but you are getting a faster delivery there. I mean, even in this scenario, it's maybe unethical, but this is actually a bull case for paying$299. Because if the default service is actually slower and$299 gets me five to ten minutes faster. This made me think they should add a feature that's whenever you get around, I'll take it whenever you get around to it. And so it's just like, it's just like.

1:13:49Surprise me. Really, really. I'm feeling lucky. I mean, no, it's just like the lowest cost version. Oh, yeah, yeah. You might not get the pizza for three hours. Do you remember that? Or Uber Pool, those? Amazon does this for packages, too. Oh, yeah. You get a credit if you like take it. Yeah, yeah. You get like a Kindle store credit or something on Prime. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, so I use DoorDash pretty regularly. I never pay for priority delivery because the time always seems about the same. And so I just don't care and I never push that button. But this makes me feel like the button works even though he's saying it does nothing to speed you up.

1:14:23And so that's kind of odd. But anyway, it goes on that to much darker places, he says, but the thing that makes me sick, the main reason I'm quitting is the desperation score. We have a hidden metric that driver for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 p.m. and accepts every garbage$3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high desperation. Once they are tagged, the system deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is, why pay this guy$15 for a run when we know he's desperate enough to do it for$6?

1:15:02We 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, it might just wind up putting, like, a strain on the entire system and just slowing. Like, you feel like you would just want to, like, optimize for the fastest possible delivery at all times, but I don't know. Anyway, theoretically, this could be happening. Then there is the benefit fee. You've probably seen that$1.50 regulatory response fee or the driver benefits fee that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed.

1:15:34The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for policy defense, and that fee feeds directly into it. That's so interesting. I feel like that's not really how money works. It's not like it's like route. This is the earmark for this. It's not a guy in linear being like, tag the revenue from this product, send it to that. No, no. You know what this is? This is like dude logic for being like, oh, I got a$5 ,000 bonus. This is watch money.

1:16:18I should buy a watch or something like that. This money is for this thing, right? It's like, oh, I got a bonus. I'm buying a car with this money. instead of just being like, no, you have a pool of money that is completely fungible and liquid. I would say so in restaurants around LA, you'll see like an employee well-being charge, which is like one to three, four, sometimes 5 % that is going. And I would assume that is going entirely to the employees, right? So there's two different things. The place we go for breakfast has a charge that they advertise as going to the healthcare for the employees.

1:17:02And so if it turns out that restaurant owner was taking that money and kind of putting it towards rent, I would be very upset. Yes. So I can understand the general framing here. Yeah. All of this is, I mean. So the key difference is like, is the money actually fungible or is it a function? because in theory, 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 get that delivered to them. If you say, hey, the tips go to the workers. Just say you haven't worked in a restaurant.

1:17:43What do you mean? Oh, because it's pooled? Well, I mean, when I worked at a restaurant, we'd get the tips. I mean, most of the tips were daily. You get paid out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is a function of the business. It's directly aligned with the business progress. And so you would expect that if this delivery service, which everyone is alleging is DoorDash, if there are a lot of deliveries, there are a lot of people paying$1.50 for driver benefits, and so that creates a larger pool for driver benefits. If the amount of drivers stays flat, then the amount of driver benefits should increase.

1:18:23If that's not happening, then that is a violation of this promise, right? Basically. In reality, the money goes straight to this corporate slush fund, they say. And regarding tips, we're essentially doing tip theft 2.0. We don't steal them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a high tipper and you'll likely drop$10, It offers the driver a measly$2 base pay. 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.

1:18:55It's subsidizing us. You're paying their wage, so we don't have to. I'm drunk and angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down. I mean, really, I mean, first of all, got to feel bad for this person. If it's real, they just quit working a delivery app. Yeah. It's a software, backend software engineer. Now they're drunk in a public library on a burner laptop. Are you allowed to be drunk in a library? It feels like you shouldn't be drunk and angry in a public library on a burner. Imagine, 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?

1:19:34I don't know. Or is this very premeditated? I don't know. So it's a, yeah. No, I do. So I get extremely, I'm extremely frustrated. I will say this. Like this feels like fan. Yes. Really? What restaurant? In high school. I worked at it. I actually never worked at it. My first job, first job outside of reffing soccer was picking up cigarette butts with my hands. Wow. For two hours in the morning. Yeah. And then I'd go at a restaurant and then I'd go work at a surf shop. Then I actually worked my way up the restaurant from picking up the cigarette butts off the grass. Picking up the cigars. It was just pure cigarette butts.

1:20:16I was like, I think I was. Wait, people could smoke indoors or something? It was like a, it was a brewery. Okay. So people would sit outside. They'd sit outside late at night. And so they would go until like. This is a child in a smoke filled environment. No, and I'd go pick up the cigarette butts with my hands. I didn't even wear gloves. Very, very, very gross. Yeah, disgusting. And so this feels like it's fan fiction. Yeah. 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 from you and going to psychologically manipulate you into feeling better about the order, feeling better about the value, feeling like you're supporting this person.

1:21:01It's on its way. They're going to do everything they can UX-wise to make it a delightful experience. And as somebody who I appreciate the art of tipping, there's an art to it. It's something I've always enjoyed doing because I'm always getting a service. And I, at multiple times in my life, worked for tips. So having this sort of digital intermediary that is messing with that relationship sucks, right? Like if I order groceries and somebody's driving all around, I want to give them a meaningful amount of money for doing this service. And so if you have this intermediary that's kind of messing with that, that's super frustrating.

1:21:53again i don't i don't know exactly where this goes right this is clearly a product that participants on both sides are happily maybe not happily but they are still like you know you can say you hate these platforms but you're still using them right and people are still accepting these jobs there are people that as much as they don't like the experience maybe of being the labor side of this equation are ultimately still like the flexibility of being able to earn $10 here,$20 there, et cetera. Yeah. The thing that always bugged me was when there's not enough financial education among the workers that you saw like Uber drivers who would be like renting a car or they'd buy a car with high depreciation and they wouldn't factor the depreciation into their wages.

1:22:44And so they were actually upside down on the deal and losing money every month, that felt like, whoa, okay, like there needs to be something that helps that. I know that there, at least with the Uber days, there were some forums where people would go and calculate the highest ROI vehicle you could possibly buy. And sometimes it was a Tesla, sometimes it was, you know, oh, you get this version of the Escalade that's four years old, so it's already depreciated. And then you can do Uber black and it's the highest ROI possible. but if someone's not doing that then they could actually not be making money which is very rough but anyway, Tony rebutted this and said this is not DoorDash and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated this kind of culture the kind of culture described in this Reddit post there's so much wrong with this post Dashers are not human assets having a metric like a desperation score is an abomination we've never had a driver benefit fee why would you charge for faster delivery but not make it faster we're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we work every day to make our platform better for everyone who comes to it.

1:23:48What's described here is appalling and if true, whoever's operating in this manner should be ashamed. And DoorDash, the official account quoted as well and said the awful claims in this post clearly hit a nerve. To be clear, this Reddit post is not about DoorDash. Given how differently we operate, we thought we'd take a moment to share what our approach is actually like. And 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.

1:24:19But 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. What I would like to better understand is how many people, what the actual churn is like on the driver side of these businesses. Because, you know, people talk about, you know, this acceptance rate and who gets what jobs and things like that. in a traditional environment, like in a restaurant, if you are like a server, let's say, and your manager is like, hey, you're in this kind of zone.

1:25:11You're in the zone of the restaurant. Any table that comes in here, you're handling today. And the server's like, well, I don't want to do that table because I don't think they're going to tip very well. Or that person always comes in and they just sort, they're needy, but they don't order that much. and it's not going to be a big bill, that manager would probably end up firing the person. You have to kind of accept the good and the bad. Whereas for this, it's different because DoorDash doesn't actually employ these people. The drivers, I think, like the flexibility of the work. I think that's a big value prop.

1:25:46And so, again, it creates this scenario where you have to use a bunch of weird incentives to ultimately make the entire, like if half the time you went on DoorDash, like your food never got delivered, the service would cease to exist because people would just be like, well, I'm just going to drive and go pick it up myself. And I'm sure some people would argue that that's actually good. But anyway. The big question is, did he tip his librarian? He was at the library drinking. I think if you're getting drinks at the library, I didn't even know you could get drinks served at the library. That's awesome.

1:26:27I want to go to this library. So at least hit the librarian with a buzz ball. For sure. For sure. This is a life hack. If you bring a 30 rack into the library, throw it down on the desk. Throw a buzz ball to the librarian as a sign of respect. Yeah. Librarian, beer me. Beer me, brother, if you're going to be in here posting on Reddit and chugging beers all day long. Tip me, tip me. Oh, well. I think, I hope that 2026 is a year of the buzz ball. You're into buzz balls. I was, buzz balls were post my time. I never had one. They were big when I was in college. I was a four loco guy. And what I appreciate now, in college people were ready for buzz balls.

1:27:11Like you were trained, no, you were trained in the sense of like, if somebody threw a buzz ball at you, your arms are staying at the side. Oh, wait, wait. Oh, this is like a prank. I'm completely unfamiliar with this. Tell me the culture of the buzz ball. The culture of the buzz ball. So you get a buzz ball. Yes. Obviously, like, near the checkout at any type of, like, look. Yes, I've seen them. I've seen them. And so the idea is, like, you're going to buy the thing that you're actually going to drink. Okay. But you just pick up one of these. They have a few. It's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol.

1:27:37That's pretty strong for a single. Yeah, it's very strong. It's more than a single serving of alcohol. Yeah, it's very strong. It's not like one white coin. It tastes terrible. So it's like a punishment. You would never drink one of these for fun. Sure. and you go back to whatever, your house or apartment, and you throw the ball at somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it. Normally, if you throw something at somebody and they're not expecting it, they're going to catch it because they're like, what's going on? Of course. But in kind of at least the heyday of buzz ball for me, you knew this was something, a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time.

1:28:07It could come out at 9 a.m., right, 10 a.m.? And so you're going to keep your hands down, and you're not going to catch it. You'll sidestep it. Okay, okay. But now - What if it smashes in the TV? Are there buzz ball disasters that happen? I'm sure there are. Results in a lot of destruction. But now people are not. I hit my dear friend, Ben Taft. He's a venture capitalist. He's my neighbor. You hit him with a buzz ball? I hit him with a buzz ball. When? A couple days ago? Like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared. Fully unprepared. He just caught it. Well, I would be unprepared. I was like, I feel bad that you caught this.

1:28:41Scoot in the chat says, I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a buzz ball. This is good lore. Thank you. Scoot, Scoot. This is great. This is good, Scoot. See, buzz balls. Tyler, is the culture of the buzz ball alive and well on college campuses, or do we send you back? I'm not 21. I never had alcohol. Oh, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Well, maybe we have to send you back for one non-gap semester day on your 21st birthday to go experience college life and the life of the buzz ball. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

1:29:21Okay, let's go to one of the more viral posts from the last few weeks from the holiday. Kick us off, read this. Oh, you want me to read it? Yeah. You want me to read it? I've read three or four posts. No, no, no, okay, I'm kidding. This is just one I don't know. We can trade off. So Justin says, am I just a monster? It's been four years since I became a father, and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is, I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion and anguish.

1:29:56The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably about 70 to 140 minutes a week. Roughly 10 minutes each day, maybe two times a day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love towards them are perfectly strong, but I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes. My blood starts to boil. I just want to be working or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9 a.m. this morning, Saturday, January 3rd. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin. My four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it.

1:30:28But at this age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded him with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father. The problem is only that I do not enjoy it. Brutal. Very brave to post this. It's not that I'm trying to maximize. But we haven't seen the other side of this. What if his son is like, yeah, bro, I don't enjoy it either. Yeah. What if this is going to be like a generational father-son rivalry where. Some patricide going on. Yeah, we don't know. I don't know. Anyways, Justin continues. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure.

1:31:06It just seems wrong that I experience so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque tree-lined block. I am even relatively relaxed from the holiday. Give it up for picturesque tree-lined blocks. Give it up for tree-lined blocks. Great places to raise family. I don't know how to make them anymore. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience, yet for every single minute. On the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed.

1:31:33When we're done, I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person, or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal? And it's modern parenting norms that are off. Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care. I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong, and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this. Okay. Well, a lot of people weighed in. 14 million views. This is 3 ,000 reposts and 5 ,000 likes.

1:32:07I would ultimately say this is the worst like to view ratio. It's rough. Which means that a lot of - And seven more replies than likes. Crazy, crazy stuff. Anyway, I like Justin. He's been on the show. He came and talked to us about Nick Land. He's a very interesting thinker, very interesting writer. And one thing that part of what he talked about was how you can make it as an independent writer or creative. And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is like their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass. But also outside of institutions.

1:32:48Like he's not in an academic organization. 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. But he's been very, very independent. And that obviously creates the type of work that consumes all, it seeps into all sorts of cracks. Because there's no moment when you're like, okay, I'm logging off and my boss doesn't expect me to do anything until Monday. It's like, oh, you could always be doing a little bit more when you're effectively an entrepreneur. So there's a little bit of that in here. I think in general, skill issue, skill issue.

1:33:24I love Justin, but skill issue. You have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method. This is parenting. The Dan Bilzerian method, especially this works especially well for four-year-old boys. So you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining like an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four-year-old. So you're like, hey, want to get in a really fast car and drive around fast? They're like, absolutely. That sounds amazing. Want to go look at fine watches? Want to go, you know, want to go look at guns or whatever else? Like whatever Dan Bilzerian does. Want to learn poker, buddy?

1:34:00They'll be like, absolutely. I want to play cards. Four-year-old boys have the mind of Dan Bilzerian effectively. And so before you say, oh yeah, I can't afford a fancy car like Dan Bilzerian. A four-year-old cannot tell the difference between an SF90 and a Dodge Viper. Just get the Dodge Viper. Get a red car. Tell them it's a 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 CT5V Blackwing themed birthday party. Like it is a very weird thing. I got this car half jokingly. I know you love it because it goes vroom and it goes very fast and he's very excited about it.

1:34:42But 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 think the bigger picture is that, is that like Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch and that's fine. Like my son is into soccer. I think it's slightly deeper than that. I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life as a man, whose job is to provide for your family, if you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting.

1:35:19Unless you're behind the wheel of a Dodge Viper. Yes, but what I understand here is my reading of it is like he doesn't feel – like it's maybe a sense of stress. It's hard to enjoy just playing catch or going for a walk. Yeah, because he can't turn off his mind. Over the last two weeks, I was spending all day with my wife and kids, and it's raining, right? So you're kind of like stuck indoors and our options are like going outside. Like I would go outside and we would walk around and like pick up slugs and like bucks, right? Because like Dan Bilzerian, four-year-old mode. And I felt at peace. I was enjoying that in part because we worked so hard last year.

1:36:10I was like, you know, So historically on Christmas breaks, I would be annoyed that it was the holidays because I'd be like, it's inappropriate for me to email somebody and say, like, hey, let's talk right now. It felt like needing to slow down for this couple speed bumps when you're trying to go 100 miles an hour. And so, yeah, I ultimately think that's just a huge part of it. It's like the more satisfied you are by your life as a father, the more satisfied you'll be just doing the simple things of life with your kids. The other thing that I've noticed is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is.

1:36:52It's actually like if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend 10 minutes, you'll get that sort of endorphin rush, and that's enjoyable, and then it kind of drops off from there. but the more like it there's increasing returns to uh scale totally totally yeah yeah i mean uh i i i've been playing uh mario kart with my son and he beat me for the first time ever uh just yesterday and it was like this like very interesting moment very cool uh felt very fun uh but also it's like i just i enjoy playing mario kart so yeah and same with like when we do legos now and so now you guys can start.

1:37:32I feel like it gets better and better. You can start gambling his allowance on Mario Kart. Introduce him to putting some money on the line. Maybe he should get an allowance. Every once in a while, he acquires coins randomly somehow. And he's very proud of that. But yeah, I do think that there's something to be said for trying to find activities that align because a four-year-old, specifically a four-year-old boy, I think, I mean, that's not my only experience but a four-year-old boy with with a father uh is like the most memetic creature possible like he's literally just looking to you for everything so you can say i like dinosaurs and he'll be like i'm so into dinosaurs but you but if you're not into dinosaurs you can be like actually i want to go look at horses today or something whatever you're into like they will be alongside like there's times when i can like like like whenever we're in the car like we he doesn't request ready to read the wall street journal get ready to read the wall street journal buddy I actually am excited for that I will read all sorts of stories to him and yeah I have to stop and explain them like I'm five, literally explain them like I'm four but it's still fun and same thing with the music he wants to listen to my playlist he wants to listen to rock music and the songs that I like and yeah I do a light filter so that there's no part of that is almost leadership I think my son loves dinosaur is probably, you know, if there was a Spotify.

1:38:58And you took a class on dinosaurs. Yes, yes, yes. No, but what I was going to say, if there was like a kid's book, Spotify wrapped, he'd be in the top 0.0001 % dinosaur enjoyer. The problem is like I read to him before bed every night, right? Yeah. Seven days a week we're reading. If he was just like deciding what we were going to read, it'd be dinosaurs every night. Yeah. And it's so hard to pronounce. Dude, you've got to give me some dinosaur book racks because we – No, but let me finish. So where I got to is I'm like, okay, like we got to introduce more books because like if we're – there are like kids-oriented books, even for like the four-year-old range, that are more – that are like interesting parables, stories, et cetera, that are just like timeless and worth reading.

1:39:42Yeah. And so I've like enjoyed massively over the break, like switching it up a lot. We got like a comic book style, like action comic of the Bible, right? So we're reading that, right? And that's like, he enjoys it. I enjoy it. It's just like, you got to be like switching it up and not at the same time, like you want to be leaning into their interests, but not overly just doing whatever, like generate your own ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turn this semi-analysis deep dive into a children's book so that I can read it to myself. About the TPUV7. something there you gotta give me some recommendations for dinosaur books because my son found a dinosaur toy took a picture of it ID'd it with one of the LLMs and then he was like I want to know more I want to read books and I realized I'm actually woefully under resourced when it comes to dinosaur books I have poop and none of them are particularly good so anyway breaking news breaking news?

1:40:46we got some breaking news what's breaking news? department of energy just announced that it awarded general matter 900 million for uranium wow hit that app loving gong john it shakes the camera it shakes the camera that's amazing I think we gotta figure out how to hang the gong from the rafters. We do. Yeah, yeah. We're refining. We're refining. Let's pull this. Well, while we do that, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Let's move on to our breaking news. What you got for me?

1:41:36Let's see. So the U.S. awards 2.7 billion worth of orders to boost uranium enrichment. So it sounds like there's a few players here. Department of Energy announced Monday it was wording orders 2.7 to three companies to boost domestic uranium enrichment over the next 10 years in a broader effort to reduce U.S. dependence on Russian supply. Yeah. No, no, no. I never knew this. A lot of the uranium comes from decommissioned missiles and stuff. So it's already been processed and then they break it apart and we just buy it from them because they're basically denuclearizing, I believe. Pretty well. Yeah, so it's American Centrifuge Operating, General Matter and Orono Federal Services secured the order.

1:42:21Nice. The department said, if you want to sell to the government, maybe put federal services in your name. Well, I think that might be not a startup. I think that might be owned by the government or something like that. Is it or is it a private? I don't know. It 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.

1:43:08Russia is currently the only country that makes H-A-L-E-U, uranium enriched to between 5 % and 20%, which is said to make new high-tech reactors more efficient in commercial volumes. Funds to make the fuel domestically in the United States were included in a law to ban uranium shipments from Russia fully by 2028. So big news. Very cool. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business's AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches in their tracks. Check out CrowdStrike. So the Duarquesh piece, it's sort of big. We might want to go through it. Let's save it for tomorrow.

1:43:56Let's save it for tomorrow. Let's skip through this. The big shift to Miami. Miami is back. This was from Teddy Schlaffer in the New York Times. 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. 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 boomtown 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.

1:44:35Why was he in Miami? Was he just there for the Soho Beach House? Was he there to - F1, maybe. F1? F1. F1. It takes place in Miami every year. Oh, you think he was in there like this week? He said having just spent a few days visiting. Okay. I don't know. Because, I mean, to be clear, like Patrick Collison would be subject to - Totally. The billionaire tax that Ro Khanna - Ro Khanna - Former guest of the show. Former guest of the show. It was burning up the timeline. It was funny. 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.

1:45:11Really? It was like, he seems to be a guy that does, it's weak beliefs, weakly held. I don't know. 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. PT clearly press release. December 31st. Ro Khanna 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. When they threaten to leave, I will miss them very much. So Ro Khanna will not be missing everyone that leaves.

1:45:55there is the debate sort of shifted back to like, okay, 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 Delhi, an idea of like, let's move Silicon Valley to Miami, like that didn't really happen. but is there a world I had this theory that Miami could become, 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 I need an office on Sand Hill Road they're like I'll get an office in San Francisco when I want to raise money, I'll drive down to Sand Hill Road yeah but almost every venture capitalist also just got a presence in San Francisco No, but what I mean is that there is a fundraising hub that founders go and visit.

1:47:01And whether it's in Sand Hill Road or the Presidio or Miami, it is accessible if you're doing a roadshow. Like if you're taking a Series B seriously, you're probably going to spend a week in New York. You're probably going to spend a week in Miami at this point. And maybe Austin too. and going around to different locales for fundraising doesn't seem that hard. Yeah, in 2021, people were doing Miami roadshows, and they were pretty effective. You could go to Miami and get around them. Miami Tech Week was in many ways that. Yeah, and you were sometimes just calling back to the West Coast doing Zoom calls, but you could meet a bunch of VCs in a tight line.

1:47:46And 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. And 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.

1:48:24I 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. Every definition that a. He's like, would you like some nonprofit credits? No, every, every. Yeah. I'm sure Sam is close to a billionaire just off of his stripe. Yeah, just off of other stuff, for sure. Okay. The car collection alone. Here's a theory. Okay, Sam is actually behind this because it's going to force Dario either to pay a massive fine or they're going to have to move. Right? That's better for opening an eye because he doesn't have the – Yeah, get the tinfoil hat on.

1:49:03So Sam is actually behind this. Maybe. He's getting everyone out of Silicon Valley so he can stay there. Maybe. I somehow don't think that's what's going on. Anyway, Roe Connick. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing, this whole wealth tax debate was happening almost at the same time as the Somali daycare thing. Yeah, which was very odd because there's this question of how effective is government. Once you get the money into the government, it sounds very nice. It's like, oh, it could be redistributed, but if it all gets stolen immediately. Which was funny because we've had a recurring bit on the show where we said, like, is PT really a billionaire?

1:49:39Like, I've never seen him in chrome hearts. Oh, yeah. I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens. Yeah, and then the guys were wearing chrome hearts. I've never seen him with an RM, a racing machine on the wrist, right? And the Somali daycare founder was actually rocking chrome for a press conference. It's actually crazy. It's crazy. You know, on the question of like, of like, is the government effective at just redistribution broadly? I was reflecting on this fact that there, you can kind of put the billionaires in two camps. There's like, let's call them like the bleeding hearts that like, they sign the giving pledge and they say, I'm going to give away half my wealth or all my wealth.

1:50:17And then there's like the, the ruthless capitalists say, I'm not giving away anything. I'm just going to pass it on to my kids. Right. And so there's, there's two camps and let's, let's call the bleeding hearts. like they really do want to give away. They want to leave 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 pay down the debt or just like distribute it to people in a tax rebate or something.

1:50:53Like it's always been, okay, I got to go and do like this healthcare and this cancer research and this doc. It's always something more specific. Bill Gates's new pledge is specifically going to deploy a lot of capital into Africa. Yeah. But it's never, it's never just, okay. Yeah. Like I built my wealth in California. I'm just going to give my money to the state of California, which is odd. But Ro Khanna puts a lot of context here. He says, my district is$18 trillion, nearly one third of the U.S. stock market in a 50-mile radius. We have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar.

1:51:25And 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. Those saying 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-founder is at Sun. He started NVIDIA in my district because of the semiconductor talent. I do sort of agree with this. I think the effects would take a very, very long time. No, no. The issue I have is it's just a slippery slope down the asset seizure mountain.

1:52:16They really got to build the high-speed rail. Like, all of this is just so, like, the high-speed rail is just such an easy dunk on all of this. It's like high-speed rail, you know? Like, oh, you want more of my high-speed rail? High-speed rail didn't work. So, like, nothing you do works. If I was Gavin Newsom, I feel like I'd just be like, okay, I'm actually going to go finish the high-speed rail thing, and then you can't say that anymore, because I did it. But it's still, and it's like, we were even talking about, 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.

1:52:45Uh, and, and I think that's like, it's, I mean, it was the, it was the cornerstone anecdote of Ezra Klein's, uh, book abundance with Derek Thompson. Uh, it's like the main anecdote for like a new order among like liberal Democrats. And 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, on the left. 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 does he think that this is a good one?

1:53:27Friedberg had some of the best commentary on this. He absolutely mauled Ro Khanna. It was a brutal mocking. There's a quote from the All In pod X account. They say, Freberg, California's billionaire tax is a Trojan horse to go after the middle class's private assets. Freberg, 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.

1:54:01Forget about the term billionaire, millionaire, whatever it is. 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.

1:54:28What matters is that we're giving the government the right to look into our private property and take a percentage of it every year. The total net worth of billionaires in the U.S. is$8 trillion. The net worth of the U.S., the middle class, and everyone else is$170 trillion compared to the$8 trillion of the billionaires. Jamal 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. You could charge them a capital gains tax if they borrow against their assets that they haven't paid capital gains tax on.

1:55:01Very simple. That can resolve this. Another thing you can do, you can raise the capital gains tax rate. sounds unpopular. 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 trillion, not the 8 trillion that the billionaires have. So yeah, again, the founding fathers would be absolutely disgusted with the state of our current tax structure, they would be throwing up.

1:55:37Come to the New York Post would be crazy. Yeah, I just think people need to realize how far... this can go and I think that the political story of the next seemingly decade to decades It's potentially, as our lifetimes, is politicians running on, I will raise taxes. I will take assets from people. I will take the assets from private citizens, and I will redistribute them to you if you vote for me. And that feels like an incredibly vicious cycle that I don't see how it ever stops. So I'm so blackpilled on it, I don't even want to talk about it anymore, unfortunately. The number of billionaires has grown globally from 140 in 1987 to over 3 ,000 in 2025.

1:56:34With enough inflation, everyone will be a billionaire eventually. If we go through a period of hyperinflation, you could see everyone making billions of dollars every year. Introduce billionaire tax, print. Yep, hyperinflate. Hyperinflate, everyone's a billionaire. You know, there's countries where there was so much inflation that people would be making billions of dollars for a loaf of bread, basically. a quadrillion dollar. I'm reading, uh, reading a book on the banking system in, uh, in the, uh, 14th and 15th century right now. And they introduced, uh, various governments would introduce wealth.

1:57:10They were always like going to war with other city states. And so various governments would like introduce a wealth tax. 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. Like there was tons of, uh, tons of, tons of, uh, fraud and, um, uh, but, uh, ultimately people do not enjoy earning, uh, earning dollars, buying assets, and then having those assets confiscated. It does feel like it will create an immense amount of jobs, like assessing all these assets.

1:57:45I mean, like the, the family offices of these billionaires themselves employs like dozens of people to track everything and then you have the flip side of that which is the private uh or the the state effort to monitor all those assets it's so it just becomes yeah it's it's it's it's going to be truly it's truly an impossible like you know we we spend all of our not all of our time we spend a lot of our time covering the private markets right and so if you're a business owner uh and you have a some uh uh somebody in the government coming and saying like hey you made x amount you made you made a million dollars.

1:58:21We're actually looking at public comps right now. And companies in your category are trading at between 20 and 30 times earnings. So actually, you're worth, you know, you're worth$50 million. And we have this tax where if you're worth 50 million or more, which Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax, I think like, she's talked about doing like 8 % above 50 million, something like that. Um, and, uh, and so, yeah, you're, you're actually, you, you call it congratulations. You qualified for the wealth tax and the person's like, well, we only had this much net income last year because of this one time thing.

1:59:01And suddenly you're having to argue against the value of your own. Um, and very weird because a lot of startups want to get the valuation as high as possible for recruiting purposes. And then you have like, for tax purposes they'll want to minimize the valuation there's already a little bit it's never it's never gonna work i was talking i was catching up with a uh portfolio uh company founder over the break and technically i have shares in the company that are marked at close to seven figures and he's considering a pivot right now which means that like the value of the equity is is is worth like is worth like a tiny fraction it's tiny last round because it's like completely changing yeah it's starting over start basically like starting over from zero or also there's scenario that he just shuts it down yeah right and so it's like i i kind of put the even though even though like investors in the company have that equity marked yeah at tens of millions of dollars yeah i value it at effectively zero yeah but the government will not the government will backed, that backed the company.

2:00:10And they just did it. They did it in the last year. How can you say this is not worth, that this is worthless stock? This looks like it's worth quite a lot. And anyway, so. Anyway, let me tell you about 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, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI. The backbone of the internet economy. Backbone of my career, I've been using Shopify since 2012, I believe, 2013. So yeah, over a decade on Shopify. Wow. All right, let's talk predictions.

2:00:45What did Scott Belsky predict for the future slash 2026? Number one, he said, massive amounts of talent arbitrage. There's 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. For example, companies want to hire answer engine optimization efforts or experts over search engine optimization practitioners. Most marketing leaders are still not conducting old-fashioned focus groups rather than using AI breakthroughs in market research.

2:01:282026 provides a precious work window for young or 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 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.

2:02:09The 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 films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people 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 Taylor Swift era's 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 agree with Dwarkesh's take?

2:02:50Not 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? Yeah, this is why people enjoy watching TVPN is they can debate, is Tyler using the GigaChad filter right now? It provides a shared experience that you can have a conversation around. What did you say?

2:03:23Did you see any movies over the break? Sicario, one and three. You did? let's go i recommended that give me your review uh i mean masterpiece masterpiece goes in my top five films yeah ever it's fantastic did you like that's because you know i like in four that's that's right but it's still uh top five by default did you like you know the difference between one and two like a completely different team so so one one is regarded taylor sheridan didn't do two? I forget exactly the difference. I need to look it up. But Sicario 2, I believe it had a different team. The director, Stefano. So he wrote Sicario 2 but didn't direct it.

2:04:07Exactly. Yeah. And I think it got worse reviews than the first one. But did you like one better than Zootopia 2? He snowed. I recommend Zootopia. Just skip Zootopia 1. Zootopia 1 is great. Go straight to two great movie uh with your four yeah anyways what what what movie do you recommend i watch next oh that's a tough one there was uh there was a list of movies that was going viral from was it bill simmons movie list movie list this one uh did you watch uh the ping pong marty supreme i didn't i didn't get you watched it what'd you think what's the review um it was pretty good i enjoyed it i like uh safety brothers their movies yeah me too 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 uh yeah i maybe like what what will we remember what will we remember more in five years the marketing or the film yeah i think that's definitely an argument you could have which is like not you don't usually like say that about movies.

2:05:18So yeah, just by saying that, it's like, yeah, probably the marketing. Yeah, maybe it's a lesson. It's like, don't make your marketing too good. Otherwise people... They feel like they got the experience. This is something Derek Thompson talked to us about and Dan Wong called out again to go back to his piece. 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. Tell the most interesting stories. Exactly. They're like, well, it was, it was, I got one hour of this.

2:05:53Do I really want to have six hours of this on the audio book? I kind of got the audio book 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. 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 re-watched movies of the century. Devil Wears Prada, Social Network, Anchorman, The Town, The Departed, Miami Vice, Hangover, Superbad.

2:06:26Have you seen Superbad? I think that would be a good one for you. It's very funny. It holds up. I think you'd like that. Stepbrothers? You've never seen Stepbrothers? Stepbrothers. I feel like we did a meme around Stepbrothers. The movie that I think you might like, if you like Sicario, might be Taken. Have you seen Taken? Liam Neeson? Yeah. great movie. Great movie. Team loves it. Studio goes wild. Studio goes wild. John Wick. If you haven't seen the original John Wick, that's a great movie. John, have you seen Prisoners? Yeah, Prisoners is great. For sure, Prisoners. Any Denis Villeneuve movie is good.

2:07:00Jordy, maybe you should go like Art House. Have you tried any of those? Art House. How about Capital House? Do you have any recommendations? Margin Call? I saw Sicario as a double feature. I went to the movie theater. bought two tickets saw sicaria walked straight into the martian saw that it was great great that's great well this is this is the year of the social network too yeah i somehow think it's not going to be as good as the first one it just feels like it's going to be mired i think it depends who plays duarkesh yes yes i hope i hope that they really go into it's about it's a free entirely on yon lacun's hot takes around the llama for overfitting of the benchmarks that yeah that should be where it's where it's anyways back to back to scott he says uh behind the scenes proof of crafts content will enter the mainstream of advertising and entertainment as more ai generated content fills our feeds we will develop a membrane of doubt that's fake will become a default reaction as we become that was uh kind of the slower reaction to this company pickle.com yeah that came out people at first were like wow this is super cool and then people started being like wait is this real?

2:08:11Is this fake? We can get to that later. Scott says, that's fake will become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention-grabbing content. This is how I've been with AI-generated launch videos and vibe reels. I haven't watched a single one. I assume you'll tell me if one of them is good. AI-generated launch vibe reels? Maybe you're not watching them either. Tyler probably watches them still. Pure AI purist over here. Andy, two cents. That was pretty good, I thought. That was AI generated. Yeah, but that had great ideas in it. It was a lot more, it wasn't just, here's a bunch of cool images that are trying to make you feel something.

2:08:52I'm skipping over those. 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 this watch costs more than your car it's a rolex president um margin call i feel like i saw that a long time ago it's been a wild lioness i haven't seen that that looks pretty good i'll have to check that out uh there's a couple others here uh anyway cognition they should make a movie about cognition uh let me tell you about the software engineer devin the software engineer crush your backlog with your personal ai engineering team um we gotta get we We've got to get Scott back on the show.

2:09:36Yeah. Update 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 predicted the IMO, gold medal, from AI exactly as it played out. That was a great call. And 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, we have Justin Mares from TrueMed coming on the show in just 25 minutes. And he's obviously deep in all of this and can tell us more about this particular trend.

2:10:17Scott 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, where 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.

2:10:55We will also see shifts in travel, entertainment, dating apps, and beyond, as the societal implications of longevity become a mainstream conversation. You got to get on TruMed. We're having Justin on the show in just a little bit. We got to get on TruMed and figure out the ultimate looks-maxing stacks and make sure you're paying for your looks-maxing regimen. They offer the peptides? Yeah, with pre-tax dollars. You got to be looks-maxing on pre-tax dollars. That's key. That's key. And thanks to TruMed, it is now possible to looks-max with pre-tax dollars. Hardware becomes a more popular moat amid a surge of hardware startups.

2:11:33Interesting reflecting on this year, there was a surge of hardware startups. We demoed a lot of hardware in 2025. I was asking you about the X-Reel, those AR, VR glasses. I was super bullish on those. But you churned, I churned. Haven't really been using them. Wait, were you actually bullish on them? Yeah. because when I use the Apple Vision Pro, 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 film to watch by modern standards. Like Sicario was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

2:12:12There's always something happening. It's really exciting. You know, you're watching the tactical stuff, the cameras moving, those sweet shots of like the SUVs moving from the aerial. It's amazing. Like it's so visually stimulating. The color grade's amazing. The sound mix is amazing. Citizen Kane is so slow. It opens with these really slow title cards. It's just the easiest movie ever, if you're not locked in and really into it, to pull out your phone and just get tuned out. Is Tyler watching a movie now? I mean, Citizen Kane, there's much more boring movies, I will say, than I've seen. No, I agree.

2:12:47I agree. It's a great movie. But it's just like any movie that's even more, even before the 80s, I feel like it has a slow start. There's lots of exposition. It's just less TikTokified versus a modern Fast and the Furious movie. Even if it's not a good movie, it's going to hold your attention because there's always something happening. Yeah, that's probably true. But I mean, Citizen Kane is known for having the, I forget what the term is, but it has the thing that starts the whole story, right? The rosebud. Yeah. It's supposed to get you. Yeah, yeah. It's a good hook. It's a good hook. You know what it is?

2:13:18The initial rosebud where he drops the, it's the snow globe, right? Yeah. Isn't it? The snow globe. Have you ever seen those, those brain rot tick tocks where it's throwing the bottle of like marbles down the stairs and it smashes and they bounce everywhere. No, you've never seen those. Oh, it's like the most brain rotty content possible. And it's kind of like that. Somebody 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.

2:13:49Like I enjoyed watching movies in it. You could put on Avatar and it's in three 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 use it. And so I returned it. And it was not something that was going to go into my daily driver. But we tested a lot of these on Guinea Pig Tyler over there. We gave him a Quest 3S Ultra Xbox Edition. Didn't play that much. You didn't prestige, right, in COD? No, I didn't have prestige. Skill issue. And the X-Rails. You wore them on one flight. You enjoyed it for that.

2:14:22Yeah, on the flight, it was great. But you just took a flight, and you didn't bring them. You didn't think, ah, I've got to put those in my backpack. Yeah, I mean, that was in the summer, I think. I last used them. Rip. And the Rabbit and the Humane. Well, the hardware that I care most about this year is getting a couple great racing sims here at UDO. We've got to see if we can get one on TrueMed. I wonder, it is a sort of a lifestyle upgrade. I wonder, what is the current meta? I've been watching a lot of Instagram reels about sweet racing sim setups, and I was wondering, is the meta, is the best racing sim VR, or is it physical screens these days?

2:15:05I wonder which one is the true. Still physical screens. It's still physical screens. The F1 drivers use physical screens. They don't do VR. Because I've done some racing in VR, and it's really cool. It's amazing, but it is a heavy thing on your face. Anyway, there will be more hard work. Scott continues, ordinary data becomes a less valuable moat. These days it feels like every company is trying to sync everyone's data, and doing so is becoming easier than ever before. Soon enough, all your products will have all of your data, whether it is via connectors now or computer vision plug-ins later.

2:15:34As 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, et cetera. Two, more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers. And three, real-time data sources, whether X or the weather, where ocean tide patterns becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots. Graphs, portable memory, and real-time data are the new proprietary data motes. He says seven, ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream while many teams use services like Granola or Zoom to record and annotate their meetings.

2:16:09Not me. I talked to some people that loved the granola wrapped because it had all the context on every, like they were specifically running. You said nothing on my end, thanks, 400 times. But, I mean, there were some really interesting insights because if you run a remote startup 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 going to completely reinvent your business, but people, it definitely delighted a lot of people.

2:16:45So that was cool. What if Granola this year just has a pop up and it's like, do you know you can automate this entire role? For$1 ,000 a month, you can replace this. Brutal. I have to imagine that's part of their pitch to investors, right? is like we're going to understand like what work is actually getting done at these companies and who does what and how things get made and how things get kind of far-fetched but yeah i mean will manitis was posting about uh about the like it was 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 um and i think his point was just like there are there are so many secrets within businesses about like how things actually get done that don't typically get documented.

2:17:36And so you can get closer to that. Just because like, like 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, we 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 like that's clearly true for a lot of businesses, regardless, like there's just secrets that are kept within internally.

2:18:12And if Grinol is like a way to access that, like could be valuable. I don't know. What's the next one? 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 open AI is brewing, and our computers become capable of running powerful LLMs locally while the world is going to change yet again.

2:18:44Implications 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. 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 expect it to be, if it's better than the Photos app, if it can be. I have noticed that the text-to-speech feature has gotten better. I feel like they updated the model at some point. And 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.

2:19:27I haven't tested a lot of other stuff. 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, Gemini deals going live tomorrow. It's like, okay, you did the deal. Just put Gemini and Siri today. Yeah, I mean, people have been talking about, there was some research paper about whether, like, AI tools are actually benefiting companies. And then you look, and, like, it was the models that were out in October. It's like, that's already, like, too late. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:20:04Opus is much better than the previous plot model. Yeah, and you think just getting, like, actual customer feedback, starting to troubleshoot these things. There's also like just a benefit to, I feel like Apple is in many ways very, very cautious with their brand. They're very thoughtful and they don't want like, like, you know, when Google launched their first image model, now they're loved for Nano Banana. It's remarkable. But remember the first launch that people were doing like the, the, the accurate 1940s soldier. And it was very controversial because it got the, the, the, the, the, the race wrong.

2:20:41and 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. But Apple's not really in that mode of, oh yeah, 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 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 22 really great days where people were like, this is amazing.

2:21:22Thanks so much. This is a cool new model. And so like it's 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. I'm going to 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 buy code, tailor-made software, and agent-driven solutions for functions around the company.

2:21:52At first, these efforts will replace SaaS products, especially those that are expensive private equity-owned clunky solutions. We support private equity here. We do. And they're 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 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.

2:22:27Let's give it up for cross-functional work. Yeah. I mean, Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation Software, was sort of talking about this, right? It was great. He just came out, said on an investor call, it's over. It was a good run. But I mean, so I was wondering this because on, it was January 2nd or something, the market opened and all the SaaS companies were selling off. Did you see this? 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. And so it's bad news for all the SaaS companies.

2:23:07And I was trying to think about that. So I pulled some stats on, you know, 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. And they're all growing revenue somewhere between 5 % and 30%. 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 – my initial thesis was, like, it would be hard to justify this idea of, like, vibe-coded software truly replacing SaaS.

2:24:00If all of the big SaaS companies are still growing, then it's like clearly a Jevons paradox thing. We're just getting more software. 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, yeah, you're not going to one-shot it with Claude. So you're not going to do that but you do need to be worried about this like long tail software that just sticks around and just raises prices and doesn't have any features. Yeah the threat to some of these I guess more if you think about like the Joe Lamont style companies were built to die.

2:24:40You have this software that you know an investor allocator like Joe would be comfortable buying knowing that the revenue is just going to decline and eventually cease to exist. And you can imagine this being like somebody that makes software for large vending machine companies to manage inventory, something like that, right? And a kind of overlooked category, not big enough for venture. The question is like, will those companies like be super quick to adopt? Will they be super quick to adopt AI products themselves or will they be using, will they be like vibe coding? I don't know. The question is you potentially get this sort of like explosion of like web developers that just were like thousands, millions of people globally that are going to, I'm going to go to business owners and I'm going to make them a website.

2:25:31And you could see something like that happening with like vibe coders, like freelance vibe coders. That's 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, 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.

2:26:02Maybe with just a little bit of extra work, we can make it great again or make it bigger. I want Tyler's response, but first I want to tell you about MongoDB. choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedded models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Tyler. Yeah, I think there is some distinction. You mentioned of the software companies. It's like Snowflake or MongoDB. People aren't vibe-coding their own vector databases. It's like a tool. It's not the full solution. Yeah, yeah. I would be very surprised if those are heard a lot by vibe coding.

2:26:41Yeah, no, I know. 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. And I think that even companies that seem simple where it feels like something you could vibe code, but they've been aware of moat building for 20 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 can navigate this for you, and it feels just like a SaaS app, but there's something else going on behind the scenes.

2:27:16I think that that creates more durability. Anjane has 2026 group chat consensus. One, extraordinary capabilities, progress from Anthropic and Google. Leaving out. Leaving out opening. What's going on over there? Two, sovereign. I mean, he was an angel in Anthropic. He's got his team. uh sovereign nations as largest customers of open source models three compute scarcity at unimaginable levels four violent public backlash against perceived ai job losses uh hopefully no violence um but i the perceived ai job losses is notable i saw there was a pretty viral video that popped up on my ex uh this morning and it was like a montage of like big tech layoffs and they were positioning it like it was all AI job loss.

2:28:07And so I think that's the story right now. On one hand, it's CEOs and management teams saying, hey, maybe I should do more with less. In some cases, 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, 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. Yeah, I agree. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Go check out Railway. Tomas says 11 predictions for 2026.

2:28:53We got a bunch of prediction posts here. Every year I make a list of predictions and score last year's predictions. 2025 was a good year. he scored 7.85 out of 10. Here are his predictions for 2026. Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time. Whoa, that's a bold. I don't know that he's saying all businesses. I think he's saying some businesses. Waymo rides cost 31 % more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. We saw blacked out Uber, or Waymo, which was iconic. I want to get to that one. Murdered out Waymo? It was a real murdered out Waymo? It might have been AI.

2:29:27I don't know. We got to dig into it. Vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack. 2026 becomes a record year for liquidity. I saw something interesting where, so he's predicting SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropics, 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, 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 when you return$50 billion to your LPs, they probably wanna sign up for the next fund, and the next fund probably gets bigger.

2:30:04And we've seen a couple charts where it looks like venture dollars are declining and 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. They're finally gonna 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 return. Maybe they buy land. Maybe they buy land. They're into land maxing.

2:30:34AI 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 2026, AI agents will autonomously execute eight-hour work streams. That will be crazy. 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. Now, it will come back to you before eight hours, right? Yeah, so... It's the equivalent work time. Yeah, I think there was this good blog post that came out, I think a couple days after the break started.

2:31:11It was like critiquing the Meteor evals. And the main thing was like, if you actually look at what the eval is doing, I think it was for Opus, the headline was like it can do four and a half hours or four or something. And so the way you do that is like you give it tasks that take people on average four hours. But it's pretty hard to find tasks that do that, right? So if you look at it, they only had like 14 actual tasks that gave that benchmark. So it's a very small sample size. So it's pretty hard to reliably see if that's actually true. At the same, are you laughing at the chat? Yeah. Bobby says, did you guys hear about OpenAI's, quote, pen?

2:31:53And Goldrock says, is it a vape pen you can gamble on from? What does that mean? That's ridiculous. That's the most 2026 pen. I wouldn't be surprised. 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 stuff there. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub shift higher quality software faster. Now part of Cursor. This is wild. Well, if you want a vape pen, maybe you should try and pay with it with pre-tax dollars using TrueMed.

2:32:34We have Justin Mayers. He's going to tell us that you can't do that. I'm going to tell him I absolutely can. Just try to stop me. And I will. I will be buying a vape pen on this. Justin, welcome back to the show Great to see you, happy new year John wants to vape Chinese peptide No, no, so I don't, I actually don't But I do want you to tell me How I can use TruMed To build the ultimate looks maxing stack I want to pay for my looks maxing stack Yeah, what are you using? What's your stack? Since you've been on the show Your cheeks are red, I can see you've been bone smacking You're just talking about the fit Your mid-face ratio is completely different Than the last time we saw you Something's clearly going on.

2:33:15True Med clearly helping. Anyway, how are you doing? What's new? I'm doing phenomenally. Doing so well. And one of the things that I've been using from a health standpoint is obviously bone broth and all of the health benefits that come with that. One hand washes the other. Wait, so you literally smashed the bones to make the bone broth, correct? So you've been in bone smashing for a decade now? His family actually made their money in bone smashing. It is a bone smashing company. It might be the best pure play bone smashing company there is. We were decades ahead of clavicular. I think you were.

2:33:47Yeah, we need a Luxmax index. For sure. For sure. Kettle and fire can be when you guys go public. We'll put it in there. Yeah. Anyway, just reset the story for us. What's the news? You picked the worst possible day to announce it, but give it to us. Maybe the best. You guys broke through the, there wasn't a lot of noise. It was sort of a quiet day, but yeah, take us through it. Very quiet day. Yeah, so we finally announced that we raised$34 million for TrueMed as part of the Series A. The first hit of the new gong. Hit it. I love that shakes the whole camera. It's so good. It's a much bigger gong.

2:34:272026 is going to be a big year for you guys. The first 2026 gong hit. Anyway, so$34 million. Wait, wait, wait. So when did the deal happen? What was the thesis around launching the announcement when you did? Yeah, so it happened earlier last year, in the first half of last year. Sure. But 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, which was fully baked by the end, which is great. Yeah. And so kind of packaged everything up and decided to announce and kind of mention that 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.

2:35:11And it's a thing that tech and other people are paying attention to and waking up to. So I wanted to announce it later in the year. And has the elevator pitch changed to consumers or the companies that you're working with? How are you positioning the actual value prop of TruMed, getting people on board? Yeah. So to brands like Peloton, Aidsleep, Lifetime, those are our partners. It's quite easy. For many of these brands, exactly, Eight Sleep, they realize that they are selling a product that oftentimes is expensive. And so if someone can use pre-tax funds and save 25 % to 50%, if you're in the max tax bracket and live in California, you can save 50%.

2:35:54Getting an Eight Sleep or a Peloton at 50 % off is quite a material thing. And so we have merchant partners where we're doing 15%, 20 % of their total sales are going through TruMed. And for the individual, if you're someone with an HSA or FSA account, historically, these accounts have been used under this idea of wait until you get sick, get cancer, need surgeries, need pharmaceuticals late in life, and then you have a tax-advantaged account that can pay for everything once you're sick. And the IRS has been clear, the average American is sick today. we should be spending these dollars on things that studies show are effective at treating or preventing different diseases.

2:36:31And so that's what TrueMed enables. And what's the status of HSA? It's usually an option and you have to pick a specific healthcare plan to be eligible. Is that right? Are HSAs booming? Are people adopting them? What's the actual flow to get one? I maxed out my HSA this year because of TrueMed on our TBPN plan. Yeah, I mean, HSAs are growing quite a lot. They grew around 11 % last year. I think over the last three years, that's been about right, like 10 % to 15 % growth. Our thesis, though, is that you ask the average person, like you, Jordi, before TruMed came along, like, what is an HSA? Do you have one?

2:37:12Why 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. 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. Who cares about buying Band-Aids tax-free? Our hypothesis is if you can buy something, pay for lifetime membership, pay for AIDS lead, pay for these different things, assuming that you qualify, that many, many more people will actually sign up and fund these accounts. I think that over the next decade, there could be a trillion dollars in HSA and FSA accounts, even without any regulatory changes or anything like that.

2:37:52is it possible to pull a PT and put startup equity in an HSA? Could I throw a few shares in? Do you have any availability, like trade in the HSA? Is that a thing people can do? That's definitely a thing people can do. It's not something that TruMed necessarily supports yet, but it's a thing people can do. I mean, I don't know if there's an HSA PT out there yet, but there will be one day. Do you think we can move? So TruMed is a company that to me is shockingly political. Like some people hear about what TruMed does and they get angry. They're like, no, you should only be able to spend your HSA funds once you're deathly ill.

2:38:36You shouldn't be able to use it to buy something that helps you exercise that even though we know exercise extends your lifespan. So it's just crazy that we're in a place that spending HSA funds is political and people are angry about it. Do you have optimism around that changing over time? Is this just kind of the nature? So much of health is just deeply political. Yeah. I mean, honestly, one of the biggest disappointments that I've had in the last couple of 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 like means it's a right wing issue somehow.

2:39:20I think that there's always going to be people that look at this like within the industry. You know, I came as an outsider from the industry, started Kettle and Fire before this. And within the industry, it's still like controversial somewhat whether like bug spray should be HSA or FSA eligible. 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 they just say NFSA 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 22 years ago when these accounts were started, when Congress basically created these accounts.

2:39:54I just think those default assumptions are no longer true. You look around and the average American today is sick. Like, you know, 70 % of Americans are overweight or obese. 93 % have at least a metabolic marker 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 healthcare 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.

2:40:28Is there a lot of volume happening on TruMed that's going towards like Wagovi and people paying out of pocket for weight loss treatment products? Or is that separate? No. So as of right now, we don't support GLP-1s. I 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 want to pay for pharmaceuticals, you can use an HSA today. But aren't a lot of people paying for GLP-1s out of pocket? Yeah, they can. But HSA, for many people, is considered out of pocket as well. Because it's like they can direct where and how they spend these funds.

2:41:07They're their own funds, just they're tax-free. And so 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 healthcare system right now doesn't really know how to think about, and people don't really know how to pay for it. So is there like a big roadmap for you on new verticals that you want to 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 Peloton and it was like a different process?

2:41:38Or is there just one bucket and you can throw whatever you need into it and you just sign the companies as they come up? 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. We basically look at a couple things. What do the studies say about how effective a certain intervention is? Based on that, what conditions will that intervention be effective for? You can't get exercise to treat a toe fungus or something like that. That would be a bad intervention.

2:42:10A doctor would never prescribe that. What we are basically looking for is something like exercise. 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 thing that I want to unlock this year is food. If you look at the data, medically tailored meals have incredible efficacy, incredible ROI, but they're very complicated.

2:42:47to, 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 spend on food because like everyone needs food. On Raisin Canes. Chicken fingers. Chicken finger dream. My chicken finger dream is chicken fingers via my TrueMed account. No, you're talking about like actual, like, you know, properly portioned meals. Yeah, I mean, 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 kids. Obviously, there's varying levels of efficacy. But in theory, that's a really great intervention.

2:43:23I mean, it just seems so obvious. 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 just sleep, diet, and exercise. 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 obviously like food, it feels like it's a challenge. So you're working on that. So is that a goal for 2026 or? 100%. I would say that is one of our big goals for this year, especially as like tens of millions of Americans are gonna be on GLP-1s.

2:43:58Things like eating more nutritionally dense food, getting more protein. Like these things really, really matter for even things like GLP-1s to work over any long period of time. Yeah, and micronutrients too, right? Is that a place where people miss out if they're on GLP-1s? How are you? How big is the team? We're 51 people now. 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 are you pushing everybody on the team to to like, you know, use the tools as effectively as they can?

2:44:41Like, where are you getting the most leverage? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, we're certainly pushing the engineering team 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 prototyping side of things. We recently stood up a team within TrueMed that it's basically me and two other people where we're calling it the VentureBets team. It's basically the team that just moves fast, tries things, prototypes stuff, and sees if it works or not. And the goal there is basically to unlock a new line of revenue over the next 12 to 18 months.

2:45:17And for that, we are basically using almost entirely AI tooling to spin up landing pages, mini products, all these sorts of things that are not exactly built to scale. They're not built for six nines, uptime, or anything like this, but just with the pure goal of get as many shots on goal and as many iterations as possible. And so that's how personally we're starting to use it a lot. I feel like, do you identify with the label like fintech? Is that a fair category? Or do you think of yourself as like a different category? He'll say he's finance tech. Finance tech. Yeah, I would say definitely we're a fintech company right now.

2:45:55Yeah, that's fair, right? Yeah, for sure. The question I ask is because 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, it's not a headache for you. Is it a headache? Most payments, like a company that does payments online typically is incentivized. It's set up in a way it's like business joins platform, moves money. If you want more businesses joining the platform, moving money.

2:46:31I think that you guys are, I'm sure people have tried stuff, but feel pretty insulated from that kind of like large. I mean, it's not a payroll company, so you can't just immediately do money laundering. But is there a fraud-fighting team, or how have you addressed that? Is it even a problem? Yeah, so it has been a small problem, but it's been a thing that, honestly, Stripe's tools are pretty darn good. We build on top of Stripe. They're quite good. And so it hasn't been the thing where we're throwing personnel at it or anything like that. But yeah, I mean, certainly the most possible boring explanation of TrueMed is we're a B2B SaaS company that does compliance for HSA and FSA.

2:47:11Given that, we're definitely a fintech company. New Year's resolutions. Do you think they're effective for living a healthier life? What do you think of New Year's resolutions? I personally, I find them great. I actually just had my first kid, though, so I'm sort of like resolutions out the window. Sure, sure, sure. Figuring out the parenting thing. Keep on keeping on. A hundred percent, yeah. Just live it. But we were talking a few days ago and you said it's amazing and super underrated, which is wildly different than another person that we were talking about earlier on the show that said, Am I missing something?

2:47:48Yeah, yeah, similar name, similar name. What about 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 going to be talking about this year? Well, let's get into, I think, the thing that's been going the most talked about. I mean, in my world, that's the most... Tied to that, but peptides. Oh, peptides. Sure. Okay. Let's start with peptides. I did 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 I did this at a time where I was like, there's really no large-scale studies on this.

2:48:37But anecdotally, I knew people that had done it. Sure. And they'd tried them for, you know, you do it as a cycle. Nobody even back then was saying, take this and never stop taking it, right? There were also some really big high-profile, like the Hugh Jackman Wolverine. Like, everyone saw that and were like, oh, whatever that he did. Is that peptides or just anabolic steroids? I think that was BPC-157. I don't know. Anyone know? I don't think so. I don't know. No, that's the Wolverine peptide. Oh, okay. I just mixed them up. I don't know. It's Wolverine. It's a Wolverine peptide because it helps like - Oh, recovery.

2:49:09Recovery. Okay, anyway. Maybe it was just gear. But my concern with peptides is like you basically, I just look at them as like slightly toned down, like anabolic steroids that are more targeted in terms of what they do. And so when you have like 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. So peptides, Faustian bargain or not? I think that these are going to be incredible tools. I think that the FDA is probably going to release much needed guidance around them this year.

2:49:45Like there's just too many Americans that are buying cheap for research purposes only peptides right now. You know, it's just gotten too big that the FDA has to do something. Like I personally know a bunch of people that swear by these things. The efficacy is there. And they're certainly endogenous, like your body makes them in many cases. I'm very bullish on them from an efficacy standpoint. I have tons of questions about quality. And I think for me, the thing that you just have to wonder on all these things is one thing that our current FDA does a very good job of with pharmaceuticals is figuring out, are there any sort of side effects?

2:50:19So does pancreatitis risk go up 12 % when you take this thing over a year period or whatever? And 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 some long period of time. So I would say that I'm bullish but cautious, whereas I think most of the people in peptides right now are sort of riffing it. Purely bullish. Yeah, exactly. It does feel like we're in a new era of just experimentation. and just like, I don't know, like a couple decades ago, like a TRT or something was something that was like buried in a bodybuilding forum and yet had to know a guy.

2:51:03And now it's like, here's the website that was perfectly coded and we'll just deliver it to your door. And it's like a completely different experience. That's beautiful photography. Yeah, it's way more like user experience focused and like just way less risk. I mean, we've seen this with all sorts of substances and just activities where we've productized them in the way America does best. It becomes a button. I mean, that's totally true. I also think, to be fair, the health stuff is the biggest problem in the country, in my mind. The average American is sick. The average American has bad sleep.

2:51:36They have bad energy. The demand for something that can promise you feel better, your joints feel better, you're sleeping, you're losing weight, is off the charts, has never been higher. And so I think, given that, like there's just infinite demand for products that can make someone feel better give them more energy lose weight sleep better whatever uh which is why i'm just i i think peptides are going to be one of the biggest trends of the next five years certainly they're going to come with side effects and downsides yeah but they're going to be here yeah yeah underrated story about american competition the whole story of 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 uh other trends nova have been in series i mean basically uh i mean they had that problem with like the the they didn't file the the ip rule or something what uh what's the what's the state of austin we've had oh yeah we sax is is opening an office people are getting out of california make the pitch for austin yeah give us like it would you recommend it on austin yeah look austin's great i i think that austin will do well to the extent that California decides to self-immolate.

2:52:46And it seems like right now, California is just pouring gas on the fire. We'll see. If the wealth tax thing actually goes through or even gets a medium amount of popular support, then yeah, there is going to be a huge exodus from Silicon Valley, from LA, to other places all over the country. Is it Austin or bust? Is it Austin or bust? Or are there tech people that are going to Dallas? or anywhere else. What about the, I could see some allocators ending up in Highland Park. I don't know. Highland Park's in Los Angeles. No, no. Highland Park is a neighborhood in Dallas. Oh, it is? Okay. I've only been to Dallas once.

2:53:24I don't think anyone's going to Dallas. No one's going to Dallas. So if a tech person's leaving San Francisco, they're going to Austin. I think it's basically Austin, maybe Boulder or Denver, maybe Miami, although I think the Miami thing was kind of not a real thing. I personally, I'm more of an Abilene guy. Abilene. straight to the data center. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I'm an Alaska guy. I say, get up there. It's nice and cold. There's bears. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're, you're locked in. But, uh, anyway, uh, any, any other, are there any other predictions for just health trends or foods or anything that's like, uh, rising and falling?

2:54:02Are we, have we finally reached peak slop bowl? Are we going in a different direction? No, I'm going to go get a protein cup from Chipotle later. Is that real? Are the restaurants really downsizing in reaction to GOP-1s, or is that just some random organic thing that's happening? You are seeing certain grocery chains, especially ones that sell a lot of junk food, are starting to downsize or see junk food sales go down, mainly because people are less hungry, and most of junk food is predicated on people eating them infinitely while snacking on there. And so I do think there's going to be a renewed focus on nutrient density, on protein, on things like this.

2:54:40I think you have to imagine, like a big trend that I'm bullish on is these GLP-1s are going to be everywhere. We have the oral version of Ozempic coming this year. There's going to be 50 million Americans on these things in the next five years. I think there is going to be a backlash where people start to see what are the downsides. They start to get caught up in micronutrient deficiencies and other sorts of things that just come from, even if you're eating a bad diet but you're eating less of it, you're still going to have health problems even if you may be less overweight or less obese than you were previously.

2:55:12And I think we'll start to underwrite that more over the next couple of years. Makes sense. Well, it'll be interesting to track. Well, this is your second time on the show? Yeah. Let's make it a monthly thing. Yeah, next time you're in LA. There's a lot to talk about. And we love you. this is fantastic love you guys thanks for the merch we'll talk to you soon talk soon goodbye let me tell you about 11 labs build intelligent real-time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs or in our case theme songs theme song our theme song is generated by 11 labs do you want to do some timeline how long do you want to go because we could close with this post this very optimistic post from Elon Musk replying to Mark Andreessen Mark Andreessen says it's time to grow.

2:55:59This is in response to 4.3 % year-over-year GDP growth in Q3. Kind of crazy. Didn't see that coming, says Caleb Hammer. And Elon says double digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months. If applied intelligence is in proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple digit is possible in five years. Let's pray for triple-digit GDP growth. It would truly be a golden era. A lot of bottlenecks to that, but let's hope it happens. I like the sound of that, John. That's a good place to end. I think that's a great place to end. We'll cover Lulu's post tomorrow. Lulu's actually coming on the show this week.

2:56:42Tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. So, Gabe, you got exactly what you're looking for. And also, we'll have to discuss the prediction about OpenAI buying Pinterest. That's an interesting one to kick around. It was very funny because it was just a prediction post for the information, but people were reporting on it like it's a rumor, like it's a fact or something. But there's a lot to dig into there. But anyway, thank you so much for watching. It is so good to be back with all of you. Thank you for tuning in. We seriously missed doing this. As a couple of Irishmen, we yearn for labor. We learned to be on the mics, tilling the RSS feed.

2:57:22And thank you. Thank you for being a part of this. We're so excited for this year. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be huge. And we hope you have a great Monday. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Bye.