Big Technology Podcast - Meta's AI Agent Plan, Grok's Perversion, Prison Of Financial Mediocrity

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. This week, we do our 2026 predictions in an abbreviated holiday-time episode. Here's what we cover: 1) Meta buys Manus 2) Is the Manus deal an enterprise play? 3) What Meta could do with consumer AI agents 4) Why consumer AI agents are a good advertising strategy for Meta 5) Instagram head Adam Mosseri addresses AI slop 6) Meta Ray-Bans don't work in the cold 7) NVIDIA pretty much buys Groq 8) Elon Musk's Grok goes full pervert 9) Who's responsible? 10) What explains the rise of sports betting and prediction markets -- is it a lack of a stable financial future that would otherwise be worth investing in? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Michael Lewis here. My best-selling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly.

The Big Short's story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the big short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Meta is buying AI startup Manist to do what exactly? Grock undresses people and apologizes who's responsible.

And why are so many young people turning to prediction markets and sports betting? Here's a theory. That's coming up on a big technology podcast Friday edition. right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format.

We have a great show for you today. As we kick off, 26, we're going to talk about why META is buying the AI agent startup Manus. We're going to talk about GROC. I wouldn't even say going rogue, but basically following the prompts of people on Twitter and bikiniifying, if that's a word, undressing people, and then apologizing afterwards.

and who's responsible for that. And then we'll also take a look at a great piece called The Prison of Financial Mediocrity and an explanation for why so many people are turning to sports gambling, sports betting, and prediction markets. And joining us, as always, to do it here as we kick off the year is Ron John Roy of margins. Ron John, great to see you.

Great to see you. Happy New Year. Where in the world are you, Alex? Tell our listeners. Happy New Year. I am in Peru. It's been a pretty wild couple of weeks in South. America, a couple more days here, and then back to New York. How about you? How's your Christmas

break, Ben? It's been great. I'm back in New York finally. I was in, I was at a very nice New England holiday vacation up in Boston, the New Hampshire skiing. So excited to get back to it, though. And we both had meta-ray bands fails, which we're going to talk about as we go through this meta segment here. And we'll get to that in the moment. But I think the biggest news over the past week has been that META bought the AI startup Manus for more than $2 billion. This according to the Wall Street Journal, Meta Platforms, agreed to buy Manus, a Singapore-based company with Chinese founders that conducts deep research and performs other tasks for paying users.

The deal is being closed at more than $2 billion. Manus gained a wide following after previewing in March an AI agent capable of producing detailed research reports and building custom websites, using AI models developed by companies such as Anthropic and China's Alibaba. The demo followed the release of Deepseek, made in China AI, that rocked Silicon Valley because of its advanced capabilities, coupled with claims by its developer that it was developed with far less computing power than American rivals. I think for those who follow AI closely, we all remember the Manus AI agent as sort of the highlight of this company with like the journal kind of winked at as it highlighted the China connection. at the beginning of this story. But I'm actually curious to hear your perspective, Ron John, on this one. What do you think the significance is of meta, a consumer company buying Manus, which seems enterprise focused and AI agent focused?

What's happening here? Do you have any theory of the case? Yeah. So this is very squarely in my world. And for long time listeners, I work at Ryder, which is an enterprise AI focus. company. And almost six months ago, we were debating because I was saying, what is an AI agent is being redefined? It's no longer these kind of blueprints with block stitched together. But in reality, it's just kind of like defining tools, connectors, giving a prompt, and letting the agent go do its thing. And I think this is the year, this was one of my predictions last week. This is a year that that vision of what agentic AI is is going to be realized the power of it. So I think Manus is just another.

they definitely had one of the more popular somewhere between consumer and enterprise, still more consumer-focused. You can get on there for like 30 bucks a month. But still, the idea that you can do things very quickly and define these workflows that actually start to work. And I think that's going to be the battleground. Open AI is getting involved with all their enterprise-focused hires recently. Like, I think this is going to be one of the biggest parts of 2026 and that's self-serving as well. But I think what's interesting is that last point you brought up is that why is meta buying them? And honestly, I was racking my head. And I don't understand how this gets integrated into the product. The product, it's like this isn't going to be helping consumers, you know, book their flight. Remember when that was what everyone said agentic would be? This is something different. It is going to be more work and enterprise focused. So, So that part still leaves me guessing, other than Alexander Wang and just went to Mark and said, this person's smart, you can buy them for $2.5 billion. And it's not just paying a researcher

a billion dollars. Okay. So I have some thoughts on this. So first of all, the Mannis team doesn't even seem like it's going to be reporting Alexander Wang. It's going to be reporting the META's chief operating officer, which is something that the story said in the beginning. in the release meta said we plan to scale the service to many more businesses my belief is that is a head fake I think meta is making a big consumer agent play they think the people at manis know how to do this they think that over the coming years like especially if you're right ronjan and then the AI agent stuff will start to work consumers are going to want to go to an app that's going to be able to handle that travel booking scenario for them pretty well

And I think meta is doing something really smart here, which is it realizes that's going to be a competitive edge. It's going to be a differentiator. The people that get the credit cards first are probably going to be the ones that, you know, start to embed that consumer behavior in their AI agent. And that's what they're going after. And notice how the statement's very interesting. We plan to scale the service to many more businesses. Maybe they'll do that. But ultimately, I think the interesting thing here is what they do, what they didn't say, which is that.

that, yes, they might scale it to some more businesses, but ultimately this is a way of them getting into this, you know, the space where Apple intelligence wanted to play, build the AI platform, build the thing that people want to use, that gets things done for them, and tell the world that, yeah, this is more enterprising as you come out the gate, really, though, developing the consumer application here. And if you own that platform, then you're going to win.

I love this. Okay, you know what? I'm starting to, I'm starting to feel that a bit more because to me, one of the most kind of like amazing parts of how quickly seeing a Gentic AI evolve in this way is like it just makes so many basic things I do regularly a lot easier. Like when you receive an email from this one recipient, go research this person, go research this company, send me a Slack notification. Like that's all stuff I have fully built into my life, but professionally. So there's so much opportunity around that on the consumer side. But, yeah, you're right. Who has the actual, like, economic incentive to actually push this within their product? Open AI keeps saying the word Greg Brockman again tweeted,

Enterprise Agentic AI adoption and scientific research are the two most important trends of the year. So, like, so everyone is just leaving consumer agentic to the wayside. And you're right, Apple Intelligence, I mean, we all know. So, okay, I like that. And Manus is very, very slick in terms of its UI. It's very user-friendly. So if something could be more consumer than Enterprise, I think it could definitely be them. I like it.

And you need that. You need that specialized knowledge to be able to go do that. I mean, Meta brought this whole super intelligence team aboard, and, like, their task is, like, build the best model. But ultimately, this is, again, going to product. this is how you productize these things. And I don't think it's any coincidence that this is happening as FG-Simo, the former head of Facebook app, is sitting inside OpenAI and thinking about how to build an ad platform. And not only that, when you start to research things in OpenAI, within ChatCHIP-T, there are new,

I don't know if you would call them maybe like cards that will help you do more browsing for things that you might make a purchase decision on. I know for myself personally, and I'm sure anyone that used these tools, like tools like Chatshapit to plan, you know, their winter breaks. I mean, for me, going through South America, Chad Chitee was super important. It was a pivotal tool. And the one thing that was missing was for me to just say, all right, that sounds like the right option. Go ahead and book it. And if Meta's models can get to the point where they're helpful in this way, and the agentic side of things can get to the point that they're useful in this way, then all of a sudden, meta's AI effort goes

from something that's kind of laughable, something that Jan Lecun, even today in the Financial Times, is saying, you know, they fudge the benchmarks in a way for Lama 4. They go from that to becoming a player. Now, there's a lot of ifs here, right? I said if a lot of times. But ultimately, it seems to me like if this is what they're doing, it's a sound strategy. Yeah, even more, I think, let's not even talk, but are you actually booking that flight to South America or that tour? Like, if you start to think about it, there's so many elements with shopping, with travel, with anything consumer focused, with health, with personal health, where you're asking these kind of recurring routine questions or have these ongoing conversations. And rather than having to go to chat

GPT and remember to type it in, you're already scrolling Instagram and Facebook, and now you just have one additional block that's like, oh, yeah, do you want to pick up where we left off? I actually just found this other article that would be useful for you or this other flight alert that do you want me to go book it? So, like, having you already locked into that interface does start to get pretty interesting. We're going to get into Adam Maserian, what he was talking about, like, AI within the feed. But if this is the direction, I'm starting to find this pretty interesting right now. All right.

I have one more thought about this. You mentioned the agent going proactive and suggesting, hey, remember, we were talking about this. What do you think about this? What does that sound like? Isn't that a great ad business waiting to be built? And meta can definitely build it on the foundation that it has. Exactly. And meta's already stuffed their feeds full of plenty of ads and everyone is totally okay with it.

And it is not slowed down. Even as ad load increases, everyone just uses the products more and more. So if anyone can do it, if it's already. native to what that platform they're using versus I would be horrified. The moment chatGBT BT says that in the context of a chat, even more so, it seems like that's a good place for, for meta to get involved. Did we just, I really hope this is a strategy because this is so sound that if it's not, I'm going to be disappointed.

And weirdly, you're right. Meta is at a better starting point to introduce the business model here. It's like it's detriments are its benefit in some way. Yep. I mean, everyone is completely used to advert. And their advertising is good. Let's not take that away. They have made very, very good, relevant advertising that's so good.

All holiday season, all my cousins and everyone. Now everyone just openly jokes like, oh, I'm getting tracked. Ha, ha. Oh, we were just talking about that. Now I'm getting tons of ads. We clicked on it once. But everyone's good with it. So I think go consumer, become the entire consumer agentic lair, disrupt every travel and shopping and personal, any kind of consumer website, it's an opportunity.

That is probably what's going to happen. Now, the question is, what happens to Mehta's feeds as we see more and more AI? And you remember not long ago, it seemed like they were encouraging Shrimp Jesus and other forms of AI slop in their feed and the type of conversations that they encourage. Now, the head of Instagram Adam O'Sary is coming out and talking a little bit about what will make content stand out in the age of AI. This is for Business Insider. Instagram's head says the aesthetic that helped the app become popular is dead and AI helped kill it. Instagram's top executive thinks AI has made the social media sites carefully curated grid a thing of the past. Unless you're 25 under 25 and use Instagram, you probably

think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetic is polished, lots of makeup, skin-smoving, high-contrast photography, beautiful landscapes, Mouseri wrote, that feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to the feed years ago. He said that users kept their friends updated on their personal lives through unpolished, shoe shots, and unflattering candids shared via direct message. Moseeri says the growing ubiquity of AI images meant creators would have to embrace this trend and shy, yeah, embrace the trend of rawness and shy away from curated grids and professional style photography in favor of a more raw aesthetic, flattering imagery is cheap to produce and

boring to consume people on content that feels real. The social media feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything. So what's your reaction this, Ranjan? It doesn't seem like it's exactly a brand new thing and I don't think it really is AI related. This one hit hard. And let me explain why. So I worked in direct-to-consumer fashion and apparel for a number of years that adore me. And in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg starts openly saying on earnings calls that reels are the future, more lo-fi content. Basically, TikTok is a threat and that they're starting to advertise the increase in percentage of reels on your feed. Now, we all know what happened.

I vividly remember getting it into an argument with our creative director, and as you can imagine, a traditional fashion creative director being told that highly produced beautiful imagery is not the future, and it's going to be lo-fi short-form video content. We all know how it played out, but this one just, I was already sending this to former coworkers because I was like, I mean, we pushed hard, but it was like that idea that Instagram was one thing. and then it became something completely different, yet everyone uses it more and more. Again, Mark Zuckerberg was right. Like I have to say, there's been a few of these really big strategic moves. I don't know if old timers will remember the shift from like HTML5 to native mobile apps was like a big bet they made. I honestly think quietly taking this incredibly profitable engaging engine of photos. that are beautiful and square and turning it into a TikTok clone and just doing it and doing it successfully. I think like this is kind of the final. It happened.

Now, no one can argue that this is, this is what Instagram is today. That's right. And the AI thing is interesting because on one hand, when I read what Moseri said, I was like, oh, yeah, maybe he's exaggerating a bit

because there is AI slop out there. And, like, maybe my nice, pictures from my vacation will look better than the shrimp Jesus, but then you're right. There is a lot of truth to it, which is that AI is so good at taking the average of averages and it takes the average of like, you know, when you think about, you know, say, you say create me a beautiful picture, it takes all these beautiful pictures that have been posted on the internet and gives you the average of that. So if you put what you think is like a beautiful picture on your feed, it's just going to look like something that people have seen over and over again, maybe even

before I eye, but even more so afterwards. Now, I'm really rethinking my vacation. I was really cooking up a nice post, post vacation, and I don't know what I'm going. I've got to put a picture of my feet, or, well, not feet. That would be, that would be weird. Did you buy a lot of socks recently? Did you buy a lot of matching thoughts recently? Black Friday, 24.

That was one of my great moments. I'm still using those socks. I mean, I would hope so. I bought 24 of them. But- Feet picks, Alex, feetpicks. No. And we're all in the prison of financial mediocrity, which we'll be talking about. It's the only way to go.

I'm starting to regret taking the conversation in this direction. Well, no, okay, okay. Let me try to bring it back. AI slop. Please do. What I think is interesting about this is, like, and you actually made the point right there. When we, everyone says AI slop, you think shrimp Jesus, you think six fingers. baby you think like crappy content but in reality AI slop has become to me that average of

beautiful that it's like what everything expects it to be engaging beautiful highly produced and he actually made the point too that uh you said flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume he said that like it's the and and this isn't just generally like AI you know like mid-journey image diffusion models. This is Apple making every photo run through 10 layers of processing and like color correction. So even that kind of AI also has contributed to this. But so to me, it's really interesting

because it's like AI slop is actually beautiful, boring, generic imagery that everyone has taken versus what is, what's engaging is, something that's just real, raw, unfiltered, not going to talk about feedpicks, but something along those lines. Well, there was a thing, there was a line in the, in the story where you talked about, uh, untied shoes or something like that. That's shoe shots and unflattering candids.

That's what I was going for. I apologize about bringing up feet, but, but, but, but, okay, so then you get into the question of like, is AI generated content good for these feeds? Because one thing I'll admit, actually, I have a great Facebook story. I, and you know, you love my Facebook stories sometimes because I don't go on it often. And actually, and as we get into our Meta-Raband stories, from the holidays, I was home in Lexington, Mass, where I'm from, over Thanksgiving, my drone got caught in the top of a tree at the elementary school park area where I grew up. So I kind of considered it gone. Over Christmas break, someone from my high school I had not talked to in 20 years sent me a message that someone had posted in a Lexington Mass residence group, hey, found your drone, does anyone recognize this person? And it's a photo of me. They'd taken the SD card out and pulled the photos. So someone randomly posting to this town Facebook group, someone from my high school I haven't talked to in 20 years, sending me that message, and I got my drone back. So I even

My wife was like, you have to say something nice for Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook for this one. That is a beautiful story. It is, right? I was like, this is one of those. Remember the promise of social media what it was supposed to be? I thought that was pretty amazing. But it made me go on Facebook a number of times, which I don't normally do while I was waiting for confirmation, organizing around this drone. And it reminded me what's actually on my Facebook feed as a non-heavy user.

And my God, that shrimp Jesus version of AI slop is, it's there, it's alive. It's just raging in there right now. Yeah. Well, you know, you've definitely answered a question for me, which is what happens when you lose your drone in a tree. I thought maybe you call the fire department like you would for a stranded cat. But I'm glad you didn't do that. I'm glad you used social media. I would recover the thing.

I was actually wondering about it, but, like, as per Reddit, fire departments are not very friendly about that. And if you're devoting resources and the cost to, like, there's actually lots of debates, the cost to the taxpayer versus the cost of a drone. So I was like, I'm not going to not going to do that and just hope for the best. And it worked. Well, I mean, in the defense of people that do call the fire department, I mean, they do have a truck with a ladder on the back. So, you know, it's like sort of, well, what do you expect? But anyway, let's talk briefly before we go to break about our meta-ray ban stories. So I'll tell you one.

So you and I are both big fans of the meta-ray-band stories. It turns out that they're not very good in the cold. I had brought my pair with me to Ecuador, where I was for a good chunk of the end of December, trying to climb up Koto Paxi, which is a fairly big volcano, 19,350 feet. and we were a couple hundred feet underneath the summit and I was like, all right, time to break these things out. I'm going to film this all first person on the way up and I break them out the case, put them on, turn them on. They were fully charged when we were on our way up and the battery was totally empty. I know you had a similar experience here too with your right ones.

And I will say I was only at 2,743 feet in altitude at the same. summit of Mount Sonopi in New Hampshire. But I was very excited. I was going to take my son. It was the first time at the top of the mountain, had my ray bands fully charged, even check the battery before getting on the lift, get up top, start taking video, get about five seconds of video, and the battery died too. So I was like pretty unhappy. I had prepared for that with the rayban. So if anyone's listening and knows about cold weather effect on I mean, I guess it should be pretty, I don't know, it's standard. But if there's any way to prevent this and still get these shots, let us know.

Some praise for meta, some criticism for meta. But all together, you know, hey, look, they're in the arena, right? They're doing things. They're building AI. They have social feeds. They have the smart device that we both tend to like. Okay, small flaw. You know what?

But that is the meta-pick. Think about this. This is the first time in a long time we have devoted the first half, at least, of the show to meta and AI. So I think if nothing else, they're back in the arena, as you said, 2026, maybe there's going to be something big. I think so. I think there's a chance for them. Absolutely. All right. So, I mean, there better be something big, given the amount of money that they're spending. But we'll talk about it through the year. All right, on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about NVIDIA's deal to license GROC, not the Elon Musk's GROC, the chip GROC, license its AI technology, bring over their CEO. We'll also discuss, we're going to have a double GROC, I guess, second segment. We'll discuss Elon Musk's GROC going bad. And then finally, the president. and a financial mediocrity, which Ron John and I are both excited to speak about. We'll do that right after this. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. All right, briefly, Ron John, interesting story here. NVIDIA license, this is from the Wall Street Journal.

InVIDIA license is GROC's AI technology as demand for cutting-edge chips grows. Invidia has forged licensing deal with the chip startup GROC for its AI inference technology, a sign of growing demand for cutting-edge AI chip. Under the deal, GROC's CEO and founder Jonathan Ross will be joining in video, along with its president and some of the startup staff. Actually, it's 90% of the startup staff. I guess this is still not an acquisition. Grok's language processing unit chips are built for inference, the everyday process that occurs when consumers or businesses ask trained AI models to provide answers, make predictions, or draw conclusions on new data.

Ron John, what do you think the significance is of this? If we don't, it's an aquihersition, right? That's what it is. Do you think this is in video recognizing that GROC, basically, because it does provide inference services for AI models, could over time be a very big threat and they'd much rather have it on the inside than otherwise? Yeah, I think, and I'm glad you said aqua high orosition because I was trying to remember what that phrase was. But I think to start when I was reading about this deal, like now the first thing I ever do in any of these in news items is try to figure out, is it actually an acquisition? And this one was one of those funky ones, whereas Manus was a straightforward old school acquisition. They actually acquired the company.

Here we have lots of quirks around to who is joining how, what is licensed, what is not, what's intellectual property. what's not. I think, as you said, this is a, as it's talent in technology. It's like the entire chip. It's the language processing unit. It's if in video, they just have to stay ahead of whatever competition, Google and their TPUs are coming. Like, so I think it makes sense from that standpoint. Is it like, do you think it was just to avoid antitrust that they structured in this way or? Absolutely. There's no other explanation. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's so funny how everyone just says that, like everyone, even people who are very strongly, like, for antitrust enforcement, even people who hate Lena Khan, everyone just casually is like, oh, yeah, everyone's just doing that to end around antitrust. But, yeah, I think it makes sense to me from like a strategic standpoint in terms of the actual chip technology and having some kind of differentiated.

innovation versus like what you're typically working on so i mean just listen to the details of the deal so grok was valued last at 6.9 billion in a 750 million dollar september round uh this was a 20 billion dollar aqua high position this is from axios most grok shareholders will receive per share distributions tied to the 20 billion dollar valuation 85% will be paid up front 10% paid mid year and the remainder at the end of 2026. Around 90% of GROC employees are said to be joining NVIDIA and they will be paid cash for all their vested shares. Their unvested chairs will be paid out at the $20 billion valuation. That's an acquisition and everything. It's effectively everything but in, and they calling it to call it a non-exclusive licensing agreement is it's an,

I feel like it's an insult to the intelligence of the people reading and talking about this deal. who came up with that one. And I mean, and again, I'm saying that in jest because I think it's actually, like, in reality, what also happened is here's a promising alternative technology infrastructure to Nvidia's core business and they've taken it out. Like, does that mean they're going to now use this and compete against Google or maybe? Or they just took out a promising technology for $20 billion and it's actually well worth it for them because they're. I mean, market cap alone increase on the news of the acquisition was more than that. Even though I never liked that as a barometer, still, it's not a bad deal for them in any way. I think it should be blocked.

I think GROC is a promising company as an independent company. I just spoke with the company CFO at Web Summit. I mean, people can watch that interview on YouTube. You know, I did that a couple months ago. Also, funny story from the big technology. standpoint, we were supposed to have Jonathan Ross on the show in late December and the night before the recording he canceled. And I was like, I've never seen that happen before. Why is that? And now I understand. Now you know. Now you know. But listeners do not despair. We have a great

January coming up. We have the founders of Corrieve who are going to be on on Wednesday. We have the CEO of Mistral coming up the week after that, most likely. And then a string of promises to be really fun conversations from Davos coming up. All right. Let's talk about GROC, the other GROC. Let's go GROC to GROC here. It is from Bloomberg. This is a pretty disturbing story. GROC post sexual images of minors after lapses in safeguards. Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot said lapses in safeguards led to the generation of sexualized images of minors that had posted to social media site X. GROC created images of minors in minimal clothing in response to user prompts over the past few days, violating its own acceptable use policy, which prohibits the sexualization of children. The offending images

were taking down. The chat bot said we've identified lapses and safeguards and are urgently fixing them. Greg posted on Friday, adding that child's sexual abuse material is illegal and prohibited. This is something that I just sort of, I had seen the discussion of come across my X-Feed over the past couple of days where people were just like basically at messaging grok and asking it to, you know, remove users' clothing. And it's part of a growing trend of a problem. The Internet Watch Foundation is according again to Bloomberg story. A nonprofit that identifies child sexual abuse material online reported a 400% increase in AI generated imagery in the first six months of 2025. Ranjan, I wanted to bring this story of

up, A, because I think it's important to cover, but also I think you in the past have talked about how worrying it is when these bots that are very powerful do have the vulnerabilities that allow them to be manipulated and sort of what that means for the safety of AI overall. So what's your thought here? It's a tough one because to me, this does not appear to be a vulnerability of the system. And in reality, given the creator of Grock and the overall kind of like vibe of X, you know, as this kind of weird frat house-ish, Andrew Tate Light, whatever, it's becoming more and more every day. Like, to me, this isn't some kind of like, you know, like red-teaming vulnerability. This is probably at the very core of how Grock thinks of images and people probably were doing this who were building it.

as they were actually, like, training this out. It just feels like this is just very in line with everything else. Grock was supposed to be the non-PC-woke AI that just, you know, like tells it like it is and is funny and sarcastic and witty and all that. So to me, it actually feels like this is more feature than bug. And it's also just like it's kind of horrifying more. I'm going to say as a testament at least to who I follow, it wasn't. coming across my feed any images, which was good.

But then I saw a conversation around it. And then, of course, went to the GROC media tab where it shows all the media that GROC's generating on the actual, like, core GROC account. And then constantly started getting it, getting bikinified pictures. Most of them appeared to be like only fans' models. And it was just total, like, engagement bait, which, whatever, that's, I guess, okay. I mean, I think that's fine. But then, actually, the first image that came across my feed was Zoron Mamdani's wife getting bikini-fied at the inauguration, which, again, like, that is not great.

That's pretty, like, gross and just, you know, not good. But then imagine you're like any female out there posting anything just trying to be engaged in the conversation in some way. and then you're just getting bikini-fied left and right. So, like, and that's- I think it's terrible. Generous. Yeah. Yeah, that's like-

Any version of using AI to undress people against their will to me is all. But I wonder who's responsible here. I mean, obviously there's responsibility from the user. But also, if you're releasing something at scale that does this, it's also your responsibility. Well, of course. I mean, there's a reason this isn't happening on other platforms. And again, it kind of. goes back, do you have this, like, this is Grock the anti-woke PC one?

It's like, what was the, what happened? I think it was Bard at the time, or was it Gemini that was doing like revolutionary war soldiers? Or there was like going in the woke direction. Do you know, remember what's time? That was Google, Google AI. It was either Gemini or Bard. Yeah, it was like creating like Black Nazis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, like, that stuff is awkward, but then, again, to me, the biggest question is, like, is this something that people, those creating Grock were, like, playing around with themselves, thought it was funny? Like, I mean, was the model specifically trained in some way to actually do this better than other models? There's a good chance it was. So, yeah, I think, like, the platform, I mean, this is going to get ugly. This is going, in terms of all the things that can go wrong with AI this year, we already saw it. This is where it's going to start. And, you know, the industry has to kind of come together and come up with some kind of just, I'm going to say the word best practices around this, but just agreed, this is how we want to approach this. Because otherwise, it's just going to keep happening.

From a legal standpoint, do you think that if somebody, let's say, undresses someone else, like with a prompt me people the sick thing is people are doing this with prompts in public you know did they have any liability here is it the AI engine that made the image is it the platform that distributed it see this is where my bet on where this is going to go now all of every large AI institution has said that the end content that's being created is original And that's why it's not copyrighted. It's fair use. It's remixed.

It's at which point it is your, the platform has created the content and is as liable as the user. Now remember, always in the past, the section 230, the way out for any of these platforms was we're just a platform that's neutral. The user is creating the content. Whereas now they, from a copyright perspective, have to say, that the platform or the engine is creating the content as much as a user. So I think this comes to a head in a big way very soon, I mean, if not from this incident itself. Without a doubt, I definitely expect to see lawsuits here. And frankly, they're warranted.

All right, let's talk about this last story here, this from a substacker slash Twitter user called Systemic Longshort, it's called the Prison of Financial Mediocrity. I'll just read a bit of it because it's really fascinating. and it definitely was something else that percolated on my ex-feet over the past couple days. The person writes, I'm absolutely betting the house that long degeneracy is the prevalent socioeconomic theme of the coming century. It is why people above the age of 40 will recommend you get a better at your job and increase your salary. Well, everybody else seems to be ignoring exactly that and desperately clawing at something,

anything that can give them a shot at outrageous success. The implicit deal used to be show up, work hard, Stay loyal and you'll be rewarded. Companies offered pensions, tenure meant something, your house appreciated while you slept. The system worked if you trusted in it. That deal is dead. Staying at one company for 20 years is now a career liability, not an asset. Wages grew 8% while housing costs doubled, and debt payments for the young increased 33%.

The math does not support patients anymore. With the advent of AI, the economic impact they are going to have, and the economic impact it's going to have, I think it's only going to get worse. Why grind 20 years towards a promotion that might not exist in 10? And because of this, because of the fact that you're not being rewarded by being patient, by trusting in the system, this person says that basically we're seeing the rise of things like prediction markets, sports betting.

I'd probably add day trading. you know, the meme stocks, here are some numbers on prediction markets. Polymarket and Kalshi did 10 billion plus in volume in November 2025, combined annual volume approaching $40 billion in 2020. This was essentially zero. Sports betting. Legal sports betting revenue went from $248 million in 2017 to $13.7 billion in 2024. Gen Z and millennials account for 76% of betting activity. So basically what this person is saying is the be patient, get better at your job, get a better salary, invest, play the long game is gone.

And therefore people are just turning to these get rich quick schemes and, well, you know, they call it like, you know, degen's degeneracy in terms of like, well, you better take your shots now to try to 100x because waiting 30 years to 10x isn't maybe not the best move or just 10 years to 10x. I don't know. What do you think about this, Ron, John? Any truth to it? I will say there's, like, those pieces that you wish you had written.

This was one of them. And again, I don't know, it was like a post on X. Is it a post? Is it a tweet? Is it a newsletter? But whatever it was, I loved it. I actually like, and again, it's all pretty dark and depressing. But, again, the idea, like he keeps saying long degenerate.

and which we've seen is a pretty good trade in recent times. And I think the discussion around the effect of social media is in there. And going back to the earlier conversation around the feed, maybe in a way the unfiltered shoe picks will help solve this because in reality what's happening is the piece says, my take is that social media and our higher order needs have conditioned people that are positioned well below the financial upper class to feel like they are already at a loss. And if you think about it, the very core of social media as it exists today is that there's someone or lots of people out there

with more stuff that's better than you, that are taking better vacations than you, that are doing everything else better than you. So that kind of like itch cannot be satiated. That's the whole model of it. But then here is all these other avenues and alternatives to try to achieve that vision, whether it's prediction markets, sports betting, crypto, whatever else. It's origin, I mean, trading options, all these things have become much more accessible. We call it kind of democratized financial markets, but in reality they're just, to me, ways for these systems to get rich at the expense of people wanting to try to, like, catch up. And this was a particularly haunting passage for me. The same people who can't imagine grinding

at one company will absolutely grind for months learning crypto trading. They pour hours into understanding prediction markets to understand the very economy they believe wholeheartedly to be rigged. The same person who dismisses traditional investing as an inside game will bet their rent money on meme coin why because the casino is the only place they feel agency the only place where their decisions might actually unlock the next tier on a timeline that matters i'm glad you read that that passage because to me that was actually like the biggest issue here is i loved that idea around uh the casino is the only place one feels agency because in reality it's where you have the least agency, I would say, relative to many of these other, oh, the stock market is rigged.

It's an insider's game versus, I mean, come on, like crypto, polymarket, all of these. But the entire messaging of the polymarkets and coinbases and draft kings of the world is one of agency. Like, that's the every marketing campaign at the very core of crypto, the message is, this is your way out. And, like, I also think the whole housing crisis slash, I mean, factors into your, there's no large assets anyone owns anymore, like, you know, other than real estate. So your flat screen TV, your whatever other big stuff is in your house, maybe a car, I guess, but other, that's a depreciating asset anyways. Like, people don't own stuff. They see everyone else has a better life than them. And then here's all these other ways to try to get ahead and actually, it's.

try to realize that it, there's, there's no doubt why this is actually happening the way it is. Right. And the problem is that, you know, with these alternative areas like the casino, like sports betting, like the prediction market, you're probably going to lose. You will. And I mean, you will. So then. Yeah. So then what is the, what is the solution here? Because, you know, is the answer that actually the traditional path works a lot better than people expect and they should just do that? Or is. is the answer that there are no answers? Because the answer isn't the degeneracy. See, I wrote about Robin Hood in this a long time ago. Like, to me, and this is, we spoke about this with prediction markets. I actually got some, like, comments around what I was saying, that I'm still pro-prediction

market, but to clarify that I'm anti-the-way Kalshi and Polly Market are approaching it, is if it's, here is this kind of like asset class that you can engage in that is interesting and like don't bet too much on it and maybe you might make some money or you might not, but that's not the point of it. It's just an interesting place to do, like engage. I think they're amazing for that, but like that's never been the messaging. And then you see it in the way that what products are promoted. With Robin Hood, it's not index investing, it's options because it's short-dated options. It's where the platform will make the most money are the products that are pushed. It's a, I think, did you see what did Polymarket call a parlay? They had like a combine, they made this, I got to, it was basically a parley gambler's nose where you have like two outcomes tied to each other to get increasingly like dramatic odds. Basically now they're doing this, these within prediction markets as well. So like that's where you make more money because more people lose. So I think, uh,

that's the it has to get regulated is the only way the way casinos always were sports betting was for a long time i don't think it will but i don't there's no other real uh solution here yeah i mean well wait i mean we've definitely ended on it on a depressing note here i think i will just uh walk away uh take some pictures of poorly framed photos and throw them up on instagram and see if the likes pour in That's just the way I'll feel better about myself this week. Unfiltered shoe picks will save the next generation because then people won't feel the need to have to try to get that next vacation and go on to Polymarket and lever up long some random contract because they're just going to see our ugly sneakers. And let's keep it at sneakers, covered feet. And then from there, we save the male loneliness epidemic.

is the only way to preserve our societal values and our belief in our collective good post ugly shoe picks get out there people do your part after a 20 hour hike of kotopaxi here's how ugly these shoes don't put don't post the picture of the sunrise that is unparalleled and majestic post the beat up shoes afterwards nasty shoes nasty shoes and that alone will take us into the future that alone will help us create a great 2026 together. Let's do it. New Year's resolution. I am inspired. I am inspired. May the feed flow with ugly images and our culture and country be saved again. All right, Ron Chan, great to be back doing this in 2026.

Thanks again for coming on. See you next week. See you next week. All right, everybody, thank you for listening. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.