TBPN Live - Dan Wang's Annual Letter, Meta Acquires Manus, Nvidia's $20B Groq Deal | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in under 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

It is so good to be back. It's amazing. A ton of stories to get through because so many things have built up. The Grok deal, the Manus deal, Dan Wong's annual letter. There's so many different things that we're going to take you through today. We should kick it off with Dan Wong's annual letter, his 2025 letter. Dan came on his show during his book tour for his, you know, excellent book that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition. He doesn't like the phrase AI race.

Yeah. He likes, he doesn't think it's something. that you can win. A race has a definite ending. There's a finish line. Whoever crosses at first wins. And he says he prefers to say that the U.S. and China need to win the AI future. And this echoes what Gurley has said too. True. Obviously at the time he was coming out in defense of Manus and benchmarks investment in Manus. Totally. He's like, I don't know what the AI race is. I mean, he looks great now that Manus is an American company. It's a meta property. It's a meta property. So, you know, and I mean, the Manus team, of course, it was from China, but quickly moved to Singapore and now Manlo Park presumably.

No, I think they're going to stay there. But still, I mean, you have to imagine that a lot of talent migrates and it's like a fully American controlled asset, essentially, now that it's controlled by America and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Let's take it over to Tyler. Let's check him with Tyler. Oh, yeah. What are we checking in with Tyler? The chat misses Tyler. Oh, they just missed Tyler. How are you doing? Also, we signed for 2027. a massive contract extension with Tyler. He hasn't, he's not technically a college dropout yet, but he may as well be. It's a gap year. It's a gap year. It's a gap decade. It's a gap century. Tyler, Tyler's parents, if you guys are watching, I'm just joking around. It's the age of gap years. We're in the age of gap years. We're in the age of research and we're also in the age of gap years. And so we thank Tyler for sticking around, hanging out with us. We're going to have a lot of fun this year.

So the Dan Wong piece, we should read through some of it, he is reflecting on the AI future, what it takes to win the AI future. We've seen this amazing, just, you know, this remarkable march of research, the models are getting better, all the benchmarks are getting, you know, completely dominated. Then we're seeing the massive hyperscalor buildouts. We were reflecting on like, what does reindustrialization mean? What does American dynamism mean? What does this idea of like America needs to build big things? We need to be able to build big things, new bridges, we need to build high-speed rail. And we've failed at a lot of that, obviously, but we've succeeded at building multi-billion-dollar data centers. No, I mean, yes, yes.

I mean, truly, truly media has been a cultural export of America for a very long time. Yeah. So we have successful- We're very good at making data centers. haven't been so good on the energy set. My big question was like, we've been talking a big game about energy being a bottleneck for AI for a long time. It wasn't truly the bottleneck with bottleneck was chips and then data centers and then just moving the energy around. But it feels like the last year we were just kind of shuffling energy assets around the board.

And that's why we saw energy prices go up where if just supply and demand, if we've been building a ton of energy infrastructure, well, supply would have gone up and actual prices would have fallen or at least stayed flat because all the net new. all the net new data centers would just be using the new energy infrastructure. But that's not exactly what happened. So from 2008 to 2021, America's annual growth in energy production was 0.1% annually. Really, really bad. Not good. But it is getting better.

The EIA's December 2025 short-term energy outlook projects generation growth of 2.4% in 2025, and 1.7% in 2020. 26. That's like, you know, what, 20 times higher? That's great. But also that doesn't feel like, oh, fast takeoff. We're going to be doing 10% jumps. We're going to be really, really ramping up here. So it feels like there's something that still needs to change. And then simultaneously, you have this, you know, massive political backlash to rising energy prices. And, and I think most importantly, like we've identified some of the characters that drive AI. You know, we know Dario. We know Demis. We know San. We also have identified a lot of the people who are, you know, running the neo clouds or doing, you know, build out of new data centers. We don't really know the characters. Who's the Elon Musk of Energy is something I keep coming back to? There's no one who's really become like the main energy guy or gal, right? Yeah, I would say like Chase at Crusoe is potentially a contender.

Totally. Unclear yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO. Other other crazy stats. So while we're growing at like 2.4%. 1.7%. China is consistently putting up 6% growth. China now accounts for one-third of global electricity consumption and contributed 54% of global demand growth in 2024. So more than half of the growth in demand came from China. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the West, semiconductors and aviation. So there is one that I think he missed. And maybe you put it in aviation,

but I think I think space travel. Like they're way behind on rocket. Yeah, you said that the Boeing Airbus, they don't have that equivalent. And maybe you put SpaceX and Blue Origin in the same category as Boeing and Airbus. I particularly don't. I think of them as separate technologies, and I think of this as potentially like the third category that China's way behind in. Obviously, we were tracking the performance benchmarks of the models. Then we were tracking the diffusion. What's the actual revenue?

Is it sticky? Like there was a lot of risk of like, oh, this this company? comes up with some AI app, they, you know, ramp to a hundred million. Will it stick around or will they just get, you know, swept by the wayside and people will go back to doing it the old way, or they'll use something else, or they'll pay way less? I don't think that that is a public perception. I would say, like, the most popular topic. Well, beat the bubble will pop in 2025 allegations. Like, like at the start of the year, people were predicting that like open AI would not be would not do an upround for example and like

that just didn't happen it was like all up rounds for basically all the major players like if you were long AI broadly in 2025 you did very well in the other section of the dan wong piece he talks about competition and i thought this was just an interesting element to read he talks about sputnik moments one might have expected the u.s to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war but there have been too many declarations of Sputnik moments without commensurate action. I hadn't thought about that, but at one point, we were meming like a Sputnik moments for Sputnik moments.

Remember? Yeah, that was super. That must have been like a year ago. Yeah, it was like a year ago or something. But you know when it becomes like a meme that we're like, everything is a Sputnik moment. Like it really is overused. Yeah, so Barack Obama declared a Sputnik

with China's high speed rail. Mark Warner repeated with Huawei's 5G, Mark Andresen called it with Deep Seek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously. It's a good point, right? Because I think the U.S. continues to systematically underrates China's industrial progress for several reasons. First, too many Western elites retain hope that China's efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, or maybe even a political collapse.

I won't rule these out, but I don't think they are likely to break China's hum. tech engine. Yeah, it was interesting because you could say this was a 2025 letter, but this felt like the best possible summary of the geopolitical economic dynamic between China and the U.S. Anyways, go read it, but he called Europe cooked and chopped. 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. So this all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, former Lee Scale AI.

He says, excited to announce that Manus AI has joined Meta to help us build. Jack Randall in the X chat. Did anyone check on Deli? Oh, yeah. That's funny because Jack worked with Deli. Yeah, I mean, it really, it really is. Hey, Deleon might be taken a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing, Deleon totally vindicated, right? Also that and Patrick Hollison was bull bus. Oh, yeah. So did Deleon capitulate?

Did they capitulate too early? No, no. He gets to play musical chairs. He's like, what? I never said anything about Mannis. I don't know about that. It's fine. It's fine investment.

It makes sense. 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. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form after the AI reconstructs creatures that are, quote, to humans, what corgis are to wolves. It's hard to know what to make of this document. He's talking about AI 2027.

He says, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnote, notes repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction. 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 so good. It is fun. That is really funny. That is really funny. This is the key problem for the tech industry 26 is like how do you need to paint a more up like the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision yes for AI yes because it's not working right now yeah because people see their energy bill going up or

they even hear about the idea of their energy bill going up and then they see some of the slop the slop is getting better right you look at some of the videos coming out of this sloppia debacle right people in all types of roles are worried about job loss and you know they see you know they see the investment going into AI and they're just scared right and so when you you do quotes like this whether they're serious or not saying I think that AI will probably lead to the end of the world people are starting to ask like wait why are we automating all of this in the first place can we just stop right like I don't actually I don't want my job automated yeah I'll keep doing the industry needs

to figure out how to paint a more optimistic you know because 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 for themselves, right? And so in the 20th century, it was like, you know, it was easy mode being a politician or a CEO 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, you could go and say like, hey, you currently spend a billion dollars a year on payroll, I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%.

Yeah, there's going to, you're going to be able to conduct lots of layoffs and then he could go on TV and say like AI is going to create an abundant you know future and that in the in the the clips wouldn't kind of know cross policy no right or politicians could go talk to yeah a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here yeah you just I mean we see this on our show 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 quoting like out of context and being like oh I hate this I hate what they're

saying and we're like well we weren't trying to get them to say something controversial, but they... Before you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TBPN of 2025, just to get context. Before you criticize us. Just to get some context. I don't know if the AGI-I-pilled people

are so AGI-I-pilled that they think we're going to defeat the speed of light. Every physicist I've ever talked to has always said, like, no, that one holds forever. That's not like, oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple decades away, or fusion or fusion. All these other things are like somewhat engineering problems. I think the speed of light is, like, going to be around forever.

I don't know. Just need a faster horse. It's the year of the fire horse, by the way. Yeah. What does that mean? Wait, I thought they- 2026, Chinese year of the fire horse. 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 a fire horse. It's amazing. So Ramp Labs modeled it out. 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 hunt to 100 million ARR in history, just eight months. Wow. And benchmark likely 8 to 12x in under a year. People were kind of putting the deal between 2 and 3 billion. 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. 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. He, they're the biggest investor in scale, right? But they didn't acquire the product. Yeah, yeah.

Zuck has been saying, you know, beating the personal super intelligence drum. It's been very unclear what that means. Manus has been building high quality agents. They're sort of time and time again, I talk to people that are just very excited about Manus. They're like, just use Manus. Like, it's the year of the agent, right? Like, use it, you'll see the future. Sure.

And so just given Zuck's history from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what they're, like, 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 like shopping right you see something on Instagram that you like and you can you could trigger an agent effectively like go find this product yep like you see a car that you like go find this product and the elusive gt3rr s that gt3 yeah yeah basically like you see you see a yes make any image or video shoppable

and in fact I would I would probably argue that uh LLMs in the chat form where you have a bunch of information with a, you know, knowledge cut off baked into a, into some big model, a llama four, and it's vended through, you know, the Instagram search box that you chat with. That just, it can never fully satisfy the vision of personal superintelligence, a personal assistance, 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. So this does feel, this does feel like, I don't know, I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way. 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. 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. Like, Apple has a spreadsheet app, right? They have a word processor.

Like, meta doesn't really have those. They did meta for meta at work for a while, but 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 maybe they want to. 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, close to the action that apparently like the meta AI trough, the, the. The, uh, vibes. Yeah, meta vibes. Actually, the usage is actually insane. Really? Yeah.

No way. So. So. But I mean, it's, it's terrible in the app store, right? It cannot be ranked. Even, even Sora is not ranking well. One thing with Manus, uh, this is maybe the first acquisition of, uh, in the billion, uh, in the billions for a company with an Isle of Man domain.

They're mannus dot I am. I am. You don't, you don't, You don't see a lot of multi-billion dollar dot I am acquisitions. Tyler, is that where you're from? I love Chad. You did you get into looks maxing over the break? I've been bone smashed.

It 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, Tyler, go like this, do the. The double jaw ser.

Oh, yeah, they definitely have the filter. Can someone explain why Mehta bought Manus? What's the one pager for Zuck? Other than we have an F ton of money, so why not? 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 any AI model, wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder connectors.

So yeah, they're just good at products. 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 A.I. 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. Do you see the Jan Lacoon 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. He was very salty over Alex Wang coming in and becoming his boss, effectively. You got leveled. Well, yeah, it is an odd. I mean, it's a bold choice to put Jan Lacoud 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 medist list, Tyler? Tyler, do you have Jan on the list? Yeah, yeah, 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. So there were two major blockbuster deals before the end of the year. unclear, I mean, we're 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 GROC-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. 20 billion dollar deal, what should we do with that, John? Should we hit that app love and gong? We should hit that app love and gong. We have a new gong, everyone. Look at this gong. 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 six, eight. If you're just tuning in for the first time. It's a massive gong. It is a massive gong for a massive company, fantastic company. There's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Premack, about how GROC 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. We did. We did.

did hear that so 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 everyone sort of got paid it sounds like chamoff did very well on this he was a very early oh i mean chamath haters were in shambles we need to check on that we need to check if you if one of your friends doesn't like chamoth call them if you haven't heard from them well i would be worried are you doing okay let's just go hang out let's go play in golf or Take him out, touch grass, touch your grass. Because it's going to be rough for a while. 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.

What a chat. Send the $20 billion wire. Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs. I've good for my $20 billion. Why is NVIDIA buying grok? Is it a response to the TPU? We'll have to get some of the semi-analysis books on the show to dig into it. They've been on this super crazy roller coaster. I think not a lot of

people expected them to wind up at 20 billion. There's two sides. One is like when, if you read the actual social capital memo that Chamath put together, it's, it makes so much sense to invest at the valuation he did. 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 10 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 and so like there's this you you make a bet on a certain architecture and there's other firms right now that are betting on like we're going super long the transformer architecture we're going super long cerebrus like wafer scale we want to put the whole model on one chip instead of a rack instead of a rack of a rack of a 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 tradeoffs you're making. And then you kind of just wait and you hope that people come up with a use for what you made. Is this

offense or defense for Jensen? I mean, I think he's like almost like even though he's not literally the richest person in the world. He's run the big company. So he has the most capital, like fire around at places. And I think to put to put this into perspective, this is like us saying investing in a nice camera right yeah yeah like it's not the kind of like it's we take like jensen personally let this process it took him two weeks he wired early yeah you would you would do the same thing for a nice camera holy effing s not swearing really really hurts the quality or you can read it on the screen but uh he's very sensational so it's a screenshot from reddit it has 36 million views and 207000 likes it's a massive post 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 zero percent of it, zero dollars 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. We're going to dig into all the different aspects of this, but this is crazy. Some people in the chat, I read this, but we're going to go through it. So just watching the code getting pushed to production, I can't sleep at night knowing I helped to build this machine.

You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but 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. That's literally what they call drivers in the database schema. They talk about these people that, like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying

to pay rent. First off, the priority delivery is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a psychological value ad. Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a Boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an AB test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders. We just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by five to 10 minutes by making the priority ones

feel faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. Even in this scenario, it's like maybe unethical, but like this is actually a bulk case. bull case for paying $2.99. If the default service is actually slower and $299 gets me

5 to 10 minutes faster, this made me think they should add a feature that's, uh, whenever you get around, I'll take it whenever you get around to it. And so it's just like, it's just like surprise 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. Well, it was like Lyft line. 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 up. Yeah, yeah, you get like a Kindle store credit or something at Prime. It's kind of interesting. 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

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 stop showing them high-paying orders. The logic is, why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he's desperate enough to do it for $6? We save the good tips for the casual drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience while the full-timers get grinded into dust. 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 law has passed.

The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. That's not really how money works, right? It's not like, it's like route, you know, this is earmarked for this. It's not a guy in linear being like tag the, you know, revenue from this product. Yeah. Send it to that. No, no, you know what this is?

This is like dude logic for being like, oh, oh, I got, I got a $5,000 bonus. this is watch money. I should buy a watch or something like that. Like this money is for this thing. It's like, oh, I got a bonus. I'm buying a car with this money. I'm extremely frustrated. I will say this.

This feels like this feels like fan. Yes. Really? Restaurant. In high school. I worked at it. I actually have never worked in my first job. First job outside of roughing 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'd actually work my way off the restaurant sure picking up the cigarette butts off the cigar picking up the cigars it was just pure cigarette butts I was I was like I think I was wait people could smoke indoors or something it was it was like it was a brewery okay so people would sit out to sit outside late at night and so that they would go until like a child in this smoke-filled environment I'd go in and I'd go pick up the cigarette butts with my hands. I didn't even wear gloves.

Very, very, very gross. Yeah. Disgusting. If you're using a delivery app, you should assume the delivery app is trying to get as much money as possible from you. Yes. And going to psychologically manipulate you into feeling better about the order, feeling better about the value, feeling like you're supporting this person. It'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 it. the, I appreciate the art of tipping. There's an art to it. It's, it's something I've always enjoyed doing because I'm always getting a service and I want to, at multiple times in my life, worked for tips. So having this sort of digital intermediary that is messing with that relationship sucks, right? 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. I want to go to this library. So at least hit the librarian

with a buzz ball. For sure. This is a life, life hack. If you have a 30, if you bring a 30 rack into the, throw it down on the desk. Throw a buzz ball to the librarian as a sign of respect. Yeah, librarian, bear me. Bear me, brother, if you're going to be in here posting on Reddit and chugging beers all day long, tip me, tip me. I hope that 2026 is a year of the buzz ball. You're into buzz balls. I was, buzz balls were post my time. Yeah, they were big when I was in college.

And what I appreciate now, in college, people were ready for buzz balls. Like, you were, no, you were trained in the sense of, like, if somebody threw a buzz ball out, your arms are staying at the side. Oh, wait, wait. Oh, this is a, this is like a prank. I'm completely unfamiliar with it. Tell me the culture of the buzzball. The culture of the buzzball. So you get a buzz ball.

Yes. Obviously, like near the checkout at any type of like, 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. Just pick up one of these.

They have a few, it's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol. That's pretty strong for single. Yeah, it's very strong. It's more than a single serving about. Yeah, it's very strong. It tastes terrible. So it's like a punishment.

You would never drink one of these for fun. Sure. And, And you go back to whatever, 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 in the not expecting it, they're going to catch it. They're like, what's going on? Of course.

In kind of at least the heyday of Buzzball, for me, you knew this was something that could, a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time. It could come out at 9 a.m., right? 10 a. And so you're going to keep your hands down and you're not going to catch it. You'll kind of, you'll sidestep it. Okay, okay. But now.

What if it, like, smashes in the TV? Are there like buzzball disasters that happen? I'm sure there are. Results in a lot of destruction. And but now people, people are not, I, I hit, my dear friend Ben Taft, he's a venture capitalist, he's my neighbor. You hit him with the buzz ball? When?

A couple days ago. Like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared. Well, I'm prepared. He just caught it. Well, I would be unprepared. I was like, I feel bad that you, that you caught there. Scoot in the chat says, I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a buzzball.

Is the, is the, is the, is the, is the, is the, is the, is the, is the cultural. of the buzzball alive and well on college campuses or do we send you back i'm not 21 i never had alcohol okay oh yeah yeah that makes sense 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 uh confusion and anguish the 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 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 on the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it. But at this age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged so I conceded and with a smile. I have no probably being a kind and loving father, the problem is I only, is only that I do not enjoy it. Brutal.

Very, very brave to, 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, you know, father, son rivalry? Anyways, Justin continues. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure.

It just seems wrong that I experienced so little delight when my dad friends. all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque tree-line block. I am even relatively relaxed from the holiday... Give it up for tree-line blocks. 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 when we're done. I know that when he is a teenager, I 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 a lot of people weighed in 14 million views part of what he talked about was like how you can make it as an independent writer yeah or creative yeah and so i think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass but also outside of institutions i think in general skill issue skill issue i love justin but skill issue you have to use what i call the dan bilzerian

method this is okay parenting a parenting the dan bilzarian method especially this works especially well for four-year-old boys so you just assume you're dan bilzarian 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?

They'll be like, absolutely. I want to play cards. Four-year-old boys have the mind of Dan Belzarian effectively. And so if you adopt the mind of Dan Belzarian, you will have a very important. in, you will have a very enjoyable time with your four-year-old son. 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. Thank you for being a part of this.

We're so excited for this year. That's going to be a lot of fun. And we hope you have a great Monday. Cheers. Goodbye.