TBPN Live - The legacy and future of CES, Dwarkesh’s “Capital in the 22nd Century,” Ben Thompson’s “AI and the Human Condition” | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

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CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives. It might be. It might be. I think it still is. It probably still is. Why don't we go into your op-up? Yeah.

So I call it the death of the tech conference because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is like CES launched so long ago, 1967. What were the consumer electronics at the first event? of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So the VCR launched at CES, like the thing that you put the tape into, I know you don't watch movies and you never had a VCR. I had a VCR.

I actually did. I actually did. You had a VCR. Like a personal little. Yeah, you put the tape in, you have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970 when Phillips unveiled its N1,500 video cassette

recorder until that point BCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 Gs. Okay, at the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs, and tape recorders. The lineup of stuff that launched at CES, the Atari Pong console in 1975, the CD player launched in 1981 at CES, the Commodore 64, 1982, the DVD at DVD at 1996, the Xbox in 2001. And we really got to play this video of how the Xbox launched. 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. You know, today we think we're so cool.

Oh, tech companies, they have vibreels and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things. Get on stage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That's the bar because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We got to play this video. We're unveiling the Xbox. Look at this.

This is the product that will be out later this year. and there's an amazing amount going on, working with partners who help build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal. But the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy into. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here. This is a showmanship. This is the Xbox.

And so for the first time, let me now unveil X-Box. Whoa! Do you ever have one of these? With the controller in the plastic glass, very cool. Yeah, dangling down there. This was iconic. Play called Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there. The design here was driven by spending time with gamers.

And actually putting the control in their hands. The controller was huge. The first controller was so big, they had to make a smaller one, because they just went way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. type of people or something were you were they testing on you no there's this whole meme that it was like really good for shack but that was it and shack loved it or something that i seem to remember this i don't know

loaded as you move uh from level to level what you're seen on the front that you checked uh the on off button and four game ports uh that was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two they yeah the playstation i think just had two at the time and maybe the n64 had four here we go look at this getting a celebrity like that. Like, Open AI had so many announcements this year. Look at the fit. There was the whole Scarlet-Johansson thing.

They didn't bring out the rock. Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really is a lot of... Thanks, Rock. The celebrity cameo is a tech launch is completely forgotten art. We don't know how to do this anymore.

I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a... a effect, I don't know about A-list, but maybe like an aging out, like somebody that was iconic, yes, an actor, an athlete, et cetera. And just instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video, just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product. There was that drink company that did this. Do you remember they had some celebrity, like read every sign? I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Orca. Orca. Yeah. Orca. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We remember it today. A lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage, good editing, a bunch of things to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately, and they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just, also it's just way more thumb-stopping, like you're just going to be scrolling, oh, what is the rock doing there promoting your product?

Anyway, CES, when it launched, I thought this was impressive. In 1967, like no precedent, there's not really a tech community, it's sort of new, 17,000 people show up, 200 companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot. It's grown not even 10x. I mean, this was this year, or in 2024, they had 130,000 attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not, you know, it started out pretty big. I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, IOT, all that stuff was like sort of annoying. Maybe the AI stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more.

opportunity for actually cool integrations with AI in all sorts of different hardware things. At the same time, I was at Best Buy over the break, and I saw a TV that said it was powered by AI, and I was just shuddering, thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was, because, like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating, like, a frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing. Samsung had a big announcement last year. Perplexity integration.

Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense. And again, I just think any time you're in a situation where you could ask your TV, for information probably easier to ask your phone yeah so I don't know I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing we'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting I wanted to go into the history of like how the tech conference like the the tech conference that's not linked to a single company sort of died and a lot of it goes back to the iPhone

actually the iPhone probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history it should have been launched at this consumer electronic show like it is a consumer electronics. Juggernaut, it should have been the most important consumer product of the 21st century. Totally. And they got scoop by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9th, 2007. Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by IDG, this international data group. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from Apple, but Apple was like obviously the cornerstone draw to the events.

So they'd give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software or even just like a phone case, didn't make sense at that time. But like you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you'd go there and figure out partnerships and do deals.

Launching the iPhone at Mac World, which happened at the exact same time as CES, it allowed jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing. He was famously fanatical about this. He rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks. He wanted things exactly, He wanted certain demos to happen after.

And he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at CES. And the big thing is that at CES journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So they create these like charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category.

And he also did not want to be compared to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best weird name. It was more performance. He didn't want to go spec to spec. He didn't. So the Nokia. had 3G already in a GPS it allowed for copy pasting of text it had a front facing

camera he's like he's like until we can copy and paste yeah seriously we don't have that no the number of features that the Nokia 95 was crazy it could record videos the iPhone couldn't record videos it had a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera it even had an FM radio the Nokia beat it on like you know 10 different specs the only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen but people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full featured Safari web browser, but it didn't even have third-party apps. The Nokia did. Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone

discussion as like, it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Macworld. They're not allowed to be here. Best marketer of all time. Clearly. And everyone copied him. Apple actually pulled out of Macworld two years later. Started doing WWDC and their own their own self-hosted events, self-distributed events. Obviously, technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper. You can live stream.

So you have Google I.O., Microsoft Build, MetaConnect, Samsung Unpacked. When Zuck introduced the latest meta-rayband displays, he didn't do it at CES. He didn't wait for CES. He was just like, I'm going to have my own event. Everyone's followed Jobs Playbook. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies, and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there, and Invidia unveiled Vera Rubin.

Which looks incredible. Yeah, but also it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even NVIDIA has their own conferences now. So my main takeaway is like just like in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore, although the rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write-up of CES coverage

is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course they highlighted NVIDIA, the faster artificial intelligence chips, Vera Rubin, the CPU-GPU combination. Mercedes-Benz, NVIDIA has a partnership to make the first autonomous car. The tire of my Mercedes-Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way of the work. The journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips, known as The Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to NVIDIA yet. shares fell more than 2%.

Uber, the ride hailing company plus EV Maker, Lucid, and Nero have begun on-road testing for their planned Robotaxy service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco. Later this year, stock jumped to 5.5%. Lego launched a smart brick

and high tech Star Wars toys. This was the launch of the year contender and it's a first week in January. Let's pull it up. And you'll see it from the sound in the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the mini figure, it knows who that mini figure is, and actually it knows where that mini figure is. So as I move the mini figure around, you'll see different lights and colors, depending on where the mini figure is compared to the brick.

What does this allow us to do? Well, you saw it's actually good. Let's go. Let's go. I think this is good. I remember... We turned every Lego brick into a mini iPad. There was some sort of Lego programmable computer, but it was much longer.

was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid. And, uh, yeah, Lego Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing. But yeah, so Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic two by four Lego brick. It will make entire Lego sets come to life. Love it. Coverage. Very cool. Uh, Boston thing. And of course, Boston Dynamics. Yeah. Demo champions of the world. Boston Dynamics is starting the year strong. They seem to be upset that figure is valued at roughly one Ford motor company. And they're not happy about it.

They had a new video of various Boston Dynamics robots in a Hyundai. Yeah, here. They've been doing this for so long. But I don't know, it looks good. How tall is it? 2.3 meters. Oh, that's how long it can reach.

That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoids have been really, really small. Just kind of like smaller. Is this not CGI? I can't even tell at this point. This looks like... Wow. Oh, that was a cool move? The way that it can move.

That was a cool move. The way that it stands up is wild, too. There's a view of it's standing up. It looks like a spider and then it's kind of... Yeah, very disconcerting. Swapsed some battery. Maybe one of their first use cases could be gloving. Oh, yeah.

That's really trendy. I've been seeing that. Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an air. plane or something you see that one but yeah you saw that Tyler you need to start gloving yeah when a founder any time a founder raises more than a hundred million dollars you got to say can I glove for you what is that from like EDM culture or something I don't know funny yeah so apparently Hyundai is

preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into I mean their manufacturing facilities 66 pounds sustained you know weight capacity most most people can lift more than that. Come on. We've got to get those numbers up. In the New York Times today, Jamie Diamond's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers. Is this gongworthy? This is gongworthy. Let's do it. First gong. The Trump admin is lifting regulations and deal making is heating up for jimmy diamond being jp. Morgan Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly 15 years, Jamie diamond, the bank chieftain has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials, and journalists.

At just the right time in meetings, he breaks out a single-page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart on it. Mr. Diamond's underlings have crammed in tiny type, a comically complicated flow chart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, J.B. Morgan Chase is subject, that theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date back to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets, again, like cryptocurrency and President Trump pause enforcement of foreign anti-bribery rules.

Interesting. The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker, but there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M&A, as the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers Discovery shows. Once imperiled real estate loans look steadier, thanks to the rebound in-office work. Stocks are near record levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020, and gold and silver have soared, all of which feeds the trading

businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming. A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants, and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly $770 million for Jimmy Diamond, for the chief executives of city. who shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slash tens of thousands of jobs and a year's long restructuring. And Goldman Sachs shares... Tyler... Tyler...

...displacement? Not because they were up 60. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, because the way that you reacted there looked a little suspicious. Your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographic. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Pay attention.

They do really tell you something about where your energy. I've been getting, I mean, speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show, and I bought one. I bought one too. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post.

He says a week ago, Dorcas and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piccaddy's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality, as the Financial Times kindly put it. That was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in. Buckle up. I don't think they wrote it knowing that they're.

was going to be this whole like Rokana, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like the whole like wealth tax thing that was going on California. And they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in the zeitgeist at the same time. But I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very, it's like a paper. He's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone or at least tried to.

Maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize people haven't read it. Yeah. kind of key fact. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor.

So key factors, they talk about privatization of returns. So like very, very hard to get exposure to XAI right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home, right? And the issue is, like, home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation, right? If you have a home in Ohio and you have, like, $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get, like, you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe somebody that is, you know, pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could, like, buy your. home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just like land somewhere else in the U.S. at far, far less.

They talk about the end of international sort of catch-up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital. They would turn that and they would create, create, yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value, even though a lot of the investment was foreign. They talk about, like, wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies. are sort of like aging, aging out, effectively. I guess pushback here generally, like, hey,

even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that the institutions just break. The way that the world currently works breaks. If you own a bunch of open AI shares in this sort of fast takeoff scenario, maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with open AI shares, right? But is a super intelligence going to say,

oh, oh, yes, I would like to buy some open AI shares, right? Or would they just... Corners the market. Or just rebuild, you know, effectively just rebate. You know, so I love, you know, reading, I love reading this essay. I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to any scenario you can imagine. There are 50, there's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply. It would be funny if we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich.

Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder a million light years away? Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we're actually sitting on an entire planet of diamond. And we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Like, how much is it, how much is wealth inequality a direct focus on like the keeping up with the Joneses,

like the neighbor effect, the direct memetics of like the person. that you see as your equal. Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans, and they don't see any value in that. He quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of Late Night with Conan. Let's watch this Louis C.K. clip.

We may be going back to that, by the way. But in a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the side. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone.

We had a phone that you had to stand next to. and you have to dial it. Yes. You don't realize how primitive... You're making sparks in a phone. And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more... Like, oh, this guy's got two zeros.

Screw that guy. Why do I want to... And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank when it was open for like three hours. It's a stand-in-line, write yourself a check like an idiot.

And then when you ran out of money, you'd just go, well, I can't do any more things now. Right. I can't do any more things. That's it, yeah. That was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh, and he'd bring out this whole shunk, shunk,

and he'd write all credit. He'd have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century,

we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in a, in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, and they're like, ugh, it won't.

Give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of like too slow? It's true. I was on an airplane and there was internet, high-speed internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists.

And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop, you can go on the internet. And it's fast, and I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane. 2008, watching YouTube on a team on a plane? And they apologize, the internet's not working. The guy next to me goes,

this is bullshit. Like, how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago? Right. And on planes. A couple days ago, my one and a half year old has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well, and they stop sleeping well.

And with my three-year-old, we hired a, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my three-year-old, we hired somebody. and they effectively, you know, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer and blah, blah, blah. And it works really well.

Like, it's a lifesaver. But with one and a half-year-old a few days ago, my wife just goes through an LLM and just like breaks down exactly like what's happening. Gets the answer. And it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. Within 24 hours, like the problem was totally solved, like back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, like basically one shot at it. Open AI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, like, we're going to solve this. You're going to have, you're going to have like a personal tutor in your pocket and all the stuff.

And then people like hammer him because it's like, well, then we're doing SORA and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that. Like AI is actually already delivering on this sort of. Do you remember the Fallon clip that went viral, where Fallon asks him, like, do you use Chad GPT to parent your kid? And he was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it. But yes, what Luis C.K. identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have, is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously.

enriched the world on an absolute basis, but the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more emiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire, quadrillionaire aliens, we're all done for us. Should we take it over to Jocco? Yeah, Jocco Willing. Jocco, one of the greatest podcast capitalists, maybe, right? Apparently, I didn't even know he had this brand origin, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. American made gear. Apparently, somebody in the government is a jaco supporter because they threw Maduro in some origin looking sharp, got him out of the Nike tech. It's called Origin Built by Freedom hoodie on Maduro.

We got to get Maduro on some TVPN merch. I think we absolutely do not have to do that. That's ridiculous. Silence. In turn, Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got them themselves. We, of course. I feel like we deserve a small slice for promoting the reward. We did do a promoted post for the capture Maduro back in Q1 of last year.

Delta gets all the credit, maybe the DEA. Osted Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in U.S. federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by U.S. forces over the weekend. I am innocent, he said. I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant Delci Rodriguez was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delci Rodriguez is picked by Maduro, so should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much she'll be cooperating with the United States. Security officers were out. enforcing crocus running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests. In Manhattan, Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a U.S. court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors

and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial. So, chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of Rinaldo. I wonder the chat is going on. saying good, you know, the jocco line. Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror from the clink? Got captured by U.S. Delta Force? Good. Good. wearing his origin. Arrested, arrested on drug trafficking charges? Good. More inspiration to grind harder. It's an opportunity to learn about the U.S. legal system. Thank you, everyone for listening to TBPA today. We will be back at 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in. Cheers. Goodbye.

You know,