#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future

24:31Among the other defense space, aerospace companies went to work at SpaceX and said, what it was like, and he said, it's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. It's just like, it's just like, is that the year point? Like, everybody around me is like so absolutely competent. And most of most people, most of us never have that experience. Most people are never in an organization where the bar is held that high. As a consequence, the competence level is so high and stays so high and even rises over time. Again, to his master credit, he has been able to do that repeatedly. So, detail oriented, focusing on everything from A to Z in terms of the business, sort of intimately familiar with it, and prepared to get his hands dirty from a, I will get in there and actually look at solving the problem myself.

25:20So that suggests to me, although this can't be the case, because you couldn't run this many companies if you were doing it this way, there may be some challenges in learning when to delegate, when to hand off tasks, because in order to get that level of resolution to be able to see things with that much finitude, you also need to spend a lot of time on it, and then if you're solving the problems, how do you choose the problems that are yours to solve and the problems that aren't so and so forth. So that must be a challenge, delineating between what is my problem to solve and what is somebody else's?

25:55Yeah, so most leaders like most CEOs we work with have exactly that problem for exactly the reasons you described I think that Elon Method is a little bit different and I don't know if you'd agree with this But the way I think about it is he actually delegates almost everything Like he's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed. And then he doesn't have to be involved anymore. And then he can go focus on the next thing, that's the biggest problem for that company right now. So like for example, manufacturing, there's this concept of the bottleneck, right?

26:27And so in any manufacturing chain, there's always some bottleneck. There's always something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running the way that it's supposed to. And sometimes the bottleneck is at the beginning of the process, it's like we can't get enough from material, sometimes the bottleneck is at the end of the process, we don't have enough warehouses for the finished product or the bottleneck might be somewhere in the middle. and if you run a manufacturing company, there's always a bottleneck. Whatever the bottleneck is is holding everything up. And the job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing.

26:54And I think he basically has universalized that concept. And he basically looks at every company like it's some sort of conceptual assembly line, sometimes a literal assembly line, making cars and rockets. And basically, in a given week, there's a bottleneck. There's guarantee to be the main bottleneck. There's going to be one thing that's going to be the thing is holding people back. And so the answer to your question, the resolution of the paradox is, I'm going to micromanage the solution of that. I don't need to manage everything else because everything else by definition is running better than that, right?

27:23And so I can go focus on that. The other part of it is so compelling and this is where I think a lot of especially non -technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method is he really, when he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. And if that's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line, or if that's people in a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code. Right, so he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering, to ask the manager, to ask the individual contributor to write a report for, you know, that's to be reviewed in three weeks, he doesn't do that.

27:56He would like throw them all out of the window, but it's just no way he would do that. What he does is he goes and he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. Right? And again, this is why he inspired such incredible loyalty from the, especially the technical people who he works with, which is they're just like, wow. If I, if I'm up against a problem, I don't know how to solve. Freaking Elon Musk, go on the guy that owns the company. Freaking Elon Musk is gonna show up in his Gulf Stream and he's gonna sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he's going to help me figure this out.

28:30Wow. Right? And so it's like, how do you possibly, like, how can, yeah, and this is the thing. It's like, okay, you're like a normal CEO you are running a normal company, like how can you possibly compete with that? What are the other reasons that CEOs of similar companies or comparable companies don't do that? Technical understanding, I get that, that you need to be able to get your hands dirty from a specificity perspective, but what else? Yeah, so that's a lot of it, and that's a topic that makes people really mad, because now technical people really hit being told that they are not qualified to do something, because they're not a technical, but every now and then the technical details actually do matter.

29:06So there's a whole domain there. And most managers, like most people in government are lawyers, most people in business and senior levels are MBAs. So there's a most large companies not run by engineers. They run by business people. And so there's increasingly lawyers. And so there is a real challenge there. And then I just think more generally, it's just the way that management is taught And, you know, most classically in the form of something like our Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, it's basically taught. It's basically management as it was sort of developing implemented.

29:42I would say in the like the 1950s, 60s, 70s, it was sort of this so -called scientific school of management. And so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry. And you know, you can manage a soup company or you can manage a, you know, I don't know whatever, whatever, whatever kind of company. And they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do. and there's a common set of management practices. And it has, you know, is a lot to do. It's, you know, process. It's, you know, how do you structure, you know, the, how do you manage the balance sheet?

30:11How do you set the review schedule for the meetings? How do you do compliance? How do you, you know, hire, you know, how do you manage a, you know, how do you hire and motivate executives? You know, how do you resolve interpersonal conflicts? Like all these, like general business skills. And by the way, those general business skills are, you know, very useful in lots of contexts. It's just that that training doesn't give you any of the information that training gives you none of what you need to go do what Elon does. And then and then Elon push I would say he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do, which it turns out has this like just like incredible, you know, catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are, you know, so just incredibly amazing.

30:52He just said this thing at the most recent Tesla event, the blue my mind, because his companies are famous, they don't actually have marketing departments. Like, Tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing. Like they don't sell the cars. Like every other car company in the world is running all these ad campaigns all the time, TV commercials and the newspaper flyers and the quarterly sales events and all this crazy stuff and promotions, all these things, like Tesla doesn't do any of that. It's just the best car and you just show up and buy it or not, except you, you're more on if you don't, right?

31:20My dad went to go and test driver, a model S maybe a couple of years ago. And he's sort of an old school car guy. And he's used to the sort of banter back and forth, the forecourt, the discussion. So he said, please, sit down. Would you like coffee? Would you like, you know, what is it? And he said that he walked in and it felt like he got into an Apple store. And there was some, as he called it, teenager in a hoodie that came out. And my dad started to do the whole, like classic boom apparent negotiation thing. And this guy was like the price is the price and I don't have any fucking coffee for you He left feeling like this is the new world and now he has a range Rover so Listen thing.

32:05It's like do you want the best car on the world or not? Right like that's the ones mentality right and and it's working very well And then he had this event he just he took it to the next level and this broke my brain I'm still thinking about it. He said if you think about it He said the best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo. Like you shouldn't even have to have your name on the product. People can just identify it from how good it is. It's just obvious. It's just obvious. Everybody knows. Because it's the best product of the world. Everybody has it. Everybody uses it. And like, of course, you don't need to put the name on it.

32:38Everybody knows. Right? And so for a minute, I was like, all right, is this like a Zen thing that I was thinking about? And then I was like, no, he's actually, as usual, with Elon, it's like, no, he's actually serious, the best products in the world would not need your name on it. And so, yeah, anyway, so it's just this like completely different, it's just this completely different method. And then on top of that, to have the guy who's on top of his game, you know, to, you know, as you said, to kind of be working on the government challenge and then to be, you know, to have the new, you know, for whatever people think of the new president, pros and cons, like, to have him fully, you know, fully signed up embracing, you know, Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really, I mean, this, this has not, you have to go, like, Like literally the last time something like this happened in the United States government was literally like 1933.

33:20You know, the closest analogy to what at least has started to happen is literally what happened under FDR, which is just like a fundamental readvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent from actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimaginable. And so it's, you know, it's a once in an 80 years thing. I'm doing everything I can to help and I hope it goes. You know, pouring some kerosene onto the fire as you are. I'm sorry, a clip of Elon speaking. I don't know whether it was recent clip, but the clip only came up the other day. He's talking about his thoughts on being a CEO.

33:51A lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right, so you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have like the worst. You have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems.

34:19So I wouldn't say it's fun. You have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine who says, starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're constantly facing extermination for the company because most startups fail. 90 %, 99 % fail. That's the staring part. You're constantly staring, okay, and saying, if I don't get this right, the company will die quite stressful. Memheding glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on.

34:52So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it. That's the eating glass part, and it goes on for a long time. What's your assessment of his post mortem on being a CEO? So the original form, I remember when I agree with all of that, and I felt that myself. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be an investor right now and not a not a not a not a seat you have a company But the original form of the quote the eating glass quote was actually Sean Parker And the original form of the quote was Starting a company is like is like eating glass. Eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood Oh my god And I love using that quote in front of an audience because it always gets the exact reaction you just gave me It always gets that moment of stun silence followed by that look in the face and everybody's like, oh my god That's horrifying and I'm like, yes now you go full run your company now you understand what it's going to feel like Yeah, no look and I the serious thing I would say is you know, they're they're they're happy You know, it's a little bit less now But there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and you know tech entrepreneur has been like a romanticized concept And you know, there used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was And and you know, I I have people ask questions like, well, how do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?

36:08My answer was always, it's like, no, we shouldn't do that. People shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it. So I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultramarathon. Yeah, why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? No, that's bad. No, most people should not do that, but the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that. For their own reasons.

36:38And so it really is like that. And yeah, and then look, it's tremendously painful. Most of the experience of being in business in a competitive setting and as startup is sort of the peak version of that is most of it consists of basically being told no by everybody. You need all these things, right? You need employees and you need financing and you need customers. And you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no, or you know, half the time they don't even respond. You know, they just go dark on you. It goes to you. And then, you know, just when you think you get it working a new competitor emerges and just starts like, you know, punching you square in the face.

37:12And, you know, the minute you think your product's working, there's a problem in it. You have to do a recall. And every, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just this constant. It's just kind of this constant rolling, you know, horror story. You know, the agony end to the people who are eating glass and learning to try and enjoy the taste of their own blood. Do you feel more like a therapist than an investor sometimes? So it really depends. One of the things, I think there are certain fields in which you really get to see somebody's core personality. And you get to see their kind of core attributes and their core virtues and their core vices and their core weaknesses.

37:48And it's really only people under situations of extreme stress where you really see that. And so part of it is like we see that. we see people when they're at their most dressed and when they're at their worst. And then there are, you know, that was in many cases where we're, you know, one of their only remaining allies, you know, kind of at that point. So that's a not uncommon thing. And you know, there is, you know, sort of a, there's a coaching component to it and a therapeutic and just a general, you know, kind of being a friend, you know, being an ally component to it. But I also say the other thing you see is just like, you know, there are very specific personality types.

38:18And, you know, there are certain people where, I'll just give you an I think, as Mark Zuckerberg, a great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has, it probably is not well understood enough, which is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations. He is able to maintain an analytical frame of mind, even when other people would be literally bristening in a tears and hiding under the table. And I've seen that many, many times. It's just like, the company's been through tremendous amount of both good and bad things over the last, I've been involved almost for 20 years. And we've been through almost everything good and bad.

38:50and I have literally not want senior racist voice. You know, he's always been, you know, and he's very sympathetic and he's very, you know, when somebody has a personal crisis, you know, it's not that he's not emotional, like he engages emotionally with people and he's very supportive of people when they have issues and he, you know, he feels things very deeply like everybody does, but, you know, he just, he has a level of emotional self -control, you know, psychologists would say, you know, zero percent neuroticism. He just doesn't respond emotionally. And as a consequence, he can keep his head, right?

39:17When everybody around him is losing theirs. And so you got that having said that we also work with a lot of people who are let's say higher in neuroticism And in particular often the more creative, you know people who are super creative are often high in neuroticism And so sometimes you get the you know, we get the artist type where they're like incredibly creative And there are fountain of new ideas and they just have a much more let's say direct engagement with their emotions And they feel things, you know, I would say more directly or kind of in a more raw way And so you know when things go bad it really come it really comes down to them emotionally I was frankly myself probably more on that side of things.

39:53And so yeah, there's therapeutic aspect of that. The good news I would say is generally in business, also a couple of things. So one is it's not, in our world, it's not a 90 % failure rate. It's about 50%. And 50 % is still high, but you have a reasonably good shot. And then, I think most problems in business are fixable as long as you can keep the team together. I think usually when companies crack and go down, it's usually not, sometimes it's catalyzed by something that happened from the outside, but generally the thing that actually happens before a company goes down is the team cracks, the team itself cracks internally.

40:30And the founders turn on each other, the management team dissolves. And so a big part of it is just with these things is just like can you keep the team together? If you can keep the team together and we're happy to be a part of it, we're thrilled, our job is to be part of that team. than most of these companies can battle through most things. So I've seen just as many incredible last -minute saves and rescues and turn arounds as I have screaming disasters. So there is reason for optimism going into even the dark times. Going back to the governmental efficiency thing, how much do you think the huge swaths, the platoons of useless middle management inside of the government are shitting themselves at the moment?

41:11Yeah, so it's actually an interesting question. I actually, it's hard to say from the outside. The other thing is you have this, I would say, very interesting thing. You don't have a, you know, there's no homogenous, you know, the government employs whatever it is, you know, millions of people, multiple millions of people. It's not, you know, it's far from a homogenous group. And I'll just give you some examples. There's a pretty large contingent, which is sort of the baby boom component of it, you know, because the government went on a massive hiring boom in the 50, 60, 70s, 80s. There's a pretty big contingent that's close to retirement.

41:45And, you know, we're probably going to retire anyway in the near future. And so, you know, there's some prospect maybe there for, you know, kind of let's say mutually agreeable accelerated retirement, you know, is one possible solution. Usually agreeable accelerated retirement, the most diplomatic way to say get out. People don't want to go out. No, no, this happens to come. So in fairness, this happens to companies. And I'm not saying the doge is going to do this. I'm not in charge of this, but I'll just give you the scenario that happens in companies. It's something called buyouts. with it, it kind of contrasts them to layoffs.

42:11And it sounds like it's a clever way to do the same thing, but it's actually different, which is you basically, you offer retirement packages, right? And you let people voluntarily sign up for the retirement pack, and they don't have to sign up for it. It's a voluntary thing, but if they choose to, they can get accelerated retirement or an unusual level of retirement compensation. Like a way to think about this is, like the budget crisis that a business has when it gets in trouble or that the government has where we're 36 trillion dollars in debt, But the budget crisis is not like the money that we might have to pay to have people retire this year.

42:42Like you can afford almost anything to do that. It's the savings that you can have compounded over the next 20 years if you get your fiscal house in order. And so you can sometimes do things in the near term that cost more money in order to get the long term savings and that often makes sense. And so there's, and again, I'm not speaking for the doge. So this, you know, this is one option. Another option that they've already talked about in public is the remote work thing. You know, most most federal workers are not, most federal workers are not actually at work. most federal workplaces are empty today.

43:09There are agencies where there are formal collective bargaining agreements where the employees are down to a day a month in the office. And there's a huge controversy around remote work, how effective it is and there are companies that make it work. But if hypothetically you have a government agency with 10 ,000 people and nobody's literally coming to work, you might as a taxpayer have some questions about exactly what's going on. And then you have this situation where, if you say, as they've said, if people have to come back to work, like part of the thing of working for the government, working with taxpayers to come to work, well, there are people who have literally left.

43:41You know, there are people who have moved to lower cost locations who are not going to come back to work. And so that's another opportunity. And so there's like, there's a lot of this. And then I would say the third thing that they've talked about, which is I think probably the part of it that is not well appreciated, is that the government that we live under today, You know, remember that old out of the, I don't know if you were, you probably didn't see this because you weren't maybe here at the time, but there's this cartoon that every American kid of a certain age saw in elementary school, social studies, which was how a bill becomes a law.

44:11It's very bouncy. It's very bouncy like 1970s cartoon about the bill. And you know, the Congress, you know, so the White House proposes the bill and then the Congress agrees and then the Senate and then they reconcile and dance in the bills. It's a little cartoon, you know, bill wrapped in a little ribbon and it bounces up the thing and the president signs it and everybody's happy, right? And so it's like, you know, legislation, right? with a legislative process. Most of what the government does and most of the rules that we all live under are not that. Most of it's not legislation. Most of it is what's called regulation, which is very different.

44:40And most of the rules that the government sort of exists in order to process and enforce our regulatory, not legislative. The government we live under today is the result of basically 60 to 80 years of agencies effectively putting out regulations entirely on their own. So executive branch agency is just basically deciding that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of rules that we need to live under and then deciding that they need to staff themselves to be able to process and handle and enforce all those rules. The Supreme Court recently ruled in a series of judgments a couple of years ago ruled that regulations that were not authorized by legislation are not constitutional.

45:18Right? And by the way, if you just read the US Constitution, which is quite short into the point, it makes it very clear that the legislature, the Congress, exists to pass laws, the executive branch exists to enforce those laws. The executive branch does not get to issue its own laws, right? And so we've lived in a system where the executive branch has been issued. So laws for a very long time. The Supreme Court now says that all of those regulations are now not constitutional. And so basically any activity in the government that relates to the staffing and enforcement and all of the processes and all the work around those regulations is no longer constitutional.

45:54And so there's a lot of government activity that actually is no longer constitutional. And you know, the previous administration was completely uninterested in doing anything, bringing executive branch into alignment with what the Supreme Court had ruled. But again, if you read the Constitution, the Supreme Court gets to make these decisions, they've decided this is not constitutional. This new administration has an opportunity to bring the government more in compliance with the Supreme Court, which means the government will get smaller. Yeah, what happens if Trump can't deliver change? He's got all of the things House Senate, popular vote, Elon, unlimited funds, blah, blah, blah.

46:25He doesn't even need to worry about being reelected. What's the implication for America and the West if he can't make sizable change? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I was to start by saying I'm optimistic. Like, I think he's determined. I think that he wants to determine. I think the effect is determined. I think the the team around the doge. By the way, a lot of the key staffing positions, there's a lot of controversy in the press as usual about the cabinet officials. And I think many of those are also very good. But a lot of the operational managers are being brought in at the deputy secretary level and the department has their very, very strong people.

46:57And so I think this is going to be one of the strongest, if not strongest, execution competence capability administrations that we've had in a long time. Again, maybe arguably since the next, I think a reasonable case that this will be the best, the best staffed administration since the 1930s. And so, you know, I'm reasonably optimistic. And then look, the president has this, you know, is in this sort of very interesting position where he doesn't ever have to run again, right, because he can't, right? And so, like, a lot of what happens in the second term, if president has choose to take advantage of it is, they can do things that caught, you know, that basically might even put their re -election at peril.

47:29They can do more forcible things, because they, you know, they can do the things that they actually think are important as compared to the things that they think they might need to do to be re -elected. And that's something you can only do when you're going to get when you're going to get termed out. And so, and then of course, there's just, yeah, there's sort of, you know, all the things kind of behind Trump's level of determination this time, which I think is very high. So, you know, I'm quite optimistic. I don't know. I mean, you know, you could paint various cynical pictures of the whole thing being gummed up.

47:53I, my guess is if it, if it disappoints, it's going to disappoint in the sense of some of these things are going to get done, but not all of them. And frankly, like, I think we great, it'd be great to solve all of our problems at once. But if we can't do that, If we can just basically, if this team can sort of give us a roadmap on how to do things properly and can kind of show us, you know, through examples, you know, if let's say there's, you know, let's say there's, you know, let's say there's a thousand versions of this problem that have to get solved and this team only gets to the first hundred.

48:24Then we will have the recipe book right for how to solve the next 900 over the next, you know, two or three or four administrations that follows that and so that that would be my optimistic failure case. And I think we will get at least that if not a much more sweeping transformation. Talk to me about this Willow Google quantum computer thing. How big of a deal is it? Yeah, so first of all, I don't know, you know, I just read the announcement. I haven't been faced to face with the technology, so I don't know anything that's not public on that. Quantum computing historically has been one of those things that is theoretically very exciting and then just extremely hard to actually get working.

49:03Quentin computers don't act like regular computers in any way. And so, and there's always this kind of thing where you in theory can kind of demonstrate something in a lab and that maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. It's often not completely clear even whether it worked. And then, you know, could you ever get that to repeat? Could you get that to repeat across, you know, 10 or 100 different, you know, kind of locations? Could you ever then apply that to these different problems? Like there's just all these like really fundamental questions. And so it's one of these really enticing things that, you know, everybody's hoping that we get to.

49:33I just I'm not close enough to know whether they got to the full breakthrough or not. The thing that I think would be the full breakthrough would be not only does it work in one lab, this is something where you could now stamp out 10 and then 100 and then a thousand of these machines and then you could do it repeatedly. The most enticing thing of what they said, which is one of these things where you think about it and then you decide you have to stop thinking about it because you'll never think about anything else again, is that in theory, the lab demonstration that they have is doing a computation that the entire universe that we live in, if it was converted entirely to just a giant computer.

50:13If every atom in our universe, it was turned into a giant computer, that computer could not solve that problem before the universe ultimately dies if he doesn't. Right? And the implication of that is that the computation, therefore must be spread out across many other parallel universes, which is therefore proof that there are many other parallel universes. And so interesting. Right. In other words, if you weren't able to spread this computation out across many parallel universes, it could not have been done. Therefore, there must be many parallel universes. Therefore, we do actually live in a multiverse and there are actually billions or uncountable numbers of parallel realities included.

50:53the way using for our RAM. Yes, yes. And we're, yeah, we basically have outs, yeah, we're, yeah, we're outsourcing to these other universes. I mean, you know, or by the way, are we having any impact on them when we do that? I don't know. Yeah, there's some very glitchy 360 P universe out there. God damn it. And guy from Google's, yeah, that guy from Google's trying to work out if two plus two equals four again. Yeah, it's exactly. And then of course, any of these other universes going to do it to us. So, you know, the quantum people really do believe it's a, that we live in many, many, many, many different realities.

51:25So, you know, this may be one of those things from science fiction that we end up figuring out, but yeah, it's the kind of thing. You know, it's, it's, but you know, is Einstein's famous reaction to quantum physics was, you know, this is impossible because, you know, the famous quote was, God doesn't play dice with the universe, right? And you know, this result is yet another evidence that no, actually God really likes playing dice with the universe. It seems like he is doing it between that. I mean, this thus, period is so much going on in tech. like Sora AI as well. What's your post, I mean, that closed now, signups and stuff because it just went ballistic.

51:58So for the people that don't know, this is the video equivalent of open AI's image creation service. And now you can do video too. Although so many people signed up, it's restricted to particular territories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of the way that that went? Yeah, so this is, yeah, this is video, so this is text to video generation. So you put into text prompt, you get out of video, which sounds easy. Trans, that's very hard. It's very magical. There are, there are, you know, one of the more impressive ones at OpenAI. There are others, you know, we have a bunch of others, and there's a bunch of others underway as a competitive space.

52:33But, you know, the class of technology is very impressive, and so is very impressive. I mean, one is just like how amazing is it to live in a world in which you can literally, you know, say a text prompt of, you know, a, you know, a habit living in a habit town with the dragon shows up and then literally it will render that for you. If you want the dragon to be rendered out of use car parts, you just say a dragon made out of use car parts and it renders that for you. That's just amazing to start with. Even more amazing thing about that and open a put out a paper about this, it's very interesting.

53:06More amazing thing about that is to generate video that passes the sniff test of the human and I look at it and thinks that it's real.

53:17You can't just sort of copy from other videos. And that's part of what's happening is, this is your system I sort of trained on millions of hours of video from all over the world and all this open source stuff and everything. And out of old movies and all this stuff. And then there's copyright disputes over what else is in there and so forth. But so it's trained a lots of video, but it's not sufficient to just train a lot of two, because videos all 2D, it's not sufficient. just train on 2D video and then generate a new 2D video that actually looks to the human eye like it's a representation of the real 3D world.

53:48And if you look at these videos coming out for Sora, if you look at them carefully, basically what you see is like multiple sources of lighting in different parts in 3D space coming together, you see reflections coming off of reflective surfaces that are actually correct. You see translusency that's correct and then you get combinations of these factors. So like, for example, if you do something where like man walking through puddle at night, you'll get the splashing effects of the water. The water has to splash in a way that is physically realistic. The light has to come through, refract through the water droplets in the correct way.

54:24The water droplets have to reflect the image of the man's shoe in the right way. So in the AI term for this is world model. This is not only a model for video, this is a model that actually understands the real world. It's a model that actually understands 3D reality, right? And it understands light, right? And it understands surfaces and textures and materials and motion and gravity and gravity and shapes and right exactly all these things right exactly. You know, a stiff surface versus a spongy surface. Yeah, you know, you know, give me a close up, give me a close up of a of a baseball bat hitting a baseball, you know, like in slow motion it has to deform the baseball in the way that in the real world it does you know when it hits the bat and like for this story It has to do all those things and in fact it is able to do all those things like the if you just look at the results You can see all that's happening and so so what what that means backing up to that the implication is that model is not just a video model It's what's called a world model Meaning it actually understands 3d physical reality the implication of that is that we may we may have basically just solve the fundamental challenge of robotics The fundamental challenge for robotics is how do you get a physical robot to navigate the real world without screwing everything up?

55:37So how do you get a robot waiter to comp navigate through a busy restaurant without stepping on anybody's foot, without tripping over anything, without spilling water on the table? To understand everything is happening real time to be able to adapt. You know, very similar to the self driving car challenge, like how do you do that, but how do you do that for basically everything? And how do you put machines up close with people in such a way that it's like completely safe? and it turns out one of the things you need to do to do that is you need a world model. The robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of physical reality so that it can understand what's happening and so when things change.

56:07Because the robot seeing primarily visual, it's just like you're seeing visual and see if to map the visual into an internal representation of the 3D world. Up until now building a world model like that has been difficult or impossible and it now appears that that's actually starting to work. So, Westworld. It's happening. 2028, 2030. What do you think you must be? It's coming. You must be knee deep in projections for robotics, for AI, for where we're going to get to. What's the meteorological artificial intelligence forecast for the next few years? What do you think people can expect sort of 25, 26, 27, etc.?

56:51Yeah, so just start by saying it's really hard to forecast this. And I'll give you my favorite example of this, which was the world's leading AI researchers in the year 1956. Got together and they got a grant from the government to spend 10 weeks in the summer of 1956 at DARPA. All right, sorry, at Dartmouth, at Dartmouth University. And so they all got together and in that 10 weeks they were going to finally get to artificial general intelligence. They were so close like they were almost, it was called AGI. They're almost 10 AI that can do everything that a person can do. They were only 10 weeks away.

57:21And you'll notice that was in 1956. It didn't happen. We're sitting here in 2024 and we still don't have it. So this field is prone to, of all the fields in tech AI is prone to utopianism. It's prone to apocalyptic nightmare scenarios. And it's prone to a very, very, it's been very hard to forecast progress, like extremely difficult to forecast progress. Well, another great example of that is, OpenAI was not formed to make GPD. OpenAI was not created to make large language models. OpenAI was created to make an entirely different kind of AI. And then it turns out if you traced back the origin of GPD, there was a little one guy at OpenAI, his name, Alec Radford.

57:57And he was like sitting in a corner. And he's like, I think all this other stuff is wrong. I think we should be doing this other thing instead. And so even that company that brought us, Chad GPD, a few years ago didn't know that that's what they were going to do. So forecasting is very hard, especially about the future. Look, having said that, the progress is staggering. And one is just the observed progress is staggering. The plans that people have are incredibly exciting. One of the things you always wonder with any field like this is just how many more ideas are there, right? Arguably, we've run out of ideas for what the smartphone can do, what's new with the smartphone now versus last year versus the year before.

58:36The smartphone company's kind of run out of ideas. Where they are, there's ideas all over the place. And so that's very optimistic. And then many of the smartest people in the world are being drawn into the field, right? And so every smart college kid, you know, who's considering what to do, a lot of the very smartest are going into the field. And then a lot of people are like coming over from other fields like physics to work on this now that it's really started to work. So we're also getting this effect. It's kind of this reverse brain drain or something where we're pulling in all the smart people.

59:02And it's another reason for optimism. And then obviously the commercial opportunity is very large. So that's another reason for optimism. I, the big focus right now is to get these things to what's called reasoning, general -purpose reasoning, so to get them to to predictably be able to solve problems in a way that is fully coherent and leaves to good results every time. These things are very good at solving certain problems most of the time. It's a very unusual technology where if you ask a large language model the same question twice, it actually gives you different answers. If it doesn't know the answer to the question, it will sometimes make up an answer.

59:38And it is pretty amazing and wild that we have creative computers that will literally like, you know, make things up. But like we need versions of these that don't do that. We need versions of these that are able to reason their way through complicated logic chains that are able to model physical reality like I just described that are able to, you know, think longer and get better results. And so there's tremendous amounts of work happening on that right now. I'm pretty optimistic on that. I think by, yeah, I think by, I don't know, 2028 or something. I'm just off the top of my head, just doing a little bit of emergency safety by 2028.

1:00:13These systems, you'll be able to basically give these systems problems and they'll solve the problems if it's something, if it's something that a human being can do, they'll be able to do it. And then robotics is basically that. And then we now have the interface method for robotics because we have large language models so we can now make robots talk and listen and we have voices and human English comprehension and all that stuff. And then basically the rest of robotics is basically a mechanical engineering and then some power, basically battery technology. And I think robotics are getting quite close now.

1:00:41And so that and that I bring that up because like that AI is going to be important if it's just disembodied software, but it's going to be really important if it's around us all the time in the form of access. If it exists, yes, in the real world. And then of course that's already happening, right? You know, autonomous, you know, it's now drones now fly themselves cars now, but cars now drive themselves, right? So for people who haven't tried either the Waymo cars in places like San Francisco or the New Tesla, the latest version of the Tesla software, they're both outstanding. And so cars now drive themselves, that's a big step forward.

1:01:14Drone's now fly themselves. There are now companies making autonomous submarines and all kinds of fancy things. Probably enough, the autonomous submarine just feels like one that you could have done earlier, this far less traffic, this far fewer things to crash into. Yeah, probably. We have a company that has a military submarine that is literally an unpressurized shell, sort of platform, and you can basically customize it in many different ways, a lot of kinds of things on it. But it's like unpressurized form, it's able to go far deeper than a sub that needs to support human beings can go. It's able to go down and be able to do all kinds of things.

1:01:56So yeah, like, you know, the whole as we're seeing, you know, on the military side, you know, it's a transformation of military, say, of military strategy, you know, this underway right now, you know, kind of as these technologies hit that we're already seeing in Ukraine. So that's going to matter. But you know, look, a lot of this stuff is just going to be stuff in our personal lives and our daily lives. What do you think of the adoption of self -driving, sort of, on mass self -driving? I don't know whether there is a more highly kinetic, high risk and heavily involved area of human life that is ready to be outsourced to AI.

1:02:35You know, there's other thing where you can help you cook or you know, keep your food fresh or do whatever, but there doesn't seem to be the same sort of mortal consequences. You know, people have a very strange relationship between car safety when it's done manually and when it's sort of pivoting to that. Is this just some conceptual inertia thing that we're moving through over time slowly as usual? Yeah, so to start with cars today are a disaster from a safety standpoint, right? And so cars the current run rate of road deaths worldwide is at least a million people a year. Right? And so it's about 40 ,000 road deaths a year in the US and about a million worldwide.

1:03:09And by the way, that million may be a low number. It may be much higher worldwide. And we just don't know how to count it, but it's at least a million worldwide. And so, you know, it's sort of like again, you kind of think about this like, okay, million people a year dying from cars, okay, over the course of a decade, that's 10 million people. When 10 million people die from something in modern world, we use words for it, like, you know, apocalypse, right, genocide. This is mass death at a very large scale. And so one is just like, to your point, there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten an acro—and by the way, for every death, there's many injuries, right?

1:03:40Many people crippled and never recover. And so there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten used to a a very large amount of carnage in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics. By the way, in the fullness of time, as a civilization, it seems to have been a good trade off. I don't think very few of us, not named Greta Thunberg, want to go back to, walking everywhere, right? And you could never go back to rainy horses, right? Cause of course, animal rights. But it is amazing that we got there. By the way, implication of that being, if the car were invented today, I mean, imagine the conversation that we would have right about the rollout of the automobile right, which is like okay the plan right the plan is to strap people into 6 ,000 pounds of steel and glass and then the plan is to shoot them down, you know a road that may or may not You know being good shape at 60 miles an hour and then they're gonna shoot them at each other And then we're gonna have the safety measure the safety measure is going to be we're gonna paint a line down the center of the road And that's gonna keep them from crashing right and so like there's no way that you'd be able to like invent this today or launch this today So maybe it's good that it happened in an earlier era.

1:04:48So anyway, to your point, we're used to that. The self -driving, both Waymos and Tesla's today are far safer than that. Far safer. And there's like edge questions about, you know, like, you know, the metric is like, you know, collisions per, you know, thousand or a hundred thousand miles or something or a desk per hundred thousand miles. And like, it's just no question. They're just like tiny percentages relative. And it's, by the way, not that they're necessarily zero, but they're tiny percentages of of what we experience every day with, you know, with road deaths. By the way, I think as humans, we have a bad intuition on this, because we can't see the other drivers most of the time when we're driving.

1:05:20So I find the cure for people who need to think about this harder is just go spend a day sitting at the DMV and just watch the parade of humanity, watch the people who have to be physically steered by their relatives in front of the camera to get the new driver's license at age 90.

1:05:41Right? to just see how many people are just texting, right? Or how many people have been hitting the vape for the last three hours, right? So like there's no question that the, the technology we have is much safer. There's a societal question as to whether we want, where we want the tradeoff to be, right? Do we want the tradeoff to be to state at the current level of carnage because we're used to it, right? Or do we want, you know, and wait until the computers are perfect? Or, you know, is it just, is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening? Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept, But we have chosen to roll out self -driving without the computer being perfect.

1:06:15And so, you know, there's Tesla's and Waymos on the road all over the place. And, you know, we're, and people are fine with that. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were, we were able to do that. If you talk to the people who make self -driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self -driving car colliding with a self -driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix, right? As you'd expect, right? Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human drivers.

1:06:43There will be some future state years in the future where there are no more human drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens, these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there. And so one of the things that we may want to drive, you know, we may have to drive to ultimately is that. There are a lot of questions around that, but that may be where we want to go to. I'm pretty optimistic about this. I think that these companies are making excellent progress. I think that the says pros and cons with the Chinese auto industry is now coming online and I think they're also going to be quite good at this and I think they're coming now.

1:07:16And so I think that this whole space is going to develop quite quickly. What about personal autonomous vehicles like drone? I remember I was in Leonardo da Vinci airport years ago and there was one out for gyro helicopter thing out front, this can fly itself, et cetera. That feels like a much bigger problem in that you're not retrofitting a new piece of technology onto an existing infrastructure that this is basically an entirely new thing that you need to have where they can float around. Yeah. So the term most common in our world is called EVTOL, EVTOL. So electric vertical takeoff and landing.

1:07:57OK. Right. So VTOL, everybody's seen VTOL VTOL VTOL vertical takeoff and landing. It's a hairier jet. There's a military fly. Is it the movie true lies? They have a big scene on the hairier jet. So it's the jet that has thrusters that point down. It rises and then it has thrusters that carry it forward. And so we've had these VTOL things. And by the way, we also have had helicopters which have the same property. So we've had these things in the past. And then the electric part is basically, you know, that they'll be electric. And then the other presumptive part of that is that they'll be autonomous.

1:08:32They'll be self -piloting. Because for those things to go mass market, you can't expect everybody to get a pilot's license. You're going to want to just get in and want to sit back and let the thing fly itself. So autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing. We have all of the elements to do that. We know how to do all of that. Like all those technologies exist now. And there are companies that have put this together and have these products working. The big issue right now, I think there are a couple of big issues. one is just power, which is, it takes a lot of power to get something in the air and keep it in the air.

1:09:02Like I said, batteries aren't very good right now. It's relative to what we need for things like that. We need some breakthroughs and batteries, and then the other is just cost and infrastructure, and then safety regulation, safety regime, and all that. Over the course of five or ten years, I think you could imagine that happening. There are people working on the Iron Man suit. You know, Elon keeps making references to, I don't know that he's working on it or not, but he keeps making references to it. And then there are, there are, there are been, well, I don't remember there was a, it's at the James Bond, one of the old James Bond movies, like Skoldfinger, one of those movies actually had what looked like a stunt where James Bond actually escaped from a house by strapping on a jetpack.

1:09:44Okay. And actually, you know, actually did this thing and he did this thing, a big arc up in the ear and then he landed, you know, like a half mile away. And when I was a kid, I watched it like, you know, I just love those movies and I watched it and I was like, well, clearly they did that with like a green screen special effects. And it's like, no, that was an actual jet pack. No, what that actually, yes, that actually existed. And actually the military has those today. Um, I've seen someone boarding a, like a tanker type thing and they've got sort of the hands in gauntlets. And that, but that's not electric.

1:10:11That's, that looks like it's jet, some sort of sort of fuel jet powered type thing. Yeah, that's right. So today, today, that would be today, that would be today, that would be jet powered and there are jet packs like that. Again, expensive risky, you know, not, not, not, not means to be able to. No one will it in the wrong location. If you've got one of those things strapped to you. Yes, exactly. That's maybe the second most dangerous hobby after flying in squirrel suits. So it's those those are the hobby videos where they end the YouTube videos and two seconds before the, the final moment. So, but like, you know, look, we, you know, we know how to get things in the air.

1:10:44Like we know how to do that. And so, is there a kind of propulsion system? Is there either fuel system, propulsion system? Is there a battery system? By the way, there are hobbyists that have literally put together quadcopter drones. It's like a helicopter using lots of individual quadcopter rotors. And so that could be electric powered and could basically do the same thing. And so there's lots of hobbyist activity here. And so I think people are going to be working on this a lot over the next few years. Solving autonomy helps tremendously. because you're able to, you know, the human doesn't need to be trained.

1:11:18You can make the things super safe. Another interesting thing that's happened is, if you've seen the WAMO cars in the street, they've got this sensor on the top of the car that kind of spins around. And that's a system called LiDAR. And it's a light -based form of radar. And so it's a system that lets it do basically 3D mapping of the environment. So the Tesla is basically optical. optical. So the Tesla is using cameras to construct a 3D model of the environment and sort of interpolating distances based on having different camera angles. The Waymo cars actually have these sensors called LiDAR that actually do depth sensing.

1:11:51The problem with the depth sensing is LiDAR sensors historically have been extremely expensive, which makes it hard to feel these things in products. products, but they're coming down rapidly in price now. And I about three months ago, I bought my nine year old as my prototype in house prototype for all this stuff. And I got him a Chinese robot dog for I think $1 ,600 and the robot dogs snout. And it's a robot dog like the demos you've seen, like the if you've seen like the Buster and Dynamics robot dogs, it's like that, but you can you can buy it and you can actually have one of your own and it does all the things.

1:12:23It's very impressive. And it actually has the now that's the spinning sensor. And so they've somehow gotten lighter down to a couple hundred dollars. And again, like that's very encouraging because now that you've got that, now you could start to think about building all kinds of things that then have depth sensing. And so all these pieces are starting to fall into place and with a little bit of luck and some progress in batteries the next five years, 10 years. Yeah, more of the Iron Man stuff, you know, just stuff hopefully will start to happen. It really is a different timeline. Speaking of which, I went to, I was in the UK last week.

1:12:55I was there for a couple of weeks. I went back home and had this live show thing. Give me your opinion on the sort of state of free speech and regulation on that side of the world. We're talking about the excesses, the overreaches that hopefully maybe coming out of over here. What's your opinion on the other side of the Atlantic? Yeah, so I see there's like three kind of worlds of speech right now, three zones in the world. There's like the Chinese version, which is we're going to tell you explicitly what the rules are, and you better not break them. But basically, other than the things we tell you, not to talk about, which we're very clear about, you can go crazy and talk about whatever you want.

1:13:34So kind of the top down authoritarian model. We have the American model, which is we have free speech constitutionally guaranteed, but there are a thousand unwritten rules of society, like the world's worst version of curburentusiasm, where there's a thousand different ways to trip the PC police, and if you trip any one of them, your life gets vaporized. And so you might call that kind of bottoms up authoritarianism. The government is not coming to get you that and the jail you for it, but boy, just this ashamed that you got fired and your family now hates you and your friends have all left you and you can never work again, right?

1:14:11So that's like the distributed bottoms up authoritarian unwritten version of what China has, right? So top down bottoms up. And then there's Europe, which has decided to do both.

1:14:24for reasons I have to say I don't fully understand, but you know at least from an American perspective if you look at you know this the speech laws in you know the UK or Canada they are horrifying. You know I would like to think that if those speech laws came to the US we would have a revolution like they're just like completely unacceptable. Like of course you can't send police to somebody's house because they you know said something wrong on Twitter like of course you can't do that But yet it happens. And then, yeah, the rest of Europe had, they all have variations on that. Some, obviously Germany has like very explicit versions of that on a lot of topics.

1:14:56And other countries do as well. So, yeah, but then also Europe and the Anglosphere have also, they have the top down version of the actual laws, hate speech laws and so forth. And then they also have the bottoms up authoritarianism of all the implicit codes, which if you're You know, highly educated, you know, Ivy League graduate equivalent, you know, your job is to track those codes as they have all of every day by faithfully reading the New York Times cover to cover every day. And, you know, but if you don't and you fall out of step or you're a working class person, you say the wrong thing. You know, if you crack your knuckles in the wrong way outside of your truck cab, you get accused of being a white supremacist and you get fired, which is something that actually happened in the US during the 2020 craziness.

1:15:40So, yeah, so you're, yeah, Europe right now is combining the worst of those worlds. and you know, you may know more about it than I do. They seem hell -bent to just get much, much worse. I don't know what's going on. I really, I went back to the UK and I was quite disheartened by like a lot of the stuff. I was spent my time in Kensington. The diversity is our strength thing in the UK, which is a message that you're greeted by as you enter the country. I don't know whether this such a thing is too much diversity, but it just didn't particularly feel that much like London. I'm aware that that just sounds like the most Brexit sentence that I could have ever said.

1:16:17And I was like, ah, like this just doesn't feel very much like London. Maybe it should be a cosmopolitan place, so on and so forth. So that was kind of a little bit strange. It was just something that I hadn't noticed previously, like that level of diversity. What else did I notice? The level of service, like every Uber took 20 minutes to get to you. Like why is that happening? That seems like slapping in the middle of the city. every bit of service in every restaurant was either a long wait or there was some sort of a problem. Uber Eats seem completely determined to just like destroy whatever food or coffee.

1:16:49We actually started ordering twice the number of coffees that we needed to order in an attempt that we could maybe combine them together to have residual amounts of the right amount of coffee that we needed and we still didn't get, I just, I don't know, you know, I mean, where they can just whine on like the fucking opulent, and like returning prodigal son or something. But it just, it really was quite disappointing in many ways. And then on top of this, you know, this upside down world, where Keir Starmer is saying that the immigration's too high and that this is a problem that we need to deal with.

1:17:21And at the same time, you've got these still unbelievably bizarre non -crime hate incidents that are being reported. It's odd and I feel bad about my old homeland. I don't know whether Europe's in the middle of a downfall or what at the moment, but you know, between all of the different parties that are going in this vote of no confidence, it just happened recently. It's like whatever the timeline is, maybe this is actually what happens when we get used for the ram of another fucking universe's computation that they just start to speed up all of the drama. That's the side of it. I don't know. But yeah, there's something happening and it's being expedited, whatever it is.

1:17:59Yeah, so let's say a couple of things. So a friend of mine in private equity went and worked in New Zealand, grew up in Texas and worked in the US and then went over and lived in London and did private equity in Europe for five years and he came back and I said, you know, what was it like? And he said, said, Europe is like, he said in Europe, it's like, they're like five things that are more important in making money and nobody will tell you what they are. Like there's, there's these, there are these goals and objectives and they're loosely around ideas of societal fairness and they're loosely run ideas of not having to work very hard and they're loosely around, you know, retirement things and social services and they're loosely around diversity and their loosely run immigration, but they're not.

1:18:34They don't seem crisply defined. And so maybe there's a bit of an identity crisis happening there. There's another thing as a famous line that fascism and communism are always looming over the US and landing in Europe. Right? Like the US always like there's always this threat of like the US is going to go communist in the 20s or it's going to go fascist in the 30s or something. And then what actually happens is you know, you know, France actually goes communist in Germany actually goes fascist. Right? But like so, they're actually still common as parties in Europe. And so maybe Europe is downstream of American culture in a way that is maybe helpful in some ways, but harmful in others.

1:19:14But it's a little bit, let's say a little bit, a great example that with England is, it's like, okay, in the US, we're all trained from birth, of course, to feel extremely bad about the fate of Indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Chris, pop question, who are the Indigenous people of England? I don't know who are they. Whoever was before the fucking Normans came and. No, no, no, no, the answer is it's the English. Right. Okay. Like it's just the English, it's just the English. Right. Like the English didn't display it. Yeah, it's like the Normans, it's like the Saxons, like whatever came together.

1:19:45But there was no displacement, right? It's like the indigenous people of England are just, they just say English. Yet somehow the English feel just as bad about indigenous peoples as we do, right? Like, right, well, this is the other thing. It's like, you know, as you know, England has like no, England has no history of like, you know, African, you know, they, anyway, I'm not going to go into that topic, but yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the spectacle of BLM and England is really quite something. Yeah. It's just, it's not historically, it's not very historically grounded, let's say. So, um, yeah, so, you know, maybe it's just America, maybe America is both functions and dysfunctions kind of ripple out to the rest of the world.

1:20:19Yeah. Yeah. In a way that is helpful in some ways and harmful in others. And then, you know, maybe it's a, I mean, from the outside, it seems like it's a continent that is in a series of countries that are having just a massive identity crisis. I think that's definitely true. Looking for a direction, looking for what your contribution is to the broader world. You know, very much is a little bit of attention is being paid to Russia. Most of the attention is being paid to the US and some attention get to pay to China and everybody else is playing second, third, fourth, fifth string behind that. And I wonder whether the UK is feeling like a jilted lover at the moment where it's just like we used to be important We used to do a thing actually why to bring this up?

1:20:58I've been sort of harping on about the differential number of entrepreneurs coming out of the UK versus coming out of the US Despite the fact that we have similar higher education levels in the same number of universities in the top 10 worldwide The UK's got the same number as the US do but we put out only 20 % of the number of entrepreneurs what, based on your assessment culturally, commercially, what do you lay that at the feet of? Yeah, look, part of it is some of the great UK entrepreneurs come to the US. And so we, like, by the way, this is not just the UK, it's also true of France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway, and many other countries, right?

1:21:37And so I just, because the US has such a highly evolved advanced entrepreneurial ecosystem, you know, it may just be that we're drawing a lot of them. And so they just, you know, they don't start companies in the UK because they've left. I think that's part of it. And I think part of it is that, you know, the identity crisis, I hear, I just know what I hear from my friends who are, you know, English or French or German, which is just, you know, they feel like their home countries and cultures are just not very supportive of the entire concept. You know, the governments don't necessarily want it.

1:22:05You know, the, you know, the legal codes are not, you know, well set up for it. You know, look, the UK, you know, There's a great example. There's a great example of the economy, just like the speech thing. In the US, this AI thing is the big exciting thing in tech, and the US is forming it. The Biden administration was threatening to do all these horrible regulatory things, but the new administration is certainly not. They're going to do really smart things. There's going to be a AI tech boom in the US that's going to be spectacular. A lot of that is around startups. Europe, the EU has chosen to basically make all of that illegal.

1:22:35legal, right? And so they passed this thing called the EU AI Act and they, you know, the SkyTerry, Jerry Braton, it's just kind of crowning achievement to basically make AI startups in the EU illegal. So they've just decided they just don't want them. And then the need is just in case we were going to contribute to this new fledgling industry. Yeah, well, the EU, you know, they have this slogan that EU kind of bureaucrats have this slogan that's just say, we're not going to lead the world in innovation, but we can lead in regulation. Right? It's like, no, right. Exactly. That's what your reaction is the appropriate reaction, which is like, no, that's not actually what we're going to.

1:23:12Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. So like if it's not literally happening there, then you're not going to be able to regulate it. And in fact, what's happening is new leading edge AI products from American companies now are actually not being are actually not being released in not even being released in Europe. Right. So like the new Apple AI products. And I actually think the new opening eye products as well are just not even literally being released in Europe as a result. The UK again has chosen this middle form which is they sort of made it illegal. And so they did this, the last administration did this disastrous AI safety push which was basically a massive red light basically saying don't even bother to try to start AI startups in the UK.

1:23:48But it wasn't like his overt, a ban is that you put on but it was like this massive signal that basically says this is not a safe place to do it. And I think the UK is kind of stuck halfway in the middle right now and it kind of has to decide which way it wants to go. Yeah. I, uh, I don't know, man, I, I really hope that we can bring ourselves back around. Maybe not like old school colonialist glory. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not hard -killing back to the fucking East Indoor training company. But, uh, something, I don't know, you're right. The identity crisis in the direction is a big part. And then you lay around top, um, I'm sure you've been seeing dominant Cummings going full fucking scorched earth recently.

1:24:22He came on the show about six months ago and everything that he said, even like Rory Stewart, someone that you think of as, you know, being way less of a firebrand and a dominant Cummings. And he has this really like visceral description of the type of people that inhabit the the halls, white hall and Westminster. And he describes the way that they smell and the way that they talk and the things that can concern them. And he realized, you know, the governmental efficiency thing needs to be scaled out beyond just the US. This is the sort of thing that really needs to be probably put everywhere.

1:24:58Yeah, so Dominic has this great, no, I'm glad you're about a Dominic. He's a good friend of mine. So Dominic has this great line. He says the people aren't running the system. The system is running. The people, right? Many users have to describe the UK government, but you could also describe the US government and you could also describe the EU kind of the same way, which is like in a sense, it's like, what happens when you get face -to -face with people in government is what you realize is, There are actually a significant number of very publicly spirited, very determined people who actually want to do good things.

1:25:24And there's this, and then there's people who are not like that, and they're just there for the job or whatever. But like there are people who legitimately are working hard and trying to figure things out. And what happens is if you know them, what happens generally they get ground down, they end up disappointed, and then they end up either becoming disillusioned or they end up leaving and going into the private sector. And so I think Dominic's explanation is a good one, which is the system is running the people, not the people running the system. The bad news with that is that it would be easier.

1:25:50If this solution was just to swap out the people in a sense, that would be an easy answer to the question. Whether you could do that or not is an open question, but at least you would know what to do. To reform the system as Dominic talks about, another's talk about, and actually, actually, Starmer's not talking about this too, right? Which is like, okay, how do we actually redo the system as, of course, much harder? The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarban. and I was also a good friend of mine. And the way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is, we are living under FDR's personal monarchy 80 years later without FDR.

1:26:30Right, and the reason he describes it, he says, look, when before FDR, the federal government was actually very small, like it tax rates were like super low, the federal government didn't do very much. The FDR dramatically, you know, orders of magnitude increased the size of scope of the federal government. He did that for two reasons. One was the New Deal, and then the other was World War II. And so the federal government that Franklin Roosevelt left behind in 1945 when he passed away was the government that he had built, which he had run the entire time from 1933 to 1945 himself, in which he had staffed himself and he had overseen himself and everything.

1:27:03And he built this, basically, this giant structure. And as Curtis basically says, as long as you had FDR running that, it could run really well. And we won World War II and saved the free world and pulled the US out of depression like the whole thing working. It was great. But if you let an organization of that size and scope run without its founder CEO for 80 years, you end up with what we have now, which is just like basically out of control bureaucracy, like an out of control system, in which people can't even make positive change even if they want to. And again, that's why you could have in the US, you could have reason for optimism, which is, okay, what do you need?

1:27:35Well, you need another FDR -like figure bit in reverse, right? You need somebody and a team of people around them who's actually willing to come in and like take the thing by the throat and make the changes. By the way, make the changes at FDR would probably make if he were here to make them, but he's not, right? And so somebody else has to step up and do that. It has to be a president because nobody else conceivably has the power to do that. But, you know, we will see how much this president can do. But like that, that's a lot of what this administration plans to do. In the the UK government may be grew up in parallel with the US government.

1:28:07So maybe FDR is also partially responsible for it by inspiring the general modern Western style governance, but also that of course the English system grew up for many centuries before that. It may be time for an FDR style transformational leader to come in and like really get a permanent. Yeah, the past dependence. I always, we always talk about the wonderful heritage of the UK, but you don't necessarily think about the Einstein fact that has got you beholden to all of this bullshit that came before. I learned last year that the distance between the two front benches in the House of Commons is a broadsword held out at arms length from either side.

1:28:45But it just tells you kind of everything that you need to know about what our current government and political institutions in the UK are inheriting. It's like if you've got a country that's a thousand years old, a couple of thousand years old, you're like, bloody hell, like really lovely history then. You say, yeah, but what else comes along for the ride? and sometimes it's stuff you want to get rid of. Mark, let's bring this one home, dude. It's been a long time coming. You're so great. I'd love to bring you back on it some point soon. What's your people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing.

1:29:12Oh, go to X, go to X, P Mark A, P -M -A -R -C -A on X .com. And also on Substack. Mark, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Good, fantastic. Thank you, Chris.