AGI in 2035, SoftBank Sells Nvidia, Buffett Goes Quiet | Casey Handmer, Growing Daniel, JD Ross, Scott Shapiro, Laurence Allen

29:07What often bothers very wealthy CEOs, they are human after all, is that other CEOs are getting even richer. Buffett said, envy and greed walk hand in hand. Interesting. Buffett added that Berkshire should try to avoid future CEOs who are looking to retire at 65 or who want to become, look at me rich, or initiate a dynasty. Look at me rich. What an interesting turn of phrase. Yeah, it's very notable that Buffett has never been photographed doing a money spread, wearing Balenciaga, Rick Owens. Does he have any Chrome hearts? Probably no Chrome hearts He's never been photographed With Chrome hearts It is cool he's going to continue to do His thanks A letter every Thanksgiving I thought that was Thanksgiving of course One of the most underrated holidays So he took the pledge to give away To give away his wealth And so it's going to be a pretty big changing of the guard and that's going to have a pretty significant thing i'm looking uh forward to seeing is is how many what the attendance will be like in the shareholder meeting next year like is the is is the draw buffet or is it its own community yeah exactly yeah i my expectation is that they will retain a huge amount of people because it's people that have been going every single year for a long time it's just like a kind of a meetup for people that have probably, you know, that have spent probably decades, at least some of them decades, visiting and being a part of it.

30:50Yeah. I also wonder, like, to what degree can Greg Abel, like, actually pick up the torch? Because there's that interesting stat that, like, if you go back 30 years ago when Buffett was 65, he was, I don't think he was close to the richest man in the world. He, he compounded a ton in his third 30 year run, like from 65 to 95, he had a particularly good run that, that made, that took him from like pretty rich to one of the richest people in the world. And so it would be very interesting to see like Greg Abel, what, if he really goes on the run for 30 years and is just executing, executing, executing, it's very rare we just don't see that many business executives or that many like people broadly where that's like the the highlight of the career is 65 to 95 you think it's exciting do you uh do you think that that he can be fearful when others are greedy they're kind of acting like it right now right yeah and half like i don't think it's quite half a trillion i think it's more like under under 400 billion of cash but uh they will be getting uh they will be getting calls quite a lot of calls at some point for sure and uh we'll see how they play it yeah uh before we react to some of the reactions on the timeline let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of ai graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster um so howard anglin is taking shots at uh at warren buffett so warren buffett's talking about his final letter and howard says buffett has commissioned no plays no poems no symphonies no operas, no ballets, funded no paintings or sculptures that will outlive him, endowed no theaters, choirs, orchestras, built no monuments, monasteries.

32:39Is this true at all? I feel like he has to have, I feel like Warren Buffett has to have given away enough money to endow at least one theater. Like, how do you not just get hit up by your local theater in Omaha once and say, sure, I'll send a check. Like I would be shocked if he's never done anything. And also he's committed to giving away half of his wealth. So like some of the money is going to wind up with the opera, I imagine just because it's going to go out and get diffused amongst all the different charity efforts. It's not going to all go into one thing. Um, so, uh, Howard agrees with him on this.

33:17He says he's right. The greatness does not come about through accumulate great, accumulating great amounts amounts of money which is what he is known for but beyond that it's fortune cookie level advice it's not wrong but that's about it his partner charlie munger's contribution to architecture was to fund factory like college dorms in which a majority of the apartments don't have windows the is it was that ucsb where is that yeah it's you have you have you been to that dorm yeah did you live there uh i'm trying to figure out which we need to pull up he made a photo of the charlie munger yes dorm the charlie munger dorm at uh at ucsb it's munger hall munger dorm ucsb it is a wild picture it's so funny and it's like so they abandoned they they we didn't do it he made the donation yeah yeah there's some reference to it on the campus but they abandoned the plans to build a windowless dorm it's so sick it's so soviet it's extremely soviet i don't know why yeah the um i thought there were fake windows and they were like tvs essentially but they would show like outdoor scenes it should be a vertical tv windows that you can just put sora on and just watch ai he's like you were complaining about the cost of housing i gave you housing and now you're complaining it doesn't have windows yeah you give a mouse a cookie with these people okay it is so funny apparently it it's it's also just so funny like why are you so involved in this project.

34:47Like, uh, I thought he was a bigger donator to Stanford first. And then also why, like, I feel like if I, if I donate money somewhere, I'm like, uh, okay, it's gone. And you enjoy it. And it's, it's on you. Like you are the one that takes care of it to be in the weeds to the level of like deciding where the windows go. It's a wild move. Like I thought you had other stuff to do. I would just be, I feel like if I was in this position, I would just be too busy? He does have other buildings on campus. Okay. With windows? He has a Munger residence that do have windows. I don't know. I mean, also, is it safe to take the other side of this and just say that he was about to create the greatest lock-in of all time?

35:31I mean, what if he was basically saying college students spend very little time in their actual dorms because they're out and about in the world. They're studying the library. They're at events. Totally. They're really just using the dorm to sleep. Why don't we create common areas that have windows, an outdoor area, but then you go in your pot. Yeah. Go in your pot. Almost like a cave. Yeah. It's like a cave. Because UCSB, the complaint from a housing standpoint is that, like, nobody has, like, nobody, everyone shares a room almost all the way through. Everyone shares a room almost all four years.

36:00Oh, interesting. So you never move off campus. Yeah, and it's, like, one square mile that people really live. And, yeah, there's super limited housing. And so I think Munger was coming at this, like, probably, like, very pragmatically. And it's like, hey, you're giving up windows. You're going to get your pod. But in exchange, you get your own private space. People call it Dormzilla, and they canceled it. They call it Dormzilla. I forgot about that. Did we find a picture of Dormzilla? I mean, the actual designs, I saw it for a second. It's so funny. uh why can't we do a real examination of the rules that state every bedroom must have a window this is uh eric adams floated a similar idea to munger calling for stripping legislation that promises each citizen each city citizen window access this past march uh you don't need you don't need no window where you're sleeping it should be dark he said well that's actually directly in the quote that's this direct quote that's from munger this no this is from eric Adams, the New York, New York.

37:03Okay. I was like, that's sad. That doesn't sound like crazy. I put it, I put a picture of the floor plan in the chat team. If you guys can pull this up, uh, they should have called it the monger bug then 14 ,000, the cave, the monger cave. Um, I don't know. It's pretty, it's pretty funny. It's also, it's also just, I mean, maybe UCSB when I think of UCSB, I think of like, you know, it's this beautiful, like, so just amazing like near the beach beautiful sunlight like you definitely don't want to be in a cave like it's like i i feel like i taught i taught i kind of get the soviet cave the soviet like the soviet block era like you know big buildings because it's like you don't want to go

37:55dormzilla dormzilla is so good it was like this is what i need to do it's just like also just like can't you just give like a little bit more money and get the windows like windows aren't that expensive right it's such a wild such a wild thing anyway uh it's so so funny so um i don't know uh Tyler, did you figure out if Buffett has ever commissioned one play, poem, symphony, opera, ballet, painting, sculpture, theater, choir, orchestra, monument, home, museum, church, monastery, chanterie? Just at UCSB, to give him credit, he has the Charles Munger Physics Residence, which is a beautiful, stunning building.

38:39With windows. With many windows. There we go. And so, yeah, he decided to window max on this one. yeah he's taking a bar rail strategy some of the buildings have lots but obviously that's that's munger that's munger yeah yeah this is buffett so yeah what did we learn about yeah so i think um basically all of his donations he does do a lot of donations but they're all they're basically he just gives stock to people okay so he's never like saying i want this museum to be built in this way i think he just gives it to a uh you know endowment or institution or or some charity yes and they do what they want.

39:11And is that because he wants them to kind of try to 10X it and 10X it again? Yeah, he wants bag holders. Yeah, but I don't think he has very strong opinions on should kids have windows? But can you find an example of when he gave stock to an organization? Because if that organization went and commissioned an opera, I'm putting this in the truth zone. And I'm thinking that he did, in fact. Oh, the Munger Research Center in Pasadena does have many windows. Credit where it's due. Thank you, Taylor. You can't commit to the Munger cave, then you are really committed to delivery. He's given a lot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

39:52Okay, that's kind of sort of a circular thing. It doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, let's move on from Warren Buffett. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required. we have a clip from Scott Besson on, what is this, Newsweek? ABC Newsweek. ABC this week. ABC this week, okay. I'm learning. The$2 ,000 dividend could come in lots of forms. Let's play the clip. The$2 ,000 dividend could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways, George. You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president's agenda.

40:39You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill. Tyler, do you feel like this delivers a policy? How is that going to help the day trading community? Yeah, I was planning on doing rampant speculation with this$2 ,000. What am I going to do now? You're actually, you're basically fully, you've already committed the funds, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've already placed a ton of parlays. Yes. So like, what am I supposed to do now? I can't pay my parlay bill with a tax decrease on auto loans.

41:19Yeah. You're not looking for passive income. You're looking for massive income. Bro, I'm looking for massive income. I'm looking for generative media on a platform for developers. I'm looking for fall. The world's best generated image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Doomer says they should put a button on the IRS website that allows you to either receive the$200 stimmy check, or if you press the button, you have a 50-50 chance of getting either$4 ,000 or zero. I really think a lot of people would press that button.

41:54Absolutely, absolutely wild. Certified bangers. X now has an account called at bangers and it is an account that highlights the best bangers. They're testing something new, certified bangers. We want to recognize the very best posts that move the timeline ranked by authentic interactions. If your post is featured, you will get a certified banger badge on your profile for the month. Here are the top five bangers for October. Very cool concept. very similar to a project that Geordi sort of incubated about 12 months ago, almost a year ago January it was during the fires, I remember they were ripping it was called Banger Archive and Geordi would go and screenshot a post that had done very very well and resurface it and the findings were shocking do you want to break down what you learned from that project?

42:50Yeah, if you take any post that had gotten like a minimum of 3 ,000 likes and you just screenshotted it and then posted the screenshot and said, banger, it would immediately get usually more likes than the original post. It was crazy. There were some posts that had, I screenshotted them, they had like maybe 20 ,000 likes and then I posted on there to get like 150 ,000 likes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like millions of views. And some of it is like, there's, there's a timelessness and there's just like a hot, it's just high quality content is high quality content. There's certain, certain sentences that just are always funny.

43:22They're just always funny. Some of them get funnier. Some of them did fall off. Some of them would flop, even though they were a banger previously. There were a bunch of interesting findings from the banger archive project. Including at least one person that got mad, very mad. They were like, you could have just reposted it. Exactly. But the issue is it doesn't work like it. It doesn't archive it then because if they delete it, then it doesn't stay. But they want the right to delete. So I understand where they're coming from. Bangers on X is not - says, Donald Boat says, don't care about a badge.

43:56They should come to your house and tattoo it on your body. Yeah. Having a badge for a month is... Yeah. I don't know. It's cool. I think it's interesting because... It's also, I mean, so looking at the posts that they have here, they're just kind of random. Yes. So we were debating this. So first off, I think what is interesting about this is that it's not a new functionality in the X app. Like there are plenty of ways to surface popular posts, mainly in the discover page on the, uh, the explore page with the little window glass. So you just, you search there before you search, you see for you, you see trending topics, you see who to follow business news.

44:39There's a whole bunch of things that are, that are going on, uh, that are, that are like, it's basically like new UI, new projects. Like They could have created like a separate tab or something like that. They didn't do that. They just created an actual account on X that's native. And then they created an organization. And they just give you the organization tag if you post a banger. Which is, it's just a very interesting use of like the X primitives, like the code that's already there. Like clearly, this did not require software engineering to do. Which is just an interesting way to like create some new content on it.

45:16Zoomer says, did you guys seriously not include this banger? Zoomer is going to be so upset about it. We honestly need to get Zoomer on the show. I invited him. Because he's got some truly wild takes. He has. He's got to put him into audio video format. He's been on a roller coaster for sure. But yes, so we were debating, is the bangers account going to be teapot, tech, Twitter, venture capital related stuff? Will you see Naval in there? Will you see Marky Andreessen, Growing Daniel, Rune posts, these posts that go super viral, but within tech? Or will it be more broad? Will we see something from basketball Twitter or something from all sorts of different sub-communities?

46:03and it was just an interesting way to check the pulse because I feel like we are in a little corner of X but obviously there are folks that use X and they never interact with tech Twitter really. They're over in some other, they're talking about basketball or they're talking about football or they're talking about the Oscars or they're in film Twitter or there's so many different little sub pockets. Well, the result was that they went broad. A lot of the tech folks think it's slop but some of these were kind of interesting. The first one that they highlight is from 0x45, and it says, can y 'all please tell me the lore behind your profile pictures?

46:43And it got 285 million views. So people really enjoyed quote tweeting this. It got 39 ,000 quotes. The challenge there is that in itself is not a banger. It just got a lot of reach. Yes. Because people were quoting it. That's right. It has zero value as an individual post. Well, it starts a conversation. It creates more content. Like it is sort of a viral seed of content in this weird way, in a way that there are special words in that post that lead it to generating more content than an average post. If you just posted like, how did you pick your profile picture? Not a banger. The lore, it specifically worked.

47:30and it obviously did get a lot of attention but I agree with you that this is not something that like sparks thought I suppose or like laughter I don't know what is the lore Tyler what's the lore behind your profile picture I think it was my Halloween costume I was dressed up as Julius Caesar last year I thought that's just how you dress back during your studies yeah that's not exactly like deep lore but okay what's the lore behind your picture. It's just a picture of you. Wasn't it like a stock exchange or something? Yeah. There's not really deep lore, but I mean, I could tell a whole story about it.

48:08How it was at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO. And it was also the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which was horrible. So there's a lot of lore there. I don't know. But it doesn't have the same deep lore as... I don't know what people expect. Who already do you have any lore behind you? Now I'm curious who had the biggest quote tweet of this. Did anyone have a really, really great, uh, view post engagements quotes? Um, no one. Yeah. I'm not seeing anything that was like wild. A lot of people did, uh, did, um, did actually engage with this cold healing says their, their profile picture is their apartment in Peoria had a total Ivy colored, Ivy covered window that I really liked.

48:59One day in mid spring, I took all the furniture out of my bedroom to take this photo. Huh? I mean, the criticism here, the most common criticism has been congratulations. You brought Reddit gold to X. Hmm. It does seem a little bit like gold. It is even gold colored. How a mathematician sees the world. I saw this going viral. I didn't realize this was this viral 200 million views um what is the uh what is this saying tyler did you see this do you know what this what why this went so viral just because it's it's is it funny specifically like i don't it's just like they just drew a bunch of lines and like random math equations yeah like is this actually how anyone sees no it was like everyone was quote tweeting it like how a podcaster sees the world yeah i think we were just spinning off of it on different ways of of so it just became a good meme template yeah that makes sense what was the other one when your ai girlfriend was on aws us east one 60 million views that really shows you how big the like the tech community is or like the aws like ball knowers i think this one was is closer to what we would describe as like a normal a banger totally totally i mean uh netcap girl one of the first posts we reacted to on this show Great, great poster.

50:18Absolutely a banger. I'm shocked that 60 million people have the context to enjoy a post about AWS, US East 1, but I guess it is a dominant technology that lots of people interact with. So they must know. Or maybe there's enough context to enjoy it. Well, in other news. Yes, what else? there is a JP Morgan AI CapEx report and their Max Weinbach says this is a great way to put AI ROI into perspective to drive a 10 % return on our AI on our model AI investments through 2030 would require $650 billion of annual revenue in perpetuity which equates to $34.72 a month from every current iPhone user in perspective.

51:10Ross Hendricks says the AI math ain't math and two ways to fix it. 20X the revenue in the next five years or slash data center CapEx. I'll take the latter on 100 to 1 odds. So what does a CapEx pullback look like? There was another post here. I thought it was solid. Hari Raghavan says annual US spend on software is 400 billion. Professional services is 2.8 trillion. Logistics labor is 1 trillion. Healthcare admin, 1 trillion. Education labor, 1 trillion. That's 6 trillion. Globally is probably 3x. Every market is up for grabs, all of them. If you don't get that, you aren't ready for what's coming.

51:51650 billion is a joke. So again, I think, understand the concern. But when you put it in terms of every basically every iphone user needs to spend 34 a month yeah well obviously it's not directly yeah yeah no i know i know but it's like if you're using uber and on your phone and uber uh is spending a dollar per user on ai inference just for fraud detection like that counts right it's like it's like how much are you spending on cloud computing like cloud computing is a huge market, but you don't think about it as like, oh yeah, everyone spends... My household cloud budget. Exactly. It's like, no, there are some customers, some companies that spend billions and billions of dollars on cloud hosting and then you interact with services all over the place.

52:45And the broad cloud computing market is just bigger than the AI market right now and will be for a long time. When you look at the AI CapEx numbers, they're all smaller than just the traditional CapEx numbers. The actual just building of a normal data center is still higher than building of an AI data center. And that's because they're actually monetizing cloud computing very effectively. Because everyone needs a database for something or other, or a web hosting platform, something like that. Everyone needs Turbo Puffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

53:22Where else did you want to skip ahead a little bit? or you want to go back to the AI CapEx build out. It is very odd to put it in those terms. I remember someone putting Bitcoin in the same terms to me when Bitcoin was at like 10K or something. And he was like, look, the math is like, in order to have like a stable price at like the 100K price targets that people are talking about, you would have to have, you know, billions and billions flowing in every day and stuff. And it's like, and somehow that just wound up happening. And I remember being very convinced by this, by saying like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

54:04Like how could it possibly become an investment vehicle that is constantly seeing so much demand that it can justify such a huge, such a huge price. And yet like it just did because it just worked its way into like every single person's pension fund and like every single person's ETFs, like have a little bit of Bitcoin in them. And like, yeah. And you stayed long, even if you thought that that scenario was crazy because you were, you were like, well, I should have some exposure if it's at all within the realm of possibility. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There were more reasons to like stay long than, than actually dip out.

54:43Uh, the, the most interesting point from the semi-analysis, segment yesterday was this. Did you pick up on when he mentioned Tyler standing up? Tyler's rocking the standing desk today. Give us a review. How is it feeling? You haven't been standing the whole time. You've been sitting down. You need a standing desk. I like to move around, yeah. I like to stand up, sit down. Yeah. Well, we need to get you one of the taller chairs. But there was, In the semi-analysis interview yesterday, our guest was talking about this idea of putting an H100 index on the stock market. That was something he kind of alluded to.

55:25And I feel like that would be pretty, pretty crazy. I don't even know how mechanically that would work. But if all of a sudden... Just treating it like a commodity. Yeah, but actually taking something from, currently it lives on the balance sheets of Neo clouds and hyperscalers and actually taking a product and just like making it a commodity that you can just invest in directly is not really like, I don't think it's very simple. I think it actually is a complex process, but it certainly would potentially generate a ton more liquidity. There would just be a lot more investment dollars flowing in if there was a way to directly get in on the AI trade by just investing in the underlying assets.

56:11The AI CapEx trade is betting on AI, and then we need other people betting on the AI CapEx trade. Yeah, I don't know. Derivative bets. Johnson, you're saying we're going higher. I mean, that's certainly what Semi-Analysis is saying. And it's certainly, it just feels like the, it was foolish to, it is foolish or it was foolish to sound the alarm bells around the idea of like debt being used at all. It's like, debt is fine. Debt is good. The question is just like, are we actually over levered? There's not like, so when I look at like, oh, Meta has like 4 billion of debt for this one little side project thing.

56:56I'm like, that's still a very stable business. Like that's not like, oh, they're super indebted. Like they, oh, how are they going to pay their debts? Like there's just a wild continuum on like how much leverage is in the system, what that leads to in terms of like risk. We're now, we're at a turning point where we might be going really heavy levered. We might be bringing in, you know, more ETF money. Government guarantees. I don't even know if there's a NeoCloud in the S &P 500 yet. Like, that is an interesting breakpoint. Because once you're in the S &P 500, you, like, there is way more liquidity.

57:35Because there are funds, ETFs, that just buy the S &P 500. And so once you're in the S &P 500, you sort of have, like, price support. You have extra investors that are, like, lining up. And they're like, I'm riding with you no matter what, as long as you're in the S &P 500. And so. So, yeah, I mean, it's notable that Oracle is fully round tripped from before the OpenAI announcement. So leading up to the OpenAI announcement, they were at$241 a share. They're now at$235 a share. And so the market is no longer giving them credit for the OpenAI deal. That is interesting. Yeah. Well, NABUS is down 10 % in the last five days.

58:18Core Weave is down 25 % in the last five days, and Iron is down 17 % in the last five days. So... jitters, to say the least. Microsoft can't power all of its AI chips, says CEO Satya Nadella. This is from Zero Hedge. I don't know if you want to read through a little bit of this. Yeah, the thing that was notable here is CoreWeave on their earnings call yesterday. CoreWeave was saying that they aren't power constrained, that that's not their problem. What are they constrained by? I mean, they had a weaker forecast, which is part of why it's traded down dramatically today. But again, they grew revenue 2x, and they still trade it down pretty dramatically.

59:01There's more data center news from Joe Weisenthal. But first, let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Create an AI-powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. Get started at ai.studio.com. Joe Weisenthal is excerpting a Bloomberg News article that says, two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in NVIDIA's hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity. In Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust applied in 2019 to build a data center.

59:45Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting energization. stack infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital, has a nearby 48 megawatt project that's also vacant. Meanwhile, the city-owned utility Silicon Valley Power struggles to upgrade its capacity. 48 megawatts. What are we doing here? That seems like that's child's play. The data center for ants? That should be child's play, but they're not able to do it. What's going on? Byron Dieter was responding to Elon Musk's post saying, Elon was agreeing that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of foundational model providers.

1:00:30Byron said, I don't buy it at all. No chance that four companies deliver all software value in the future, especially as the software TAM is growing 10x to include a labor component. um yeah i think um we'll have to see obviously the the labs are extremely ambitious but uh i i tend to side side more with uh with byron here that as as long as the labs don't have uh as long as the labs are saying like you can access our best intelligence yeah vr api it feels like there's going to be durable competition while you have open source models, you know, lagging, but not lagging by very much at all. Yeah.

1:01:17My current, my current way to think about this is that, um, the labs are new hyperscalers as you, as you've put it before, uh, which means that they will compete in a lot of different categories and there will be matchups and ultimately it will depend on the quality of the teams. So, uh, the way I think about like browser base versus AWS is competitor is like, well, if Paul at browser base goes up against the AWS project manager and works harder and is more creative and, uh, and Marshall's capital and does the right deals and partners with, uh, the one password team, for example, uh, he can create a sustainable business.

1:02:02Sometimes that might be a duopoly. Sometimes that might be total victory. And a lot of it depends on the nature of the market that they're going after. Like, is it possible that in five years, OpenAI just gets completely destroyed on AI vertical video, but AI vertical video as a category wins and that there's actually a different startup that cracks it and makes it great and grows it huge. Like I think absolutely that's a possibility. Um, it just matters on like, there's a, there's a matchup that happens in every single category. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to say that the foundation model labs will win every category by default or they'll lose every category by default.

1:02:49It's like Google happened to win in email and maps, but they lost in chat and they lost in social networking and in RSS feeds. They won in some places, they lost in others. And that's just the nature of these competitions. It's like, if there's a particular team in place at one company, and then there's a startup that's better than that team, then the startup wins. If the team inside the company is better than the startup, you get Paul Buchheit at Google and he's building Gmail. I'm sure there were a lot of email founders out there that were trying to compete with Paul Buchheit, but Paul Buchheit smoked them.

1:03:28And Gmail is what it is today. And so I still lean on like, who are the actual folks working on the project? Are the best people inside the organization or outside the organization? And that's how it actually works. Over on the App Store charts, ChatGPT is still number one. Threads is number two. Shout out Connor Hayes. Number three is GoWish, your digital wish list. Create wishes and get inspired. Number four is Google Gemini. Number five is Sora. So Sora is sliding down the charts, but still in the top five. We'll have to look if Fubo can overtake Sora. Fubo? That would be a win for organic media.

1:04:11I am a little lost. Let me tell you about Profound. get your brand mentioned in chat gpt uh reach millions of consumers who are using ai to discover new products and brands um do you want to did you uh jay j bolt hard one says calm down people masa's son is a male kathy wood him selling nvidia today means nvidia has plenty of upside left it is it is i mean it just comes down to he will take he's selling nvidia he's going to give that money to open ai and then open ai is going to give it to nvidia so sold we will see um casey hammer who's coming on the show in 20 minutes says that remember we could automate 99.99 percent of air traffic control if it wasn't deliberately being used as a government funding canary so we will have to ask him uh he had another post uh earlier this week government or a month ago actually.

1:05:11Funding Canary or funded Canary? Canary. He said funding Canary. The Canary in the coal mine? What is a Canary? Yeah, we have to ask him about this. I saw his other post, which was interesting. I realized the Doom graphics engine running on a pregnancy test CPU could handle all of North American traffic control. I'm going to sit down for a bit. This needs to be in the bangers. Get this man, the bangers tag. this is such a good post. There's an article, I was curious, there's an article here from The Verge that says, digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC. That's insane.

1:05:50A lot of computer to read an old-fashioned P-strip. Yeah, that's what it does. You know that, right? Like when you see those digital tests, it's literally just like basically pointing a camera at a test strip and being like, did it turn blue or not? Or did it turn red? No way. Yeah, no, that's how it works. So basically they make a test strip and then it has a chemical in there. And when the person like pees on it, the human sample interacts with the chemicals and turns a color. And so normally you just look at it and you're like, oh, it turned the color, like it's pink. So that means one thing or it's blue.

1:06:24That means another thing. But to make it digital, they just point a camera at it and say like, what is it looking at? I'm pretty sure. I might be wrong. Who knows? This is probably fake news and it'll go viral on Instagram as it always does. In other news, Jan Lacoon says, see ya. He's out. He's out. He's out. From Meta. He's going to launch his own startup. Tyler, what's your reaction? I mean, this is pretty big news. I think people have kind of expected this for a while. Yeah. Basically since Alexander Wayne came in because Alexander Wayne kind of in some sense like took over as like the chief ai person at meta which was not enough room in this town for two ai not enough room for chief scientists yeah yeah yeah uh not enough room in this town for two chief ai scientists yeah and so uh jan is like very goaded ai researcher he's been in the game for like super long yes he did he uh i think probably his most famous paper is like le net which is like the original uh convolutional paper the net the net well i don't think he named it after himself i think that's what people call it i don't know what the actual paper is that's awesome that's like the it's like alex net yeah yeah yeah it's like not actually called alex yeah yeah um but yeah it was like the og convolutional neural network paper and then that kind of basically led into deep learning yeah yeah um and then the main thing is is like today he's like very much seen as being bearish on lm sure he doesn't think they can reason he doesn't think they can like do novel tasks or whatever.

1:07:54So he's been like very outspoken about that. I think that's maybe part of the reason why he's, he just has kind of a different vision from Zuck and Alexander Wang. But yeah, I mean, this is pretty big news. Do you think he will raise a private credit fund? Get into data centers. I'm no longer interested in research and the science behind it all. I'm interested in finance. I'm interested in finance. I mean, he has, I forget exactly what it's called, but he has like another kind of path that he sees to AGI. He's still a professor at NYU, which I think is where he does most of his research these days.

1:08:32So I think he'll probably just stay in academia. Does he have any active classes going on this semester? Because if he does, we should send you onto the campus to study. not just from the timeline but in the classroom and you can do a little on the ground reporting Taylor in the chat says la credit Has he taken a formal victory lap on scaling laws not holding because from your perspective it's a preemptive it would be a preemptive victory lap because I know Gary Marcus was sort of taking a victory lap with Richard Sutton after that Dwarkesh podcast, and then Andre Kirkpatty sort of confirmed that it might be a little bit harder to scale up the current paradigm.

1:09:27Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone is saying scaling up is going to get easier, right? You need bigger data centers. You need to spend way more money. I don't think today you can just say that pre-training is dead, though. That's definitely not true. isn't isn't that sort of yan lecun's take though or richard sutton's take or i think um yan lecun is is generally against all llms he's not just saying that like llms were they were very promising and then they kind of um fizzled out i think he's kind of always been against llms as a way to agi yeah um i i think it would definitely be preemptive to say that he was like correct though yeah okay i don't want to cut you off tyler but this is more important otp in the chat says buffett is low-key a huge boxing fan and i know at least one gym around his state that he has at least had a hand in funding oh and i looked it up and he's a huge fan of terrence crawford the boxer uh and he will go watch uh he'll go see the fights and he likes the cheap seats because he can see he has a better and he feels like he has a better angle that's interesting i like that i did not know so he is he's a patron of combat we're not ready to say he's a patron of of of the arts but in some way this is martial this is kind of some somewhat of a martial art down on warren buffett this guy's amazing uh loves mcdonald's loves boxing apparently loves allocating capital efficiently you know he he stays in his lane uh it's great uh do we have an update from brian johnson he came back from his his trip he was on psychedelics i feel like i'm expecting at least him to fall in love with at least one fast food restaurant i want him to to flip around on at least one and say okay yeah yeah, I'm an in and out guy now.

1:11:31He's been quiet. I do wonder if he'll update on anything or if he's just like so, so powered through that it just will not affect him at all. Because he was kind of framing it as like, this is like a big deal. It seems like he got through it just super fine. I saw a very viral post of somebody saying, I don't think it's a good thing that billionaires can talk about taking schedule one drugs, publicly with no repercussions. It did seem that he was doing it. This seems like still such a gray area where you can get it prescribed by a doctor, but it's still Schedule 1. He posted an update on his experience.

1:12:13He also talked more about why. He says there's potential, it's potentially a longevity therapy for psilocybin expands lifespan in mice. it can reduce inflation markers tied to aging it can increase brain entropy breaks rigid patterns and boosts long-term cognition and flexibility and yeah i don't know i i kind of agree with that with that uh that person who is uh who is saying like they shouldn't be able to talk about it publicly i feel like he should have a disclaimer or something because there's going to be there's people he is such a huge audience there's going to be some people that just look at what this is in the early in the early podcast era yeah you had uh tim ferris yeah who to his credit was like doing work on himself yeah and would share what he was doing yeah but he would talk about doing things like ibogaine yeah it's like a great you know super powerful psychedelic yeah and he wasn't directly saying, Hey, I think you should go take this.

1:13:20But when hundreds of thousands of people like follow Tim for health advice, it sort of is like an indirect, uh, it's somewhat of an, it's, it's somewhat of an endorsement, even if it's not directly. So no, no, I mean, I a hundred percent think some people will see this and be like, Oh, looks like he had a good experience. Let me jump straight to exactly his protocol, which is clearly not accessible for the average person. Like he has been building up a tolerance to this particular chemical for probably a decade. And so it's going to hit him very differently than it will someone who's not in the same place.

1:14:01We were joking yesterday about like, oh, if he wanted to like really challenge himself, he would have been at like a crowded concert or something. And there are going to be people that see this post and wind up actually doing that and wind up in a very, very rough spot. But I feel like there should be a little more disclaimers on this. Like, hey, I am running a crazy experiment on myself. Like, do not try this at home. He needs the – it's the – you know, you ever watch Jackass back in the day? Remember? It opened – every episode opened with, like, do not – these are stunt professionals. Like, they do this professionally.

1:14:35Like, yes, they just look like random guys. But, like, behind the camera there is a huge team. They are stuntmen. like and and even that was still like was like okay kids were like you know trying to trying to jump their skateboards down too many stairs and getting hurt um but it wasn't like that bad but there was still like i do not try this at home i did i did see some people responding and saying i took a similar dose to this and it ruined basically ruined my year it took me you know months and months to recover yeah i would say stay off the psychedelics stay on linear because linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

1:15:12Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product readmaps. That's where you want to be. You want to be locked in in linear. Yeah, I do. Knocked out. I have joked in the past. It's like, are psychedelics going to fix your life or just doing the tasks that you've been avoiding? Is that going to make you feel relief? Is that going to make you feel better about your life? It's like that meme of the anime ninja. If you're tired, do it tired. If you're sober, do it sober. Right? Just do it. John Coogan. If you're sober, do it sober. Well, if you want to help make history, AngelList is launching a new product to fund the most creative, hardworking, technical founders building the innovations that push humanity forward.

1:16:02AngelList is hiring a marketing lead to launch and scale this product. uh eric over at angel list a friend of ours and the chief legal officer over there says you don't need prior experience running a marketing function but you do need to be scrappy data driven and comfortable in a startup environment uh you'll own marketing strategy across a variety of channels to build awareness and drive growth uh i know what this product is i'm very excited about it uh and uh but i i uh unfortunately can't share but if you reach out to eric if you dm him on X, uh, and you're interested in the role, I'm sure he can share more.

1:16:38Uh, but, uh, excited, uh, excited for this one to come online, uh, in the next couple months. Uh, I thought this was good. Somebody found a post from Sam Altman in 2016. Oh, I didn't realize this is old. I thought he just posted this. 2016. So almost 10 years ago, it says digital addiction, digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time. And Blade says, Unk had this thought and immediately was like, how do I profit from this? The greatest to ever do it, DBH. Hilarious. Hilarious. Of course, ChatGPT wouldn't launch for many, many years. Yes. But in that same, when did he write the merge?

1:17:20That was like... Around the same time. Around the same time. But also... 2017. I don't know. To be fair, there are lots of things that you could... Like if you're trying to like layer up like the open AI is bad like case, like you don't start with like the product's too addictive. Like I don't think that's the claim. The claim is like it uses too much water or like it like one shots people or it does erotica or it's like AI slop. But very few people are saying like, oh, yeah, people are on their phones too much and it's because of open AI now. people are like it's people are on their phones too much but it's because of instagram and it's because of like social media actually not the ai because of sora well i think it's a little bit too early to say that i don't think it's that i don't think it's certainly short short form video have you ever been in in like the gym or in a coffee shop and seen someone scrolling sora like over i haven't seen it i meant i meant vertical video broadly totally totally which is i guess i guess like a good take here, which is like, how do I profit from this?

1:18:26I got to make an AI version of it. That's, that's probably like more of what they were thinking. Um, but, uh, but in terms of, in terms of actually profiting on, uh, on like digital addiction, uh, it doesn't seem like it's going very well. Yeah. For, for, Oh, it seems to be extremely addictive so much so that very, for a very small amount of people, like absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know how many people. Yeah. You know what else is addictive? Doing your sales tax with numeral, putting your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I'm also addicted to the Financial Times.

1:19:05The Financial Times has coverage of Sequoia Capital and what's going on with Roloff Botta out. Both of these top lieutenants pushed Roloff out. That's what they say. A leadership duo prepared to chart a new course at Sequoia after ousting of Imperial Botha. Venture capital firms, limited partners, hope Grady and Lynn can boost strategy and bring super intense period to close. They want to become less intense. That is very interesting. I would not think that. Okay, let's run through. Let's try and understand the level of intensity at Sequoia now and potentially in the future. So from this article, we'd love seeing Andrew Reid there.

1:19:51The Financial Times, let's just say, they had to find a picture where he was pushing. It looked like he was pushing. They're like, you know, we're going to tell a story about someone being pushed out. We need a picture of one of the lieutenants pushing as much as close as we can get to that motion. Because that's the story we're trying to tell. Let's figure out what's actually going on. Sequoia Capital's roll-off Bota was ousted by top lieutenants who lost confidence in his ability to keep Silicon Valley's most powerful venture firm ahead of its rivals. Bota stepped down as managing partner of the group last Tuesday following an intervention from Alfred Lynn, Pat Grady, and Andrew Reid, said multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

1:20:34The trio of senior partners had the blessing of the wider firm and Doug Leone, Sequoia's former managing partner, said the three of the people. Their move came on the back of concerns about Bota's management style and questions about Sequoia's artificial intelligence investment strategy and followed high-profile clashes between senior figures at the firm, the people said. Financial Times spoke to 10 people close to the firm. It's a leaky bucket over there at Sequoia Capital. They got the Financial Times on speed dial, I guess. Sounds like at least one of them was an LP. Yes. Also, it says people close to the firm, not necessarily people that are actually at the firm.

1:21:14It's hilarious to be like, oh, sorry, I can't be on our all hands today. I have a call. Oh, with who? I'm going to the dentist, actually. I'm going to the dentist. Yes, I'm going to the dentist. You went to the dentist last week. Oh, yeah, I'm going again. You're going again. I have another checkup. We just got to give props for one second to Sean McGuire for there being an article about Sequoia and not being in it. I mean, round of applause. Whoa, it's amazing. He's like, this is the first. Freedom. I'm not in the doghouse for once. Oh, thank goodness. I love it. Yeah, props to Sean for staying out of the.

1:21:53You did it. You did it. They said it was impossible. Dodging the bullets. Okay, so investors who have worked with both and institutions that bankroll Sequoia, known as LPs. So the LPs are snitching. The LPs are snitching. His ousting was motivated by a belief that a new generation of leaders would better serve Sequoia's LPs. So yeah, I mean, typically if there's a change in leadership, even a change in the GP structure at all, you would expect an email to go out to all the LPs. That's probably what they're leaking. But then a lot of the LPs probably got on the phone with people. And then the Financial Times got on the phone with those people, with those LPs.

1:22:28One of those described the removal as a revolt against both imperial style of leadership. following a period of upheaval at one of Silicon Valley's most successful and enduring firms. On an IQ level, he is off the charts. Off the charts. They didn't say which way he's off the charts. Are they calling him zero IQ? Negative one IQ? That would be terrible. No, they clearly mean he's very intelligent. He's 180, 200, 300 IQ. Who knows? But the heart of the matter is that Roloff is one of these people who always needs to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. Interesting, the person said. Adding that Votha's emotional intelligence did not match his intellect.

1:23:16Roloff is a legendary investor, a leader in human being, Sequoia's new leadership team told the FT. I mean, it's possible he was using too much Claude. And Claude kept telling him after every meeting, he would dump in like the meeting notes. and he'd be like, Claude. Am I goaded? Am I goaded? You're definitely in the conversation. You're absolutely goaded. You're absolutely right. The reason Sequoia has stayed Sequoia for 53 years is they've refused to cement themselves in hierarchy. Grady and Lynn will now run the firm while Reed and Grady will co-lead Sequoia's funds investing in more mature startups.

1:23:52So Reed is going up to the growth stage. Lynn and another partner, Luciana Alexandru, will co-lead the firm's early stage investment funds. So Alfred Lynn will be doing some seed stage investing, early stage. Bota, who's run its U.S. and European businesses since 2017 and took over the whole firm in 2022, will remain as an advisor. The 52-year-old grandson of Roloff Peek Botha, the last foreign secretary under South Africa's apartheid regime, and later a member of Nelson Mandela's first government was hired to PayPal by Elon Musk early in his career. He's led investments in Instagram, YouTube, MongoDB.

1:24:41Sequoia has returned more than$50 billion to its U.S. and European investors. Despite those successes, partners decided to lend, who is backed Airbnb, DoorDash, and OpenAI, and Grady, who's behind investments in Snowflake, Zoom, and ServiceNow, were better placed to lead Sequoia under both. But Sequoia has taken a more cautious approach to AI investment than some rivals. Invested a little more than$20 million in OpenAI in 2021, when the chat GPT maker was valued at about$20 billion and has boosted that stake in subsequent rounds. When OpenAI raised funds at a$260 billion valuation, Sequoia offered to invest$1 billion, but ultimately was given a stake, a fraction of that.

1:25:28Ooh. So they didn't get their$1 billion position, which still would have been less than 1%. Sequoia also holds a stake in Musk's XAI, but is focused on early investments in AI application companies such as Harvey, Sierra, and Glean, an approach also advocated by Grady. This is very interesting. Well, we have our first guest of the show, Casey Handler, in the Restream Waiting Room. Welcome to the show, Casey. How are you doing? Happy Veterans Day. Thank you. It's good to be here. Great to be here. Is this a real background? What's going on here? I mean, it's a real photograph. It's a real photograph.

1:26:07What is it a photograph of? Sorry, there's a weird lag there. That's a photograph of some sample containers made last year of pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas made in America. Fossil carbon-free, 100%. Yeah. Give us the update on Terraform. How's it going? What's the latest? Oh, Terraform's going great. Yeah, thanks. We're at 23 strong now. And we're literally putting finishing touches on our first full-scale synthetic fuel system. So this is a machine that takes in sunlight and air and produces pipeline-grade natural gas. Also kicked off work on a methanol process, which is kind of the other half or the flip side of the coin.

1:26:47So methanol is in the department of liquid fuel and natural gas is the department of gaseous fuel. So between those two, we've pretty much covered everything that humans need. And it's just kind of a fairly mind-boggling thing to think that in 100 years, in 1 ,000 years, in 10 ,000 years, humans who need hydrocarbons for any purpose, whether that's flying rockets or jets or making paints and fertilizers or pigments or medicines or whatever, will do so using a solar synthetic process and that we're building the first one. Do you fit neatly into any of the current political – I was going to say like political trends or initiatives.

1:27:29I mean we had Isaiah Taylor on yesterday from Velar. He's part of this group. Yeah, just raised. And there's like four companies that it feels like the administration is really trying to accelerate in nuclear. It feels like solar – Elon's a solar maxi. There's tons of energy around solar generally. But are there specific programs or milestones that are – or just conversations that are happening on Capitol Hill that you're like kind of drafting off of? I mean the genesis of Terraform, which is actually four years ago yesterday, was a basically very suggestive spreadsheet. And very early on I said like I don't really want to make this dependent on political – various political whims.

1:28:16And so it hasn't been. But actually across the spectrum, we deal routinely with crunchy coastal liberal elites and heartland Americans and everyone in between. And I've never met anyone who says they'd like their fuel to be more expensive, please. So we're in the department of making more fuel, making it better, making it cheaper, making it locally, making it free of various geopolitical catastrophes. And I think that actually, as I said, never met an American who disagrees. Yeah. What about the AI narrative? Is there, uh, is there, are you drafting off of that or is it just a, uh, like a separate industry that's growing or is there, is there basically a way to lower your cost of capital by, you know, doing a deal with someone who wants to buy a bunch of, uh, synthetically produced natural gas.

1:28:59Press release economy. Yeah. I should, I should hire you guys as my PFM. I mean, I mean, there's, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And at a certain point, it's like, if it's, if it's raining, make hay, right. Like there's just a little bit of like, okay, maybe there's something. But I'm wondering how you're like tussling with it. Like what's real? What would be over your skis to do? What's the actual application of the technology? Like take me through the various intersections. Yeah, one of the really fun things I get to do as a CEO of this company is, you know, basically make spreadsheets and charts all day long and try and figure out how this stuff will go.

1:29:37And I've got a blog post. I like to have ideas and write them down two years ago saying that the way that this is going to go is we're going to need solar power to power AI data centers beyond a significant leap beyond what we're able to do with natural gas. And people have paid attention to that. We've had significant inbound interest from most of the major players at this point saying, hey, can you help us figure out how to do solar plus battery, mostly or completely off-grid AI training data centers and inference data centers? And we say, sure, happy to help. and we've done quite well by that.

1:30:09It's actually a very, very strong market signal that maybe I'm in the wrong job and I should be an energy system design consultant rather than a CEO. But tough luck to my stars. I am determined to figure out how to build a hardware company and manufacture stuff because you can never have enough factories. You can always have another factory. More factories is more better. As far as natural gas goes, I think that the primary constraint that the AI hyperscale is seeing right now is in the Department of Methane Destruction. That is to say that the turbines that produce power, as opposed to the Department of Methane Creation, which is us and then every driller between here and maybe Charlotte or something like that.

1:30:46The United States at this point at least is, once again, the great beneficiary of God's bounty when it comes to synthetic fuel, when it comes to fuel in general, actually. Synthetic fuel is a work in progress. Breakdown, can you say more about the very suggestive spreadsheet? Yeah, sure. essentially you look at a chart and you try and make a prediction for what oil will cost to produce in five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years. I mean, peak oil, it's an idea that's been around for a long, long time. And of course, over time, oil drillers are very, very studious and hardworking people and they figure out better ways of getting oil out.

1:31:21And we've seen the fracking revolution. And I think that's just a wonderful thing. I genuinely do think it's a wonderful thing. Yes, it has certain climate implications, but at the end of the day, the human welfare benefits to cheap oil are a hundred times better than the climate problems caused by it. It's just a matter of fact that we will run out sooner or later. And so oil is unlikely to get radically cheaper in the future. On the other hand, solar is getting something like 40 % cheaper per doubling of cumulative production. And that takes about two years. So we're seeing like 20 % cost reductions per year.

1:31:52And when you see something like that, it's a little bit like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the 1970s, looking at the arrival of integrated circuits and consumer-grade computing systems, like very, very primitive computers by today's standards, and thinking, hmm, this is a product that has already hit product market fit. It's already hitting this cycle of cost improvement. There's going to be a big wave here. How do I ride that wave? How do I commodify that complement? How do I build value on top of this platform? And I'm thinking, what can I use these cheap solar panels for? There's already plenty of people out there building large utility-scale solar arrays and plugging them into the grid.

1:32:32And the grid itself, even then, was kind of strained by that. And in particular, the kind of grid development bureaucracy was strained by that. What else can you do this for? And I was like, well, off-grid stuff, obviously, behind the meter, build a giant solar array and then have a captive load attached to it for AI computing type stuff. That's an obvious one to do. And then fuel synthesis. Fuel synthesis was an idea I'd be thinking about for probably 30 years at this point because we have to do it on Mars someday. And I was saying, well, on Mars, it's enormously expensive due to energy cost, but energy cost on Earth is getting cheaper.

1:33:04I wonder when these lines cross. If I'm able to surf that wave of cheaper solar and I can pass most of that value onto my customers by keeping my costs under control, then at what point should it be cheaper to synthesize fuel rather than dig it out of the ground and ship it halfway around the world? And the answer then, and I think the answer is basically the same now, was sometime this decade? You know, 20, 30 at the outside. Okay. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. A few people had. What are they doing about it? Not what I would do about it. Okay. Well, I guess I should probably stop, you know, kicking myself in the shins at NASA and go and do this at, go and start a company and at least give it a go.

1:33:39Find out what it's like. See if building a hardware company is as fun as everyone makes it sound. And here we are. So, you know, say it's an info hazard to play around in spreadsheets too much. What happens to the price of land as solar, uh, as, as solar energy production costs, uh, decline? That's a good, good question. Um, cause, cause ultimately the, the value of, of land under solar is the value of what people are willing to pay for that power and the things they do with that power. Um, and so what we've seen, for example, is that, um, that the value of land under solar is something like a 50, 100 times higher on a per acre basis or per revenue basis than you have kind of average agriculture, even in a fairly developed agricultural state like the United States.

1:34:29And that's the same for synthetic fuel. The flip side, actually, and the thing that I worry about in terms of AI safety is that it's pretty clear to me that the economic utility of land that's being used as solar array to power an AI data center is over$100 ,000 an acre at present value. And that's just higher than almost any existing human use other than particularly dense and large cities, which makes me wonder, maybe not in 10 or 20 years, but in 30 or 40 years, whether the AIs will encroach upon our agricultural land and make it harder for us to eat. Yeah, this runaway AI that just decides it's in my best interest to blanket as much of the US or the world as I can with solar to further myself.

1:35:11Yeah, I mean, it seems to create a strong economic forcing function. Maybe we can slow it down a few years with usual regulatory stuff. But I think that may be one of the reasons why Elon has been talking more about doing large-scale AI development in space. If you can convince the AIs they're better off doing it in space where they don't have to fight with humans, maybe they'll go there first instead of... There's plenty of land on Earth. There's more land on Earth that's not being farmed than there is land that is being farmed. But it's not inexhaustible. something like 100 ,000 terawatts lands on the oceans and 50 ,000 terawatts lands on parts of the earth that no one lives on or uses and humans consume about 10 terawatts of energy so there's plenty to go around for now for now that makes sense I want to get into NASA government shutdown, bunch of stuff but before let's go even more schizo Tucker had a guest on the show yesterday that was talking about chemtrails.

1:36:12What's your take on chemtrails? I'm a pilot, and I've flown around a fair bit, and I've never seen one. I think that playing around in kerosene is not very good for you. And we do see healthy impacts from people who live too close to freeways and things like that. There are definite health impacts from burning the longer chain hydrocarbons. As far as chemtrails go, I must confess, I'm not as deeply familiar with various conspiracy theories like that. Although I do think that NASA has been covering up life on Mars. So we'll see about that. Covering up life on Mars? Yeah, before we talk about life on Mars, the chemtrails thing is funny because you have to believe that tens of thousands of people are coordinating to do this large-scale operation.

1:37:01Not one of them has ever come out and said, hey, here's evidence that this massive operation is happening without anyone's attention. There are aircraft which spray chemicals, right? Like they're called crop dusters. You have crop dusters. And they have a very particular look and feel. Of course. And then, of course, if you spend much time doing like structural calculations and you look closely at say a 777 or something, it's pretty clear that, sorry, my son's at work today and he just wanted to see if he'd come in. It's a family-friendly show. It's Veterans Day. Yeah, yeah, his face is not on the internet, though.

1:37:36Nor is he a veteran of any wars, and hopefully never will be. Crop dusters, aircraft. You know, I fly to Australia every now and then, and you're like, you know, actually the conspiracy theory that planes can't contain enough fuel makes more sense to me because it seems unlikely to me that you could actually keep a plane that big up in the air for 14 hours and cross an entire ocean, like halfway around the world. Oh, yeah. Like, where are you putting all the chemtrails you're spraying out? Like, in the overhead bin, there's never any room in there. So I don't understand. And like, yeah, yeah, we got plenty of space.

1:38:03That's what doesn't work out. Let's bring the fuel and the toxic chemicals or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there are levels to the conspiracy because there is just the world of like, what if it's just like leaded gasoline where it's like sort of the chemicals are deranging people in a bad way because it's just pollution. Like, I don't think people really debate that like the possibility of pollution is happening. It's different when it's like, okay, yes, it's like specific chemical that does a specific thing and triggers a specific reaction from the population. I mean, there are plenty of chemicals that can make you crazy.

1:38:35Most of them taste very good. Really? Like what? Stevia. Diet Coke? No, I mean, like, quite literally, like, until the invention of GLP-1 agonists, like, something like a third to a half of Americans were going to die quite younger than they otherwise would because of, you know, weight-related heart disease and obesity. Why? Because sugar tastes good. Yeah, yeah. Okay? That's true. That's a poison. It's actually poisoning you. It's actively degrading the quality of life. Ray Peet would disagree. But why are we covering up life on Mars? Yeah. So to be fair, you know, you don't want to be the boy who cried wolf and shout.

1:39:13It's aliens. It's aliens. It's aliens. But so what tends to happen in these scientific fields is it becomes very fashionable to be quite skeptical of things, as it should be. But at the same time, you know, evidence will accumulate over time. And so you'll have this kind of neat cottage industry of people who can explain away any evidence they see without necessarily updating their prior knowledge or prior assumptions about it. And I was trained at Caltech by the geologist. I've forgotten his name. This is age. Okay, it's coming to you. It'll come back to me eventually. Kershvink, Joe Kershvink.

1:39:49And a legend, legend among men. and he was the guy who, when he got his sample of ALH 84001, a Martian meteorite that was found in Antarctica a while ago now, that he identified these cubo-hexor-octahedral magnetite crystals that were in the meteorite. It's not controversial that they were found in the meteorite and it's also never, ever been demonstrated they can be made by any known lab process other than culturing magnetotactic bacteria that use them for navigation, essentially. So, you know, the meteorites are full of magnetite. Magnetite is a naturally occurring mineral. But there's a particular configuration of its crystalline form, which we only know can occur.

1:40:31We only know ways it can occur with biological precipitation. So, yeah, that's called the magnetophossil if you want to Google it at home. And I think it's about as strong as evidence as you could possibly hope for finding without actually going there and kicking rocks yourself. Are you familiar with this thing, the great unconformity in the Grand Canyon? Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. Can you explain this to me? Somebody sent this to us. I was like, you've got to talk about this on the show. And I was just going to read the Wikipedia. But now we have someone who actually is familiar with it.

1:41:00Not an expert. I don't want to pop quiz you, but it would be cool. No, I've been there. I've been there several times. It's amazing. I've taken my kids there. So if you go to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, there's a trail called the Bright Angel Trail. And if you're very, very fit and it's not too hot, you can walk down to it and back in a day. But I would recommend starting at midnight. You get down to it in the early morning. and then after daybreak, but then you get back up before it gets hot. Or take a couple of days, enjoy it. But there's also an exposure just northeast of Vegas at a place called Frenchman Mountain, which you can just drive right up to.

1:41:30Although last time I was there, it was unfortunately covered in broken glass. Okay, great unconformity. So over time, the oceans rise and fall due to climatic variations and also land rises and falls due to geological stuff. And when land is above sea level, in general, it's eroding. And when it's below sea level, it's in general accumulating sediment. And so what you see in the Grand Canyon, that is to say that most of the Grand Canyon is a series of layers of carbonates, which means it's shallow oceans that are forming reefs and sand dunes and sandstones, which means it's a riverine kind of delta environment or something where the land is gradually sinking relative to the ocean, creating an accommodation space in which new dirt and soil and rocks and stuff can come down and fall and be compacted and form these layers.

1:42:15And then what happens is if the ocean falls down or the land gets lifted up, then you see erosion. And what happens is that newly formed rock gets eroded away for a while and then it sinks again and then it starts to build up again. And so you get these like what are called little unconformities, which is where you've got a little period of missing time, a million years here, 100 ,000 years there, 10 years over here and maybe 10 million years over there, where the land has been above sea level and so no new rock has been forming or if it has, it's since been eroded away. Okay, so this occurs at all scales.

1:42:40And it turns out that at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or very close to the bottom is a thing called the Great Unconformity. and it's kind of mind-boggling because the rocks on one side of this are this kind of the Vishnu Schist basement rock. It's this ancient rock that forms the you know the core of our North American continent at least in this place. It's ancient at crystal and it's 1.6 billion years old. It's like what 13 % of the age of the universe and then literally like one thumbs width away from that above it is the the oldest sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon which are 500 million years old.

1:43:09I think they're just after the Cameron explosion. Okay, this is stretching my memory. It's a long time ago now, 535 million years ago. And it's just kind of crazy. So what happened there? It's a missing billion years. It's a missing billion years. And so in that time, rock formed, right? Sure. And probably entire mountain ranges formed. It takes 100 million years to form a mountain range and then eroded away to nothing. Sure. So like the Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian Mountains were a mountain range taller than the Himalayas 130 million years ago. Pretty much eroded away to nothing. So you could form and destroy a mountain range the size of the Appalachian Mountains.

1:43:47In that time? Eight, nine, ten times in that time. Entire continents form and sink. Entire super continents form and sink. Probably not dinosaurs back then as far as we know. But there was definitely like lots of life in the oceans and some plants and stuff on land and some insects and things. Actually insects I think came later. look don't quote me on this check wikipedia ask grok um grokipedia but it's all gone it's all gone it's all uh at least you know and and when you look at one of those geological time scales you see a lot of recent rocks and not so much detail in the older rocks and that's just because like as you go back in time you get exponential destruction of of the geological record there is actually a corner of the eastern grand canyon where what's called the grand canyon super group which is a a series of layers it's inclined like this kind of pokes up and that's the only place on earth that we have rocks from that age that's kind of an intermediate intermediate age rock um Yeah, it's just bizarre.

1:44:34So you can go there just outside Vegas. Like skip the tables for half a day, drive out. Maybe they could put a casino at the Great Unconformity. I mean, on the Wikipedia page, the reason this is so interesting is because on the Wikipedia page it says, there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the Great Unconformity among geoscientists. There are hypotheses that have been proposed. It is widely accepted that there was a combination of events which may have caused such an extreme phenomenon. one example is a large glaciation event which took place during the neo protozoic around 720 million years ago um and so there's like a whole bunch of theories but it's just funny it's like it's how did they grind away so much so much rock yeah because because essentially like where this where the rock is forming and being destroyed is very close to sea level almost always right yeah and and so at some point the rock that is on the underside of the great unconformity had to have been lifted up near sea level.

1:45:32And then it has to have sunk down a mile or two to form all the rocks above it, right? And now it's been lifted up again above sea level because the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, is obviously above sea level. Otherwise, it wouldn't float to the ocean. So it's kind of crazy that this goes up and down. Yeah, I mean, that's geology for you. There's still work to be done. Maybe you'll figure it out one day. But actually, we're in the process of forming a new great unconformity, right? The rocks below the great unconformity, the Vishnu Shishtar being eroded by the Grand Canyon as we speak.

1:45:58so if the Grand Canyon ever fills in and starts to build rocks again in the future the great unconformity will be below where it is now in that part of the world okay well let's talk about something we can all agree on which is 3i Atlas what's going on with that? you know this is a comet yeah some people think they're saying it's a comet a lot of celebrities are saying it's an alien ship but what's the Casey Hanmer give us a breakdown on it we haven't been following it There's been enough happening in technology. Likewise, I've been focused mostly on the finer details of fixing electrolyzer seals and things like that.

1:46:36I would say that these interstellar objects are super interesting, and I would like to get a close look at them. And I really wish that we had some, like maybe Tom Mueller could build a series of spacecraft with lots of onboard ISP that we park out near the moon or something. And then when one of these comes through, we press the button, and it immediately adjusts orbit and shoots off in that direction, and we get a nice flyby, we get a few photos. that'd be super cool. We're seeing them about once a year at this point and that's just because our telescopes have gotten better. As far as 3i Atlas goes I have a cousin who routinely texts me updates on like it's an alien ship for sure I don't think it is.

1:47:11I think it's a comet I think that actually some of the earlier ones were weirder than it. I think it's a very large comet, a very old comet seems to be a comet to me. But if you were a sufficiently advanced alien race would you not want to just attach yourself to a comet that was headed in the direction you wanted to go and just ride along with it? No. No, I think... Too slow. Yeah, exactly. Well, who knows how long the aliens live, but I went to Caltech to study kind of warp drive to try and understand how to do that, and I didn't succeed, obviously. But someone might one day. But I think that if you've seen Avatar 2, the spaceships that Jim Cameron puts there for the humans to fly to Alpha Centauri are kind of what I have in mind when I think how would humans or aliens that are comprehensible and legible to humans travel.

1:47:54It'd be something like that, you know, enormously energetic, uh, relativistically, uh, accelerated, uh, very, very bright, very flashy, very obvious. Um, or, or maybe something like warp drive if we can ever figure it out. Um, but I think, you know, a comet that takes a hundred thousand years to kind of wander its way from the nearest start to here. Very boring, very boring. Yeah. Boring. Yeah. Uh, moon or Mars. This was a debate that we were having earlier. It seems like, uh, The Jared Isaacman nomination was kind of reinvigorating some discussion over whether the U.S. should prioritize Mars over the moon.

1:48:29Elon has been pro-Mars for a very long time. Moon is kind of incidental. Other folks see moon as like a key geopolitical race that we have to address right now and win. And then that gets you a ticket to the real competition, which is Mars potentially. how are you thinking about the trade-offs between resources spent going to the moon, resources spent going to Mars?

1:48:58So initially I was quite pro-Mars, and I wrote a couple of books about doing stuff on Mars and realized that, you know, its advantages are actually, like, both destinations are pretty difficult in their own way. They both have their challenges. and actually I think what SpaceX correctly realized is that if you're going to do anything meaningful in either place, you have to develop a rocket system like Starship that can basically fire her's mass at pretty much any target in mind. It's not a fair fight kind of situation. And so once you have something like a Starship, doing something pretty cool on the moon is very straightforward.

1:49:35But if you're constantly trying to put together some mission that's just made of little bits and pieces and small puny rockets and very expensive, you know slow going contracts and stuff you really struggle to do anything meaningful on either of them ever um so yeah i'm very much in favor of of uh you know kind of incidentally on the way to mars setting up a couple of lunar research stations and putting a few thousand people there and running it like the space station is now but for more than six people yeah um and i think we could totally do that for like antarctica program level budget with starship yeah my my my theory on it just as you know an outsider has always been uh fire hose mass at low earth orbit get star links going every day tons of i love those montages that are just showing falconines up and back every single day do that in low earth orbit then do that for the moon and same thing like dozens of flights to the moon and back every single day and then and then start you know weaving to Mars because it feels like Mars is just a completely different set of trade-offs and cadences based on when we can actually launch.

1:50:45It's not every day. And so just getting the reps in of like humans, just even just a human or I don't know, maybe a robot at some point, like getting off of a, like landing a rocket on a celestial body and then getting out and jumping around. Like even if that's, if that's happening every single day, it's going to be, that's a lot of that has to transfer to Mars, I would imagine. What's the most underrated planet? Yep.

1:51:12Underrated planet. What's a planet that you think about a lot? I spent a lot of time thinking about Mars. Mars? Still underrated? Most people would put it at their number two after Earth. Yeah. I had a little side project where I built the highest resolution topware map of Mars using a bunch of NASA data that's kind of in the archives. Interesting. Not being directly funded. So I have a six-meter resolution global topography map for Mars. And I've been doing some, like, hydrology simulations and stuff with it to see what happens when we terraform. Yeah, so it's kind of hard to appreciate, but, like, planets, even small planets like Mars are overwhelmingly big.

1:51:50Once you start dealing with these planetary-scale data sets, it's like 200 terabytes. You know, I start asking my wife, can I please buy another hard drive? And she's like, you've already spent$5 ,000 on hard drives this month. You should slow down. okay but like planets are really really big and yet i have a you know almost photorealistic render of of mars to you know sub 100 meter resolution sitting on a on a spinning platter on my desk at home it's pretty wild that's pretty good we get to do that i could never have dreamed of that when i was a kid it's just unimaginable yeah air traffic control should it be run by a pregnancy pregnancy test no i don't think so um but it could be So, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, like the shoulds, the normative discussion is kind of beyond my pay grade.

1:52:35But the descriptive discussion of like whether it could is something that I think I can opine on. And, yeah, I mean, fundamentally what a graphics system does on a computer is it's doing roughly a billion collision calculations a second. And that's a much more sophisticated graphics engine than Doom, but still it's something that you can buy in any PlayStation or something today. And ATC is just not that complicated. It has a bunch of edge cases, but it's not that complicated. And it's also a system that, for justifiable reasons, is very, very conservative about adopting new technology. But at the same time, the cost that we endure as a civilization to various air traffic control problems.

1:53:20And they're not only caused by government shutdowns. Kind of undeniable. And there's also an efficiency aspect. We could probably shave 5 % of our fuel usage if we were able to have basically weather optimal direct point-to-point flights for all aircraft that wanted them rather than usual ATC thing, which is you basically follow existing instrument-approved routes between, in many cases, places on maps that were once radio navigation beacons but no longer exist. Yeah. You mentioned giving the project to the Mag-7. I wonder, do you think that there's an opportunity for a startup to sort of do like the Andurl flipped model, build it with venture capital dollars, and then try and sell it to the government once you have a better system in place?

1:54:00And also, is the actual software and hardware actually the problem? There was that Nathan Fielder HBO special that was kind of like, it's maybe more about pilot communication and human training, human error when something goes wrong, and it's not necessarily like a computer system and a bad line of code. Yeah, I think you probably still want to have people sitting in control towers looking at radars. I'm not saying the solution to our problem is to fire every last air traffic controller. quite the opposite. But if you think about what those air traffic controllers are doing, a lot of the time, it's stuff that could be a few lines of code.

1:54:38It's one of these things we've got, I don't know, 1 ,000 corner cases, but 99.99 % is just one case. It's just the standard instrument routing. Well, just like you basically get a clearance to fly a certain route at a certain time. And then all goes well, you'll never see another plane. But every now and then, you've got to keep an eye on things. You've got to control the airspace. it's not it's not a complicated puzzle i mean like uh microsoft flight simulator 95 had a pretty good simulation of this so it's the sort of thing that i think is uh well well within our technical capabilities yeah i mean i guess something that we actually want to do yeah i guess to some degree you can forecast the entire flight path before the plane takes off and make sure that it does not intersect with any other flight paths at any point in time yeah that's relatively straightforward i think i think some people on x were like oh you know sure we should just hand another monopoly to Starlink to do all this stuff.

1:55:30Actually, I don't think that's the case. I think that you could actually design a series of algorithms that would run centrally but also autonomously on every aircraft. And so you have everything in aviation is multiple layers of backups. So there's always something checking the system. Sorry, a co-worker just brought in a new baby because I start this company and then all my employees start having more children. I think I'm doing something right. That's a great sign. Yeah. But yeah, so the idea there is like your onboard computer, onboard your aircraft, if you're flying a commercial 737 or something, should be like getting minute by minute updates on weather and tailwinds and headwinds and so on.

1:56:08and being like, well, you know, I can save five cent fuel if I go up 1 ,500 feet, you know, route into the jet stream. Sorry about the bumps, everyone. And we get the rip faster. And then it just kind of automatically does the flocking thing where it sees and avoids and doesn't intersect with other aircraft. But yeah, just the technology adoption cycle at the FAA is understandably, and airlines and aircraft manufacturers, understandably pretty conservative, but it's also very, very slow. And so we end up with a situation where delays and actual crashes and stuff are occurring because the system is not as good as it could be.

1:56:43So I think the way, I mean, it's way beyond my pay grade, but the way you would do this is you'd basically commit to buying or purchasing a family of improved products that are interoperable according to some pretty straightforward standard. You could base it on Australia and Europe has largely automated ATC at this point. And then you integrate these systems alongside. Europe is automated. What is there already? Europe automated air traffic control before us. Europe and Australia is a terrible place to be a pilot. Like in the United States, you can fly VFR. Like when I was a private pilot, I flew VFR.

1:57:14Visual flight rules under 18 ,000 feet. Not instrument. You can do basically anything you want. And I don't know if the ATC systems could handle that quite yet. But when I was flying, we didn't have ADS-B rolled out very well. So basically you had to look out the window all the time and try and spot out the aircraft. It's pretty dicey in LA sometimes. Do you have a strong take on the AI CapEx build out? It feels like, I just feel like your company and a lot of the companies kind of of your vintage are very much aligned with like, do something really ambitious that as it scales, it compounds. And all of a sudden, like once it's working, you're marshalling.

1:57:58I do imagine when I think about the story of your business, I think about billions and billions of dollars flowing into more and more solar panels and just this crazy flywheel once the technology gets working. We've talked about this in the past. It feels like that's kind of happening in the context of token factories right now. But are there anything that has given you jitters to the structure or how things are playing out? or do you see it as like one narrative is just like it's felt cool to watch big things get built. And I'm wondering like how you're processing like the AI CapEx build out, all the crazy CapEx that's going on.

1:58:45I think the United States has always done well when they're able to take a difficult problem and transform it into a form that can be solved by pouring money on it and then pouring money on it. Let's give it up for pouring money. Yeah. And so if someone were to ask me, do you really think that every dollar being spent on hyperscaling right now is being spent the best possible way it can? No, of course not. Yeah. But is it nevertheless efficient from the perspective of competition to spend as quickly as they can to ramp this technology up right now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's obviously a there there.

1:59:18I use all the models every day. I'm a discerning customer, and I think that's quite transformational. They frustrate me as well. But the direction of improvement is very clearly going in one direction. And this is not a race where the United States can afford to be anything but first. And I think it's a real question to wonder, well, what does the UN Security Council look like in 15, 20 years when basically most of them today have their own nukes? and I think they will actually, UN Security Council permanent members all have their own use these days. And in the future, most of them will not have their own AI sovereignty.

1:59:56Oh, do you think that the AI sovereignty projects are not going to bear fruit because they're underscoped or underscaled? Because I feel like a lot of countries would say, like, you just answered the question. A lot of countries would say, we're doing a one gigawatt data center. Like, we're good. We're checking the box. The United States is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in this direction right now. And how much is, I mean, China, I guess, is serious about it. Do you think Russia is serious about it? It does not seem like you're serious about it. It does not seem like you're serious about it.

2:00:26Some of Russia's biggest clusters are like 1 ,000 GPUs. Australia, we did hear, is investing in quantum computing. Do you think that that's going to be relevant? No. Can you say more? Just sent the market down. I'll say it in Australia. No. No. No, it's a shame because Australia has basically the best solar resource on earth and it's a modern Western liberal democracy with rule of law and incredible natural resources and 25 plus million well-educated wealthy people. And every time there's a new wave of technology, they go, never mind, mate, we'll catch the next one. Trust me, crazy. So that's why I'm here.

2:01:12But they have Kira. You ever surfed there? It's one of the best point breaks of all time. Yeah, yeah. The beach is doing comparable. I live in the San Gabriel Valley. I come to Santa Monica about once every two years. Under duress, I will add. And people say, oh, Santa Monica, it's the most amazing beach. And I'm like, yeah, maybe if you're from, I don't know, like Canada or something. But I grew up on Kilkare Beach in the center coast of New South Wales. I wouldn't swap all of Santa Monica for like a single bucket of sand from that beach. it's the best sand best sand on earth you've been there?

2:01:46you've surfed in Australia? all over Australia I didn't know that DBPN down under market calendars down under I love Australia Australia feels like just a very large California it feels like California as a continent a violet crumble that'll get me going I love violet crumble last thing I was curious to get your take on this company T1 Energy went super viral last week because they're just making a massive amount of solar panels. Everyone got really excited because including ourselves saying, wait, we know how to build things. And it turns out it was a Chinese company that was like a forced seller of their, of their manufacturing facility.

2:02:30Do you think there's anything that we can learn from T1 Energy and what the original kind of builders of this facility did in terms of like just scaling that out? I haven't actually heard the story, so I'm not the right person to comment. Yeah, T1 Energy. I mean, you'd be interested in the story. It's an$800 million stock. They're making one gigawatt worth of solar a year, and people got really excited. That's tiny. Yeah, I mean, like globally, we're going to make 1.4 terawatts of solar this year and deploy about 700 gigawatts. Yeah. So a couple of years ago, I used to say it's about one megawatt per minute, but now it's closer to one megawatt every 40 seconds.

2:03:1440 seconds. So, yeah. We've got to get those numbers up. Okay. And so are you like in – Like two billion modules this year. Like would you encourage – Like one for every family on earth. Would you encourage America or like the venture ecosystem or the government to try and bring manufacturing capacity back to America? Because when we've talked about this before, you've always said, hey, if China's going to be subsidizing it, just buy as much as possible. And that makes sense economically. But over the long term, if you need to scale exponentially, there might be a case for reshoring. Do you think that that's a good idea?

2:03:57Yeah, I think controlling the supply chain for solar technology is super important. And just because China currently leads doesn't mean the U.S. can't lead in the future. We've seen this in the past, right? The industry is extremely dynamic. You wouldn't have to try all that hard. If you had like a 5 % edge over your competition, you could be the number one in five years or something like that, right? Obviously, factors of production are different in the United States. Why didn't you look into that or why aren't you vertically integrating? Is that just something that might happen in the future?

2:04:28I mean, it might be the last thing we vertically integrate. So it's not really a problem for venture or government. It's a problem for banks. It's like buy the machine from Germany, put it in a shed, put it in a giant building and start showing them out. It's pretty well understood how to do this. It's not really a technology problem, technology development problem. But that's my bread and butter. My bread and butter is like doing weird, complicated stuff. Is the reason that it's in China mostly labor cost or environmental concerns or regulation or the cost of capital? Do you have an idea of like, I understand like the whole story of, yeah, the whole story of like why the iPhone landed there.

2:05:07Like I understand that story a little bit. I don't necessarily understand why solar panels went there specifically. Yeah. I mean, Australia invested a bunch of money into developing this technology. And then Germany spent a bunch of money on manufacturing it at a steep loss. And both of them basically gave up at some point. And meanwhile, China looked around and said, hmm, we just had the Beijing Olympics. We're kind of a big deal now. And, you know, we'd like to do something about Taiwan sooner or later. But the last time anyone got uppity in the eastern China Sea area, they did a lot of damage until the United States curb stomped them by choking their supplies of energy.

2:05:42And it turns out that neither Germany nor Japan had anywhere near sufficient supplies of domestic energy sources. And once the combined bomber offensive and the submarine war took out their ability to transport oil from where it was being made to where it was being used, basically both war efforts collapsed within months. So if you're China, you'd be like, hmm, where's my oil coming from? You know, 16, so 12 million barrels a day is coming from Middle East. a long way away, via the Straits of Oman and the Straits of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca, which we don't control, can't control, don't have a deep blue water navy, via our historical and current geopolitical adversaries who kind of allow the oil to pass by because they're playing nice today.

2:06:27Maybe it's actually something we should spend because the Chinese political economy is much more kind of expansionary and it's spending, it's much more supply-driven rather than demand-driven. So if we're going to spend a bunch of money on more or less inflationary projects, may as well spend them on giant solar panel factories and they got really good at it. Or credit to them. It's a bloody lot of hard work to do that and they did it. And now basically we all benefit from that if we're willing to buy from them. But that doesn't mean it's something that's intrinsically impossible for the United States to do.

2:07:01It's just a question of will. It's a question of who actually wants to go and do this at scale. always a pleasure always a pleasure thank you for taking the time after you create abundant energy we're going to require that or we're going to make a bid for you to become a you know invest more of your time in podcasting yes we do enjoy this that'd be hard to do at this point yeah you have you've been on a tear congratulations you've been all over well I know your secret sitting around talking about stuff is incredibly fun. It's so much fun. It really is. Well, thanks for doing it with us today. Great to see you.

2:07:41Coming by. You too. Talk soon. Happy Veterans Day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one in ranking on G2. We have a surprise guest joining us in just a few minutes. We'll see if he can join in the Restream waiting room. He says he's down to join. In the meantime, let's go through some more posts. Back in the timeline. There's some news in the Wall Street Journal. You see some of these images leaking from Nano Banana 2? No. What is this? They are a little too photorealistic for my preference.

2:08:27Okay, what's going on here? Oh, wow. Okay, so it's got Jeffrey Epstein and Diddy together. These are very accurate images. These seem remarkable. Third term. Yeah. Is this? So this is from Roberto Nixon, who came on our stream at MetaConnect. He says, wild times. Nano Banana 2 apparently leaked a few hours today on some platforms, and the limited results by a handful of users have been pretty insane. The model was apparently from an uncensored, slightly older checkpoint when it actually launches. It won't be this uncensored, of course, but it's crazy to think what a handful of engineers at the Frontier Labs have access to and the chaos they could cause if they so wished.

2:09:09I wonder, yeah, it's so interesting. I would love to actually trace where these leaks came from, what the whole flow is, because it's possible that there's some Photoshop in here as well. If you're in the business of creating a leak, or a fake leak, you can do all sorts of funny things. There was a, what was it? There was someone who, what did they do? They went and they filmed something normally and then they went into After Effects and they made it look like they were on a green screen for it. And they made fake behind the scenes footage for their real footage. So it looked like they were, so they actually went surfing and then they made a CGI version behind the scenes.

2:09:56just like that there's that Apple trailer now for the for the introduction to Apple TV and they say we made it all practically we did it all practically let me see we need a we need an image for for our next guest because we are not doing video we are just doing he is semi-non but But we have Growing Daniel in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Growing Daniel into the team. There he is. Growing Daniel, how are you doing? Doing really great. How are you guys doing? Fantastic. You're doing well. It's great to finally have you on the show. It only took, I don't know, 20 invites. But you've been busy, and you finally made it.

2:10:42It's an honor to be here. I didn't have anything to say before. I'm glad. Now you do. I'm glad. You're launching the Moral Discernment Company of San Francisco. Getting into moral discernment. Finally. I would love to know what that means. Is this a vibe shift on your part? Or do you feel like this is a continuation of your affinity for moral discernment? Walk me through how you evaluate what is or is not a good startup idea or a virtuous. Trey Stevens has that good quest philosophy. Like, how do you think about judging the work of the technology industry that we see every day on display on X?

2:11:26I guess it's not really complicated to me. I mean, OK, so if you're selling like gambling, then you're basically selling drugs to people. Like, and everyone knows that, right? I didn't think it'd be a big thing to say, but you should want to build things that are good for people. And I think that's exactly what the Pope was saying. If you are engaging in the act of creation, then you should try and create something that's actually good for people. And I think over the past 10 years, we've had this really weird, I guess, school of moral philosophy that we all collectively call woke. it's been really dominant and it's had an extremely aggressive uh priest class that tries to get everyone tries to coerce everyone into bending the knee to it um and nowadays that's not a very popular perspective thankfully i think that that fever kind of broke uh but i don't think what replaces it is nothing i don't think that's a good solution i think everyone should want to should want to help.

2:12:31Actually, you cannot criticize technology at all. If it's software, you cannot criticize it. We're banning, we're making it illegal to identify negative externalities of any technology product. And a lot of this stuff isn't even externalities. It's literally just you're selling drugs to people. It's internal to the economic transition, right? It's the core product. It's not like somebody got left field and walking down the street by gambling. People used to be criticized, you know, three years ago, it was like, stop building enterprise SaaS. And people were like, okay, I'll build gambling apps.

2:13:05Okay. But on the gambling issue, walk me through how you think about the utilitarian calculus of like what is or is not gambling? Because when I think about like, like putting money in an S &P 500 ETF and an IRA that I hold for 30 years, I don't think of that as gambling. But then And if you're a professional fund manager and you're managing retirements, that's not gambling. There is risk. But then you go down to zero-day options, and it starts to look a lot like gambling. And so do you believe in this moral relativism? Do you think that there's a clear line, a bright line of what is or is not gambling these days?

2:13:45I don't want passive income, John. I need massive income. I mean, yes. Sometimes there's just a different face with it. But is it I'll know it when I see it? I don't even think gambling's wrong, by the way. Like, it's like, I think it's fine to get together with your friends and play poker on a Sunday or something like that's totally fine. So as far as like gambling goes, I'm saying that if you're going to dedicate your life to building something, which is what you do when you start a company, it's not like you're just like, you know, doing something as a hobby. Then what I'm saying is that you should reflect morally.

2:14:17Yes. I don't think, I'm not here to tell you what is right and wrong, but the Pope's entire point was that you should think about that and try and do good things. And I didn't think anyone on earth, I guess one person for sure, had a problem with that. And so I don't have the moral guidebook. There is a guidebook. I own a copy. It's called the Bible. but I do not I cannot you know extrapolate that to every modern situation but I do encourage everyone who's building anything to think about what they're building what good is it is it actually helping people and by the way b2b sass doesn't get me up in the morning but hey that's honest software that actually you know solves people's problems that's a great thing to build I think.

2:15:05I like that. I like that. Um, uh, I mean, so let's get into, uh, steel manning the other side of this because, uh, that's, what's fun. Um, it's okay to, it makes for good content. So, uh, it's okay to, it's okay to, you know, hit the casino, the craps table, like once every couple of years, uh, you know, on a, on a vacation or something. Uh, isn't that what Andreessen's doing, like, by total, by net asset value, by the actual deployment of the capital, like 99 % of the dollars are going into honest B2B software, Databricks. It's going into things that feel virtuous. And then yes, they do have Speedrun, which is an incubator.

2:15:51And yes, within Speedrun, there are some crazy, crazy companies. And I'll give you that. But as a percentage of the capital that Andreessen has allocated. We are in the, yeah, once a year he goes to Las Vegas. We're not in the, he only funds gambling. So how do you react to that? I think that if you're going to Vegas, then there's nothing, whether or not you're betting black or red, it's an extremely amoral situation. When you come out and you put$15 million into Cluey, I think that is not an amoral situation. You made a decision there, uh, about what you want to find, what you want to see in the world.

2:16:33Um, and so what I see, uh, if he, if he wants, you know, and again, that's, you know, obviously a 16 Z will do what it's do what it wants. Right. Like they don't have to listen to me. Um, but for a lot of people, I think the Clue Lee investment was a real moment, at least for a lot of my founder friends. That was a moment where it was like oh okay like we're just literally gonna fund whatever retarded thing now um no matter you know whether or not it's good uh it's just more vibe more more you know bigger tweets come on and you know just try to keep this constant uh sense of excitement going uh and for what for for this cheating app like this is stupid like what are we doing um i didn't come out here to build cheating apps.

2:17:19I didn't come out here to build gambling apps that advertise that they can help people gamble under the age of 21. These things do not seem immoral to me. They seem actually immoral, and that's a decision they're making. And I would encourage them to not make that decision. Well, the good news is that it does feel like Cluelay has pivoted to just B2B SaaS, I guess. So maybe it's total victory for honor sass. I have one more steel man that I like Daniel to toy with. I should get the helmet out. Although, I don't know. Can you see us? I can see you right now. Okay, good. So John's going to throw on the helmet, get locked in for the second steel man.

2:18:05I was really hoping it'd be a crusader helmet. so this is the steel man helmet which is which is okay for when you're steel manning a point um and so it's very hard to wear but um as it should be yes uh heavy is the head that wears the steel man helmet so the second steel man is uh is while i agree with you that you should not mock the pope you should not try and dunk on the pope it's kind of rude i i would say that potentially it is okay to critique the Pope for trying to set regulatory frameworks around business. And I would cite the Wall Street Journal's post-mortem obituary on the previous Pope and kind of look back on some of the stuff that the Pope had done that was maybe leaning too heavily into some of the environmentalist trends and maybe caused too much of a shift that actually sort of hurt the quality of life in Europe and America.

2:19:14And it was not, it wound up being incompatible with human flourishing. And so the Pope is maybe not always correct. And so there does need to be some level of dialogue between even Catholics and the Pope. John did you just say the Pope isn't always correct I'm saying I have the steel man Hamlet on for a reason yeah of course you could say that of course that's a totally you don't even have to wear the helmet it's a totally reasonable take of course the Pope's going to say things that are incorrect and especially I think on temporal issues on political issues the Pope does not just reign supreme and we can't disagree with them I do think that if the Pope makes a very like, you know, anodyne and earnest post about how we should care about the things that we're building and the effect it has on people, uh, then you shouldn't mock them.

2:20:05Yes. I think I, especially, especially, I mean, if you're some, you know, low B that's whatever, but if you're Mark Andreessen, come on, man. Um, so I guess, uh, seeing it from him, I was like, that bothered me, but no, absolutely. Uh, obviously I disagree, uh, with, you know, probably many things the Pope believes on political issues. Sure. We do have a question from the chat. Why is the Pope above being mocked? I think we touched on this, but is it just purely respect? Do you think all people should avoid mocking the Pope, or specifically Catholics, specifically religious people, specifically Americans?

2:20:38Is there any more nuance to who gets to mock? It sounds like lobbies maybe could mock the Pope if they're some sort of a non - I can't stop them. Silly. Yeah, it is lower stakes. Young-growing Daniel. There's a young-growing, the future-growing Daniel. Would you have marked the Pope two years ago? Probably. I think my view is just, not to interrupt, but I'm guessing you agree, just like it should be okay to expect, like the technology industry broadly has so much power. It impacts our lives in so many different ways that people within the industry should criticize it. People outside the industry should criticize it.

2:21:17We should expect that people understand the weight of their work, even if it's not in defense tech or national security related, et cetera. Like the work impacts our lives and it impacts people that are outside the industry. And to basically, I don't even know. I mean, part of this is like, this was such a new meme format. I was trying to clock like, okay, what does he actually mean by this? This is like, this is like a. He was so bad at applying it. Did you watch the full interview, the GQ, Sydney Sweeney interview? It was very interesting because it was an interview for an event that GQ holds that's called Men of the Year.

2:21:58And it was an interview between two women. And so I think that they have like genericized the term, but they stuck with giving an award for Men of the Year. And then they give it to whoever or something. Something like I was very confusing branding. for me. But then, uh, but then also like there was a very weird, uh, it felt like a little bit of a Rorschach test actually watching the interview because when I actually went and watched the YouTube video, it feels like they're having a ton of fun with each other for like 10 minutes. And then they do get into that one question that's kind of sharp, sharply worded.

2:22:33And she kind of dismisses and says like, look, I'm not, why would you even try to understand the source material, John? It's just a meme. I, I, I don't know. What do you know? That was, That was part of my, like, you know, Mark applied it in a bunch of different ways in a very short period of time, right? So he was a little trigger happy with it. I don't know. Oh, well. I think Mark got excited that he thought there was a new image that you could quote tweet someone with and it would just own them every time. And he wanted to go apply that in as many places as possible before the cool points ran out because of people like Mark applying it and running down the cool clock.

2:23:10So he wanted to get as many of these out as possible. And that's what he was trying to do. And I don't think he understood the source material,

2:23:20but he paid the price. It was, it was definitely anybody out there that was thinking about mocking the Pope, I think is gonna, is gonna at least think twice. The Pope is like level 9 ,000. Have you been, have you been leveraging that prayer? We, we covered, we covered the prayer. I forget which church it's in exactly but the prayer Star of the Sea Have you leveraged that at all? Oh I leverage that every week, absolutely That seems like some serious alpha that should have become the current thing there should have been lines out the door It's insane that it's available for a 50 cent candle you can go and pray for St.

2:24:04Carlo to intercede for you who is in heaven, by the way, hanging out with God and he will intercede on your behalf for your technical problems. Incredible, incredible. Star of the Sea Parish in San Francisco, everyone. I could see VCs, you know, actually putting that in term sheets going forward. You need to take 50 cents. Who's the patron state of capital allocation? If it's like, I think I'm going into a down round. I think my portfolio is about to tank. I need to pray. what do you think tech is getting right right now? anything? oh yeah oh I think we're in a way better place so I don't know I came out here in 2018 from then till 21 most of tech Twitter was crypto Twitter and that sucked and so now we're actually building tools that are useful many AI tools are actually legitimately useful which is a radical change from when I was out here in those 3-4 years So I think a lot of things are going really well in tech right now.

2:25:07I think that AI will continue to creep into every crevice of our capital structures and our processes throughout society. I think that's awesome. I think it's going to save people a bunch of time. It's going to make people's lives much better. So, yeah, I think tech's doing really great overall right now. Why do you think there's so much darkness on the timeline? John and I were talking this morning. It feels like more infighting than ever. It feels like it ebbs and flows. But right now, yeah, it feels like there's a lot of infighting right now. Infighting like what? I mean, you and Mark going at it was pretty much the pinnacle of infighting.

2:25:46But it does feel like there's just generally been like a little bit more spices. And from my perspective, it feels like it's because there are actually questions about like, like, is the, are we in a bubble? Is this about to pop? People are getting like sort of defensive. Like, oh, like maybe I shouldn't be, even if you're not like, oh, I have my entire net worth in this one thing. There's even just like, I don't want to look stupid for being overly promoting something that's about to sell off by 20 % or 50 % or something like that. And so it just feels like people are in a little bit more of a defensive posture online.

2:26:22I was wondering, I don't know, do you feel that or do you not feel that? I don't feel that. The only thing that I feel is weird lately, and it's in San Francisco and in tech, is that we attracted a lot of grifty, signally people. And there's people messaging me about how to establish their image in San Francisco and stuff. And I'm like, what are you talking about? What are you doing? Literally, if you like building things, then come find some guys or whatever. Come find some people that like building and talk to them. And if you vibe, then you can work on something, right? Like, I don't know. It's how it always was.

2:27:00And so there's a lot of people that are like now moving in and trying to like, you know, get their headshots done. Like they're moving to LA. And you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm picking up a lot of that. I think it won't be the top until you have founders doing pitching at Demo Day and Chrome Hearts and Rick Allen. When that happens, it's over. Sell everything. I hope the top comes before the end. What is the correct way to launch a new startup today? Is it a 90-second vibe reel? I feel like a lot of stuff's played out, but is there anything that you think is actually the correct way to do it?

2:27:43I think first you should have a Twitter account with 175 ,000 followers. Yeah, step up for sure. Don't launch until you do that. Yeah, post constantly. No, I don't know. It's different for everyone. Like, that's the thing. It's like, I don't know. I always hate like startup advice because it's like literally everything is different. Like literally, if it were automatable, then it would be. And so it's like, what is your situation? Like, I don't know. But you got to figure out the way in which you're weird, you know, and work on that. That's usually your comparative advantage. Yeah, I like that.

2:28:20I like that. Just the advice is like avoid the templates, basically. Do you get any inbound customer interest? Anybody ever put it together? Or are you the least monetized account with$179 ,000? I got one. One. Shocking to me. Let's ring the gong. We won't. Gong. Hell yeah. Congratulations on your one customer. I mean, that's probably. It's great. It's one more than I thought I would get. We won't talk about my industry here, but I definitely work in an industry that is a Twitter industry. And so I never expect, I really should have built DevTools or something. I should have done something for me.

2:29:09But yeah, so my Twitter is not really related to my real life at all. But yeah, we did get one out of it. I think at some point you could just, all the people asking you for advice on personal branding, just say, fine, I made a course. It's$10 ,000. The$10 ,000 course would be good. The$10 ,000 course, it's effectively non-dilutive funding for the company. You can do it as a joke. I don't think it would be good for the world. I feel like I'm just ripping people off. That moral discernment strikes again. I am the most, the least, probably, except, no, I accept Rune, the least under-monetized person on Twitter, which is pretty amazing.

2:29:59I see people with 20 ,000 working hard. That's so inspiring, brother. I will say, we have an announcement from my real life. The council has met and we've decided we are hiring an engineer. Congratulations. DM growing underscore go on x the everything app and forget which app x is yes uh go and find growing underscore daniel and you can send him uh your uh linkedin or your uh your resume um if you want to live in san francisco and you can pass an fbi background check both those things have to happen and you are a goated engineer uh then you can come work with growing every every and on every and on poster was just qualified it is you are the most doxable person in the world thank you for taking the time to come on now we will we protect we will protect we protect anons we protect anons thank you guys very exciting so much very exciting role uh i'm gonna i'm gonna message some people and say hey go go go join the moral discernment company of san francisco i respect it on so much like i don't even save like full names in my phone or anything The first time Growing Daniel sends me his email for some reason, it's just his full name in his email.

2:31:25It's just first name, middle name, last name. If I could do it again. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's great to see you. Great to see you. Great talk to you. I love watching you build and have fun on the internet. You know how to do it. We both come a long way. I think we met up at, had a very LA meeting many years ago. Oh, yeah. Got together at Erewhon. There you go. I don't remember what we got, but it's been fun to watch you build and entertain us all. Fantastic. See you guys. See you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about some honest B2B software. There we go. Adio, customer relationship magic.

2:32:07Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have J.D. Ross from With Coverage in the Restream Waiting Room. Co-founder of Opendoor. Co-founder of Opendoor. We're doing back-to-back Opendoor week here. How are you doing, J.D.? Good to see you. Doing great, guys. What's happening? Oh, wow. I love the effect. Sometimes it's a little bit of a jump scare getting you into the Ultra Dome from the Restream Waiting Room. You can see you're on display here. You got some news for us. What's up? I'd love to ring the gong. First, why don't you introduce yourself?

2:32:38Why don't you give us a little bit of background? He says he likes one sound effects. That sound effect. You got the bald eagle? Let's hit the bald eagle. He's in Texas. How are you doing? What are you working on these days? I'm working on honest B2B software. I'm working on extremely honest software. I think you had Kaz on yesterday, by the way, talking about the importance of having the right leader in a business. He's really amazing. um that is a hard business yeah it's like open door is i think we had like we had a core value called we eat basis points for breakfast yeah and like a basis point is a 100th of a percent and so we're like fighting for each edge of a percent to cut off the cost to make the business good back in the day um he's obviously a better operator than i am uh so i'm working in the opposite business now it's an insurance business where you have like 99 retention and 99 gross margins because I'm lazy and I don't want to fight anymore.

2:33:42And it's all the coverage. And basically, the background was a couple of years ago, you know, I was talking to my buddy, Max, who's my co-founder. And I was like, look, in every company I've started or been in, we've had great like legal counsel. I've liked my tax counsel. My insurance guy and everyone else I know is insurance guy is kind of an idiot. Like they don't really know what we do. They don't really know what it is for our business yeah and so we're like we could probably do this better um let's just mess around for a bit and see what we can make happen and it's now two years later we have uh well over 500 clients 10 million revenue profitable the whole way there we go that's great what uh profitability not not not something you see we're gonna hit the gong for profitability real quick before we dive more into coverage i wanted to ask you about uh...

2:34:37open doors new feature uh... cas was talking about uh... you know introducing uh... returns to uh... home buying i think you can make the case that it would just increase overall sales velocity if people knew like i can buy this in found like that i can return it But when you talk about eating basis points for breakfast, returns end up being a huge line item or expense for a lot of companies that sell physical goods. But what's your take? My view is you always want to have the right incentives in a business. And returns is a good incentive in a business. If you know that you can be returned, you are going to keep your quality bar high.

2:35:25You're going to make sure that you are selling with integrity, that there's a true value in the product. And if you can't return it, you're going to sell as cheap as you possibly can. This is lemon law in cars, right? It's like you don't want to sell lemons because you would be forced to buy the car back if there is a problem with it. Exactly. And the same thing for a house. Right now, everyone's biggest fear when buying a house is, did I buy a lemon? Because it's every dollar I probably have. it's you know it's by like 8x the largest purchase i'm going to make in my life versus like a car or anything afterwards uh it's scary and you only do it a few times in your life and so you're kind of trusting this person you met probably a month ago to as your advisor who's very incentivized to get the deal done and so you want to be able to have that confidence point and if you're like hey that's going to affect the bottom line well only if we're selling bad product sell the right product i had a friend who bought a house who gets into it and like a year in discovers that like it has a bad foundation.

2:36:23And I was like, that sounds like a catastrophic loss of that house. Like it's all like the house you want to have a bad issue. Exactly. It's like if the, if the, if the chimney on the top. Okay. Just pick up the whole house and we'll fix the foundation. Fixing the roof feels a way easier than the, than the foundation. Just get under there. Yeah. Uh, so, so what, What are your clients actually looking for on the insurance side? I mean, we have a variety of insurances here. Is it all one deal? Does it get crazier as the company gets bigger and bigger and bigger? We had an experience getting insurance for TBPN that I couldn't tell you how many times they would come back for a new signature.

2:37:07And I was like, I've signed for this insurance like six times now. It's like, oh, there's another doc. You didn't do this one doc. And I'm like, oh, well, didn't you know this doc was coming? Just put all the docs in one doc. Put all the docs in one doc. You didn't know about this doc or the last one or the last one or the last one? I got to keep signing. Yeah. So I think the way, first of all, the hardest part of our business by far is just getting the first call because it's something no one wants to care about. Unless you're talking about our insurance clients in construction where it's a huge deal for them.

2:37:39Most clients, it's just like, just get the first call. Once we have that, they're like, oh, wait, this is much, much better. It's like ramp before, you know, versus any expense management system you had in the past. No one was thinking about changing out the expense management system. But then once you have a much better risk management system, in our case, now your entire life as sort of a CFO or, you know, GC gets a lot easier because this whole thing that you know is very important and are very afraid of but don't understand is taken care of. And so our view is we replace the traditional broker with a tech platform.

2:38:13We pair them with an industry expert who's basically your fractional risk manager. And instead of commissions, we try to align the incentives with a fee so that our job is to save them money instead of making them spend more money year over year. And those three things, the platform, the plan, and the team driving savings has generally worked really well. And the types of insurance depends on who we're talking to, right? Like for a restaurant or a manufacturing company or like a next generation defense manufacturer, it's workers' compensation typically. There's contractual risk. If you're talking about fintech, it's like cyber insurance and errors and omissions and things like that.

2:38:50For tech companies, usually DNO and then benefits. And so our job is just like build a point solution at each stage of this. Software has gotten so much easier to build than years ago, right? AI makes it so you can launch new features when you have the right foundation. It's not cracked and you don't have to return it a few years later. When you have the right foundation as a business, you can build these things much easier now than you could in the past. And our clients really get a lot of value from that. Yeah. Have you thought about buying existing insurance agencies? companies i've heard i've heard uh i heard at least one company that uh uh portfolio company of a of a fund m and lp and it's just a hot trend right now with the ai thing is like pull forward by rolling your legacy jd it'd be great if you could figure out us a way for us to give you another 50 million dollars i do not like how profitable you are this is a big problem for us yeah literally i think that's part of it i think people are chasing opportunities with dollars before understanding the opportunities.

2:39:54Insurance is a very acquisitive space, these brokerages, because it's been the only way to grow. I think we might be the only one I know of who's doing purely organic growth where you're saying, hey, you know that guy you golf with every weekend? Forget him. Come on over to us. And having that work. And I think it's because the whole industry is broken. Everyone kind of feels fleeced by their guy, but no one in that space actually wants to innovate because it's the most boring industry on earth. Like no one wants to talk about this or think about it. Even if it's your job, you generally don't want to think about it.

2:40:26And now with AI, it's finally like right for disruption on a platform side. But if you're acquiring brokerages, you have to convince this 50-year-old golfer, whatever, to change their operations. Like no way. I noticed you don't have the word AI agents anywhere on your website. Is that intentional? We barely even had a website until like a month ago. But it feels intentional where other people building this business would be selling this as like, we're building AI agents for finding insurance and risk management. But it feels like businesses don't really care. They're not used to using agents that are awesome yet.

2:41:10And so that's not really a selling point. I'm curious how you think about how software is evolving and how you think about integrating AI for the user as well as back office and actually to deliver value. Definitely. I think right now the storyline for AI on the foundation model side is really obvious. It's just increasing general capabilities. And I think the AI software pure kind of play where you're just saying, hey, we're selling AI into businesses to make them more efficient, isn't working as well as people want. In certain areas, it's really going gangbusters like engineering, software engineering, others, and content generation, things like that.

2:41:52In others, it's just not performing as well. Our view is that it's much easier to build an AI native business than it is to build the software and sell it into people who don't know how to even adopt this stuff yet. Over time, I think maybe it'll get easier as the entry points make sense in each of these businesses, but it's very experimental right now. And so we're very, very focused on from the ground up, how do we build a business where it works from an AI-nated way, right? Like where our clients can just say, okay, I'm buying something I already understand. And behind the scenes, yeah, when you request a certificate of insurance, an AI agent does that, right?

2:42:29It reads through this 200-page PDF and says, are you qualified to get this data or not? Okay, great. We're going to email your insurance carrier, blah, blah, blah. And it comes back and works. To the customer, it's just magic. They just get what they want. They don't need to know how. It's like explaining. You don't want to know where the sausage meat comes from. You just want to get your sausage. Last question. Do you have any mattress companies that you're working with? We work with this incredible business called Eight Sleep. Let's go. That's my next ad read. thank you so much for coming on the show I'm going to transmit it you're our new insurance correspondent so anytime there's some hard hitting insurance news you're the risk guy whatever thing is going on just call me in yeah careful what you wish for the big question actually is how who is it Deutsche Bank is like creating insurance products around the AI data center leases to try and hedge the risk there.

2:43:33That's a fascinating story, but we'll have to jump into it another time because we're running late, but thank you so much for coming. Great to finally have you on and come back on anytime. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Good to see you. How did you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 76. I didn't sleep well. I still am away from my eighth sleep. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I got to move it over. Well, I'm fighting against myself then. Let's get to Tyler's cam. Just check in with Tyler. Oh, what happened to you? Oh, oh, oh, oh, what happened to you here? Oh, you can't see it. You can't see it.

2:44:01Where's your desk? He backed down. He backed down. You can see that the microphone is moving upwards because he lost the strength to stand at his standing desk and put his standing desk down. I didn't lose the strength. You lost the strength. I like to move around. You back down from the fight. Sometimes I like to sit down. Sometimes I like to stand up. Okay, well, you can sit down. No problem. No problem. Our next guest is Josie Zahner, who is building a literal unicorn. using DNA editing to modify horses. Is this correct? I mean, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you. Hey, what's up, John?

2:44:40How's it going? Yeah, I mean, we're gene editing animals. I think animals are kind of like the, you know, software of reality. Fantastic. Software of reality. What a turn of phrase. I love it. What does this actually mean? I know, especially nowadays with all these people. Sorry, there's a little bit of a delay. No, it's not theoretical. Here's the thing. Yeah, I know. Okay. Where am I? I'm in my lab in Austin, Texas. Oh, fine. Doing. Is the delay still there? Can we hear it? Yes, it is. Why don't you give me an introduction on the company, kind of where you are, and I'd love to know what your actual timeline is for building this actual literal unicorn.

2:45:32Is that going through? Yeah. So, you know, the company I run is called EmbryoCore, and we're working on gene editing animals. I'm kind of just like, I'm tired of people investing in AI note-taking apps, and I look at universities and how science isn't going forward. So I'm like, fuck it. I'm going to build a startup company that people actually care about and like. And I'm going to build science that I can invest my blood, sweat, and tears in. And to me, that's gene editing the future of life, you know? Amazing. I think we have some – is there anything we can do about the delay or should we come back to this?

2:46:16I think we might need to have you back on the show another time. The delay is just a little crazy right now. Okay. Yeah. But I'm glad we got to check in a little bit and talk about the story somewhat. I'm sorry we couldn't get it figured out. Somehow we can edit animals' DNA, and yet we can't get the Wi-Fi to work. It happens. But the chat is loving you, and they're very excited about this. But I'm sorry that we ran into technical difficulties, but we will check in with you soon. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest after I tell you about public.com.

2:46:53investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Scott Shapiro from Coinbase. Let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room into the TBP Ultradom. Scott, how are you doing? Great. How are you guys? We're doing fantastic. A little recovering from some technical difficulties, but hopefully there haven't been any technical difficulties in your life recently. Give us the update. What is the latest news in your world? probably our token sales announcement from yesterday morning. I think that was in the Wall Street Journal, correct?

2:47:30Can you give me the full story? You guys got it in the journal? The sacred text? I think so. Coinbase launches site for token sales. Blockchain startup Monad will be the first to sell its digital coin on the new platform. Coinbase Global is launching a new platform to allow individual investors to purchase digital tokens before they are listed on its exchange. You tell me, is this fake news or is this the truth? That is probably the realest news in the whole journal yesterday. Let's go. We are, for the first time, bringing token sales to the full U.S. retail community since 2018. That's fantastic.

2:48:04Okay, so break down the different levels because I know you guys just acquired Echo. That serves a different use case, but what are the different types of offerings? Yeah, we're trying to go full lifecycle when we think about asset issuers. We have a great exchange. It's been around for a long time for secondary trading. What we announced yesterday introduces primary issuance right before it starts trading on the secondary market. Echo and a related company, Sonar, were acquired by Coinbase a couple of weeks ago. Coincidental, we were playing to this token sales product working with Monat already.

2:48:39That is even further upstream, what Echo is doing kind of pre-sales before a token is even ready to be traded or used. Awesome. So this new product you could compare to certain companies like Robinhood and Public will take an allocation in different IPOs and give an allocation to everyday investors, people that are non-investment banks or sort of established investment firms. Is that like a good comp? It's a fair comp. I'd say the two biggest differences, these are not IPOs. These are token sales, purely crypto, no stock exchange involved. Second difference is it is only distributed to retail investors on Coinbase.

2:49:23So there's not a little IPO allocation for retail and then a big allocation for institutions. This is 100 % just focused on a sale to the retail community. And then post-sale, the real float that comes will be from these folks who bought tokens on Coinbase in that primary sale. That makes sense. uh what uh why why was now the right time to bring something like this to market i know i mean if you look back through the history of crypto there was an era where these kind of offerings to retail were much more popular and then there was a lot of problem you know kind of like problems and regulatory gray area from that uh time that uh is starting i feel like to be a bit more clarified but you know maybe you could talk about the timing yeah there's a couple things here one is just our ambitions have gotten much broader in terms of becoming what we call the everything exchange.

2:50:14So being able to offer every asset class at every stage of its development. And what I focus on is really making that tailor-made for the retail community all around the world. Second thing is the regulatory environment is much better. And so where a company like Coinbase was being not so favorably looked upon by the SEC a couple of years ago, that regulatory environment has improved to the degree where we feel much more comfortable offering this type of product, not just to the US community, but in dozens of other countries around the world. And that's a really new thing for crypto. Yeah, it makes sense.

2:50:50What do you expect the volume of offerings to look like? Monad is going to be the first. Is this something that's happening on a weekly basis, monthly basis? What are the plans there? What can you share? Probably more like monthly than weekly. We're really not trying to maximize volume. This is definitely a quality over quantity play. So it really depends on the types of issuers and the depth of those teams' involvement and really their willingness to do this in a way like the Monad team has agreed to, where they're not just going to turn around and sell all of the insider allocations right away, but they're looking to develop long-term incentives and hold themselves to a standard of longer-term lockups and longer-term vesting schedules that really puts control in the hands of the retail investors.

2:51:38And you look at the past, a lot of these token sales on backwater types of markets have not done that. And so we think that if issuers are willing to do that, we'll engage with them. How does pricing work? Is it a function of supply and demand, or is an issuer setting a valuation and a specific allocation amount? What can you say around that front? It's exactly the latter we described. So the issuer sets the token price. They set the allocation to what goes into this primary sale. We make sure that it's a team of high quality and that they're willing to be transparent about their unlocks investing schedules and that they're really committed for the long term.

2:52:22And then it's really up to the retail audience. They can invest as little as$100 or six figures paid in USDC, of course, stable coins, to be involved in the sale. If I'm starting to sell tokens through this process, are there ad units around this? When we go to an IPO in New York, we'll often see taxi cabs will be wrapped. We were at the Klarna IPO, for example. There were pink taxi cabs everywhere. At Figma, they really went all out. There was a DJ outside. There was a lot of celebration. Big, massive canvas that gets hoisted. And there's a lot of attention that comes to it. And the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, too, to some extent, sort of offer effectively like marketing packages to celebrate the moment.

2:53:15Is that something that you'll have like an analogy to in the digital realm at some point? I love that idea. I worked in ads for a decade in Silicon Valley before coming to Coinbase, following my cooking passions. Thank you, honestly. Power's the modern American economy. Yeah, Sheryl Sandberg used to say it's the Lord's work. It is the Lord's work. Back at Facebook. Finally. We do not have that today. I think that's an interesting idea. This is something that if you go to the Coinbase app, you will see it pretty prominently. And right now, so the sale actually starts on the 17th. Right now is the time when people can come learn about it and get reminded so that we can notify them.

2:53:55But there's no paid media involved. And that's something that we might consider longer term. I think that'd be fun. Has any details released on pricing? thing yeah the price is two and a half cents per token um the fd fdv the fully diluted valuation is two and a half billion so you can do the math on the number of tokens out there um the allocation to coinbase is 187 and a half million dollars uh worth of monad tokens and again that will represent the bulk of the float uh once it's tradable so the actual market cap that's floating is going to be a small fraction of the total long-term fully diluted valuation.

2:54:34Fascinating. That makes sense. Well, very, very interesting new product. And I'm sure hopefully we can get the Monad team on as we get closer to them to learn about the protocol and what they're working on. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, Scott. Cheers. You know, if you do want to take out an ad, you got to go to adquick.com. That's right. Out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:55:07We're cooking on some new billboards. We're cooking. We're cooking. We've heard your complaints. Not enough TBPN billboards. Not enough. I haven't seen one in a while. The funny thing is we actually have been getting that complaint. Very silly. We have Lawrence Allen from Terra Nova in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN UltraDone. Lawrence, how are you doing? Look at that. Look at that flag. Look at the suit. The flag, the suit. Wow. Royal flush. Isaiah looked so dapper yesterday. I figured I had to put a suit on. You look fantastic. Give us the news, and then I want to go into what the business is doing.

2:55:36Look at that, the floor-to-ceiling flag. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a great time. Some of these flags are just too small. It's hard to even tell if they're real or not. I'll let you in on a secret. If you want to win the game for the biggest flag, you've got to put it outside. Go on the roof. Everyone's putting the flag inside the factory. if you hang the flag outside the factory uh also the world's biggest flag they they bring it out at uh like the halftime of the super bowl every once in a while there's one of them it's like the huge and you can get it for like 500k only 500k it's not that much right if you if you got seven million i mean it's a lot of money but it's a lot of flag it's a lot of money anyway sorry yeah it's great to have you great to have me on the show weirdest office ever and the outside of the part that's my bedroom is painted rainbow so i was thinking we'd just repaint an american flag okay so you're sleeping in the office too absolutely you know it's i think it's becoming the standard where are you gundo we are not we're in berkeley berkeley cool the flag would be a little smaller in gundo because the the price is like 320 a square foot there oh yeah uh great bringing american dynamism to berkeley going on the offensive behind enemy lines um uh anyways Great to have you on the show.

2:56:51Congratulations on the launch yesterday. Breakdown. Maybe give some background on yourself, and then let's talk about the company. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I'm a recent Berkeley grad, dropped out of Stanford grad school. I worked at SpaceX before, and I am CEO of Terra Nova. So we just launched out of stealth. We probably had the longest stealth mode you've seen. How long? How long? There are companies that have been stealthed for like a decade. longer than you've been alive maybe not the longest you've seen humane for like seven years yeah how long I've been working on this since I was at SpaceX which was like late 2021 so I was in school until under a year ago at Berkeley I stay corrected serious stealth mode so we're we're we're officially out proud to announce our seven million dollar seed round led by congruent great thank you great hit congratulations i was excited for that one and outlander as well uh awesome what from yeah who funded valor and also ponderosa and gothams uh very very cool what uh so what are you working on yeah we're building terraforming robots so usually when you hear about terraforming it's some in the sky stuff like what augustus is working on at Rainmaker.

2:58:15Here we're talking about very physical on earth terraforming where we are lifting land physically out of flood zones. I think this launch video captures it very well. But we're basically injecting really, really large amounts of material underground to just directly lift land. So this would be really useful for you if you are currently in a coastal area. I think lots of places all over LA, even parts of Gundo have this issue where you were just too low. Long Beach was called the sinking city for years. And the reason is because it just sunk about 10 or 20 feet due to subsidence. And from that subsidence, you have flooding.

2:58:54So it's not just sea level rise. It's usually petroleum extraction or groundwater extraction or being built on fill. So cities all over the world are facing this issue. And there's just really not much you can do about it. You already have the infrastructure in place. What You can't put it on some little stilts like you can do a small single story house. You can put a giant seawall in. Usually you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars for things like that. Sometimes levy systems will work. But usually what's happening now is they're just demolishing the infrastructure, putting a ton of fill dirt on it, waiting a year, year and a half for it to compact and moving around dirt on the surface to make that happen.

2:59:34And then they're rebuilding that infrastructure. And so maybe that's fine if you have some inexpensive property. but we're talking highways. These are$8 billion projects for Highway 37, which is a few miles north of here. You're talking about mass displacements when you're doing this to whole cities. I'm from San Rafael. We are facing this problem. San Rafael has about 60 ,000 people, and they're facing a$500 to$900 million bill for the seawall system that they need. There's just no way they can afford that. And so we took a super first principles approach. how could we save our hometown? And this is what we came up with.

3:00:11So you're injecting dirt and rock into the ground in order to effectively move like an area or a facility or a town higher. How much dirt, how much mass do you need to do that effectively? Yeah, you wouldn't believe it, but dirt is actually way more expensive than what we're using, we're using wood. So wood chips are free delivered in whatever category you want. You can get this anywhere in the world. It's abundant. It's usually free delivered because it's such a large waste product. And so we're taking this wood chip slurry, pumping it directly underground. It compacts in about two hours to pretty much the full consolidation.

3:00:58And then you would just three feet higher or whatever you want it to be at the end of the day. It's hard to wrap my head around how much wood chips you need to raise a city in height. But our shipping container is sized to process 20 semi truckloads of wood a day. So we're basically moving 20 semi truckloads of wood chips through our system. We have a bunch of robots that run around the site that deliver that final fluid underground. And then that processing unit that we call our arc. So the Prometheus system, that's the robot. We call it that because it's bringing something fundamentally new to the world is delivering that final injection pressure.

3:01:39and you're basically just moving as much material as possible underground because really what you need is volume, not mass or something like you'd expect. These wood chips, what is the primary source? This is a waste product when people are getting trees removed from properties, manufacturing processes. Where does it actually come from? Lots of sources. If we were going to do the Santa Feil project, for example, there's a place called Marin Sanitary right across the street from the place that floods the most they ship eight semi-truck loads a day of wood chips to be burnt in biomass energy plants which are subsidized by the state because they're non-economic and they would way prefer to instead of you know polluting the air up in Stockton to just pump that right underground so you can get it locally you can also get it from sawmills you can get it from fire trimmings all over the state obviously we have huge fire issues here in California and so they're doing massive clearing of forest and then they really just don't have anything to do with that wood.

3:02:39Okay, so goal is to save San Rafael or save them from this massive infrastructure bill. How do you start small and prove that the company can execute on this type of operation? Are there specific sites that are much smaller scale where you can start proving out the thesis? Yeah, so I just got this text from our team. They are all at our pilot site right now doing some drilling, doing some pumping. You can see we use like auger drill bits and, you know, big injection machines to do our pumping and have our shipping containers. So we are deployed. This works. We've been doing this for about a year and we are looking for more commercial projects to do right now.

3:03:27So what site what site are they on specifically? Is that like a testing ground? They're an undisclosed site near Sacramento that is primarily a testing ground, but they also have huge drainage and subsidence issues that we are fixing. Fascinating. Wild. So what's like the dream customer right now? Yeah, we would love to do, strangely, some wetland restoration projects and also some new home development projects. So things that don't already have a lot of infrastructure in place are very ideal. We've seen a customer willingness to pay slightly higher there because their risk appetite is a little more because there's not much to go wrong.

3:04:05We feel ready to do some roadway projects as well. Sorry, break that first one down. It's basically like I have a bunch of land that's undeveloped. I'm thinking about putting a bunch of houses on it, but there's a problem because there's like a marsh in the middle of it and you can kind of get rid of the marsh. Is that roughly correct? Not quite. So in the bay, it's usually you've diked or levied off an area. And then because it's organic, it's subsided. So there's an example. It's an 80-acre parcel right on the water in San Rafael near the target. This has subsided two meters. And so because of that, if you were to break the dike, it'd be under sea level, of course.

3:04:45And so they want to do two things. They want to put some wetland on that. To do that, you have to lift it so it can become tidal. and they also want to put about$100 million worth of homes on that property, on the more upland section. And so you would also need to lift it because that section is also too low. So both are fixed by the same solution, which is ours, which is just directly lift it and make it so you can develop it and make it into higher quality wetland. Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How long until you're getting death threats from conspiracy theories? Yeah, I hope we won't.

3:05:20Modifying the world. Easy. Yeah, people, you know, obviously Augustus has been on the show. You're going to get blamed for earthquakes. That's what's going to happen. Like there's going to be an earthquake. We actually think we're going to help with earthquakes as well. We haven't been publicly claiming this because we're still doing testing. But this is going to perform dramatically better. This underground looks very much like particle board. It doesn't look like wood chips. It's compact. And so this is better than normal earth. This is very controllable. It's very physical. Get ready to go on InfoWars, buddy.

3:05:48because no matter what the science says, you are going to get blamed for earthquakes because people are just going to be like, they were doing something and then the earthquake happened. Yeah, well, you have Augustus as a model. Augustus was in the hot seat. But he's done a great job. And I think there is a path for communicating with all constituents, not just tech, not just Twitter. Augustus has done a great job getting to AM radio listeners and random shows that do not break through in tech Twitter. He's done a great job there. But yeah, communication across all the constituents has to be really important for this business.

3:06:27I think it's important to say this is not like a blue state solution. This is very much red and blue. We do this all over Florida. Of course, Miami faces some of the worst flooding issues. And this is also not just a U.S. problem. This is something that's happening all over the world. Southeast Asia is particularly bad. We've had ministers from Indonesia, from Cambodia come here. They're saying, like, I'm moving my entire capital city of Jakarta. Help me. This is very much going to be the fundamental way that you solve large-scale flooding problems. And so I hope the conspiracy theorists don't come for us.

3:07:00We definitely are willing to show them what's happening. This kind of looks like a black box underground, but actually we have systems where we can measure this to like a 2-millimeter level precision. and so you can have a very good idea of exactly what's happening. That's amazing. One more question just because I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale. How many truckloads or shipping containers worth of wood chips would you need to, let's say, raise a square mile, call it like five feet? I will do that math for you right now. So let's do acre to square mile. So basically, you need 20 truckloads per acre foot, which is actually much better than fill, because with fill, you're so much more.

3:07:51An acre foot is an entire one foot. Like, picture an acre and then one foot. OK. So one foot deep, acre wide, long. Yeah. Yeah. So you want to see. we're doing math on tv well while he's doing the math let me tell you about wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great men who's doing that's top two cleaning and 24 7 concierge services vacation home but better uh and you know maybe in the future your wander will be on terraformed property we might be increasing the number of vacation homes absolutely so a square mile lifted by five feet is a lot of course you know that um this would actually be 64 ,000 truckloads.

3:08:34Let's go. However, as much as it sounds, there is way, way, way more than that. Just in California, we could absolutely source that much. We looked and it is very straightforward to source 1 ,000 semi-truckloads a day in the Bay Area region. So that would maybe be a two-month project if you were really about your logistics and maybe a two-year project if you didn't care quite as much. Okay. Fantastic. Well, we're looking forward to it. Yeah. Yeah, taking something that people want to get rid of and saying, we'll take it. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by the show. This is fun.

3:09:06The chat was mentioning you. How are you guys not talking about this? And we did sort of miss the announcement. But we're really happy to have you join and really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for having me, John. I've been watching you since you're making YC videos instead of tech startup videos. That's amazing. Engage. Well, thanks so much for supporting. Well, super exciting. Congrats to the whole team. Good luck. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye. Before we move on, let me tell you about GetBezel.com Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

3:09:35Seriously, any watch. And in tariff news, Switzerland has been making moves. Oh yes. The luxury watch market might be in turmoil again. We might need to call Quaid and get them on the show again. And Switzerland are working on a deal to slash the 39 % tariffs and try to get them to 15%. 100%. Rolex got Trump a one-of-one desk watch lock that has been photographed on Trump's desk. That might win him over. Yeah, a one-of-one Rolex can win a lot of people over. That's pretty cool. Didn't Barack Obama get a Rolex as well, I believe? He got some sort of watch from his Secret Service agent. His Secret Service agent gave him a watch.

3:10:22It was probably an Omega. It might have been an Omega. It might have been a Speedmaster. but it became the watch that he wore. He wasn't a watch guy. Then one of his Secret Service guys was like, you got to wear this watch, and he did. Yeah. Very cool. Did you see this post? Jeff Davies in 2016. A lot of posts from 2016 these days. Jeff Davies in 2016 said, Apple should buy NVIDIA and lock up VR, AI, and autonomous car tech for the next decade. Look back 10 years from now and great use of cash. Apple would be a$10 trillion company. Wow. Wild. Looking also back, Fireflies is this AI note taker.

3:11:05Someone was talking trash about AI note takers today on the stream. I don't even remember who at this point. So Shiel Monat says this is wild. It's about a screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Sam Udotong, who's the co-founder and CTO at Fireflies AI. This is an AI note-taking startup. I think they're doing very well. I think they've raised money recently. And they said, came across this post on LinkedIn. Turns out the first version of Fireflies AI, the AI meeting assistant, doesn't even have AI. It's just founder joining the calls, taking notes manually, and sending a summary back. Sounds crazy. And that is exactly what Sam wrote on LinkedIn 10 hours ago when this screenshot was taken.

3:11:49said, we scaled Fireflies to a$1 billion valuation after six failures from our original crypto food idea, food delivery idea. It's hilarious. If you're working on a crypto food idea, pivot the AI note taking. Get to a billion dollars, a billion dollar valuation. And so he says, this is the key segment. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as Fred from Fireflies.ai, We'd sit there silently taking detailed notes and send them 10 minutes later. After taking notes for 100 plus meetings and falling asleep in many, we were finally able to make enough money to pay the$750 per month rent for a tiny SF living room.

3:12:30That was the point where we said, let's stop and automate everything. And so this is being put in like a dunk because they're saying like, oh, this billion dollar AI note-taking company doesn't use AI. It's like, yeah, this was in 2015 or 2016. Like I actually, I actually knew Sam at the time and I DMed with him. I was a customer and I was completely fine with this because I was like, this is awesome. I get somebody to take my notes for me. It's basically like an outsourced note taker. But it's being sort of like reframed as like, as like, this is how they would do stuff now. And it's like, no, obviously it's been a decade almost since they did.

3:13:08I think if you're a customer and you didn't know, you have the right to be frustrated. that you were just inviting a human and there's no, no. But hilariously scrappy, hilariously scrappy. But yes, they were. And then as long as they were being transparent with the VCs at that time that, yeah, we're just using a couple of guys to do this. It's so crazy looking back on this conversation with Sam in my DMs. And he just says like, hey, like I'm working on, I needed notes from something. Like, can you send in and transcribe everything? I'd been using Rev, this manual transcription service that would take an audio file and just give you a text file back, but it was done by humans.

3:13:50And so here he says, you can add Fred at Fireflies to the calendar invite and Fred will join. Give it up for Fred. Let's give it up for Fred. I was like, hey, just got my first transcript. Pretty solid. And he's like, how comparable would you say it is to Rev? I said, lots of ums and us captured. I know the exact comparison in the day because I sent the recording to Rev earlier. So I was doing like A-B testing, actually seeing like what was useful, what wasn't. It was just funny, like actually seeing this company grow so much and having been an early adopter and then see people get the story wrong.

3:14:27So you know what, if you're using Firefly, of course they're using Whisper. Why would they be using humans still. It makes no sense. The technology's good. Tim Sweeney is land maxing. Oh, what do you do? The man behind Fortnite has bought over 40 ,000 acres of U.S. wilderness not to build to keep it forever wild. Forever wild. I love it. Where else are you in the timeline? Are you deep in there? Mr. Beast says 2 % of human time is now spent on YouTube. Well, thank you to everyone who's been spending at least 2 % of their time. We spend way more than that. Oh, yeah. Because we're doing like 15, easily 15 to 20 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

3:15:04And, you know, we're getting, the goal should be to get into the double digits, right? Yeah, for sure. Somewhere around 7 % or 8 % now. Dean Ball had some support for your take yesterday. You said, I don't think you should just throw decel at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology. That's not necessarily decelerationist. Dean Ball says, it's heartening to see such eminently reasonable takes making their way into prominent pro tech new media. There's something very, well, we're actually neo-trad media, to be clear. But he says, there's something very old man about the terms of AI policy debates, and perhaps this is because it has been largely old people who have set them.

3:15:46When I hear certain arguments about how we need to let the innovators innovate and thus cannot bear the thought of resolving negative externalities from new technology, it just sounds retro to me, like an old man dimly remembering things he believes, Milton Friedman once said, whereas anyone with enough neuroplasticity remaining to internalize a concept as alien as AGI can easily see that such simple frames do not work. Ron DeSantis says, we might have to see if we get Pelosi to run Florida's pension fund. She's showing this is pretty incredible, generated$133 million of profits and a 16 ,930 percent return i don't believe that number that's 16 000 i mean i guess this is since 1987 she was probably making money and adding to it consistently over that time uh what if she just invested like she just invested once and then i'm i'm very i'm very skeptical of that second number you don't believe she could just 10x it and just 10x that again and then 10x that again and then 16x that last time.

3:16:56It's possible, but it's like, I don't know. I would just imagine that you're adding to it every year and you can't just like take the current net worth and divide it by the amount of money that she had when she started investing, right? Like what is 133? Anyways, that is a good place to end the show. We will be not be getting into the fifth hour today. So sorry to disappoint everyone but uh tomorrow we have some uh fun guests we have uh brian uh halligan ceo of hubspot coming on also a partner over at sequoia and then uh fei fei lee from world labs so very excited for all of that and we hope you have a wonderful uh veterans day uh at home wherever you are and we'll see you tomorrow.

3:17:49See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Thank you.