Dwarkesh Patel, Nadia Asparouhova, Augustus Doricko, Casey Handmer, Ishan Mukherjee, Mike Knoop, Trump Pardons Milton, Coreweave IPO Winners

28:32Anyway, there's another interesting line in here about Les Wexner. He's in here. He owns 3 % of CoreWeave. He invested$1 million through a trust, and that's worth something like$800 million. Now, of course, Les Wexner is a controversial figure. He's been linked to Jeffrey Epstein. And he also, in here, he used to own Victoria's Secret. And so, again, not your traditional AI data center investor, but someone who got on the cap table early and rode that stake in a really, really huge way. Yeah, I think it was roughly a 700X. Banger. Banger. Never thought we'd be hitting the size gong for... Size is size.

29:21Size is size, though. Size is size. NVIDIA is also in the deal. Probably Silicon Valley's biggest winner from the offering. Yeah, it's good to see them get a win, to be honest. Finally. Finally. Yeah, Jensen needed it. They've been sitting on the sidelines. It's been a rough... Yeah, they really did need like an AI narrative for them. They needed something to really pump the stock. So they're, of course, the dominant chip maker. They have made a crucial supporting role as one of Corbeev's largest investors. It owns about 3 % of the company fully diluted after having bought about$100 million worth of shares in the Series B in early 2023, which was, you know, that chat GPT moment was just taking off and scaling laws were just kind of becoming popular.

30:03It's so strange that NVIDIA and Lex Wexner have the same ownership. That is crazy. In Corrie. Yes. Narrative violation. So NVIDIA owns about$700 million at the IPO price. The secret Jeffrey Epstein guy has the same ownership levels as NVIDIA. One of the greatest companies of all time. In CoreWeave, one of the highest profile. I mean, it really is just a bizarre company. They're doing amazing stuff. You can see from Dylan Patel's analysis, the product that they've created is clearly top-notch. I believe that Dylan Patel is very objective in his analysis, and he's not, because of the nature of his business, he...

30:40There are some lists in this industry that you can more or less pay to get on. yes but i don't believe that dylan patel's is exactly and so well yeah it's 11 30 oh it is and we have a special guest we do i believe they are in the waiting room let's bring him in what's up guys hey how you doing there he is what's going on see you guys it's great to have you good to see you i heard you've been doing uh space repetition to practice uh for interviews so i i i've been doing it it says uh your name is dhwarkesh patel you have a podcast and you interviewed somebody named Mark who owns a website called Facebook.com.

31:15Can you tell me about that? Yeah. In fact, I made an entire Anki deck just for you guys. Really? No way. We're honored. How's the book launch been going? How's the press tour? How are you doing today? It's been going good. The people have all kinds. I have a book called The Scaling Era, and it compiles the interviews I've been doing about AI. And, you know, people like, as you mentioned, Mark and Demis and Dario, the heads of the AI labs, but also researchers and engineers and philosophers and economists about... And it's been really interesting because AI is one of those topics where there's so many fractal questions you could ask about what is its impact going to be?

31:58How are you going to train it? How do you even think about a superintelligence? So I've been dealing with a lot of different kinds of questions, which has made it interesting. It's great. How contentious was the sort of book process? Did you know you wanted to go with Stripe? I imagine you could have had your pick of the litter in terms of like legacy publishers that promised you all sorts of things. But you happen to own, you know, sort of your own distribution. So maybe it was just about picking the right sort of underlying partner for it. It honestly was never a matter of picking a publisher.

32:27The main question was whether I should do a book in the first place. And so some folks at Stripe Press reached out. And if I was going to do a book, it would be with them because, as you know, their reputation precedes them. And so then there was just like deciding, do I want to do the book or not? And I think retrospective was the right call. I think I'm really delighted with how it turned out. I want to talk about acceleration. Are you feeling the acceleration? Like mathematically, we are not accelerating GDP yet, although technically we are today. I think GDP ticked up just a little bit, which means we're technically accelerating.

33:01It must be your podcast. Yes, hopefully we're responsible. But energy use is not accelerating. Even some of the benchmarks are kind of saturating. We're not seeing acceleration curves. We're seeing solid growth. But at the same time, it feels like we're on the precipice of acceleration. But what does it mean to feel the acceleration for you? I think it's a really good question because we have these models which we think are smart. And as you say, we haven't seen them even automate the things which we like when we're having a congressman will be like, oh, the call center workers, they should be really worried.

33:37And they still have got their jobs. Right. So what's going on? There's, as you know, people have been talking about what we need to make the models cheaper. When DeepSea came out, they were like, oh, it's going to be Jevin's Paradox. And we'll be using them way more and they're cheaper. I think the real bottleneck is just we've got to make them smarter. I don't like they're already so cheap. It's like two cents per million tokens or something ridiculous. I think the real bottom line for me using them more is not their price, but them being more useful, being able to take over more parts of the economy.

34:07Yeah. Do you think that intelligence is all we need? Andre Carpathia was talking about the importance of agency. Talked to other people about maybe it's like what makes humans effective. It's not just intelligence. It's also agency. It's also coordination, friendliness, networking. Tyler Cowens talked about, like, do we even need to map the different parts of like the skill tree that humans have, like charisma, wisdom, like underrated is like these, like the AIs are getting more intelligent, but they're already like maxed out on wisdom, right? But do we need to think about a different taxonomy here?

34:45Or do we just need to max out intelligence and everything else will come? No, I think you're absolutely right. I think you need a lot more skills. There has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough, we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is. And in fact, in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a beginning. So the big example here is when Deep Blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess. People thought that this was like a big breakthrough in intelligence in general, because we thought that what chess required was the general intelligence. And you might have heard this concept of AI complete problems, where if you solve this problem, then you've solved intelligence.

35:22So people said that about self-driving. The Turing test was supposed to be AI complete. We've gone through all of these subcomponents of intelligence and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to it. The thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se, although that's a part of it. I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this global hive mind where the reason we can make iPhones and we can make buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency. It's the fact that there's so much specialization. There's so much capital deepening. People are just like doing things, trying different ideas.

36:02AIs need to be smarter in order to do that. They need to have more agency in order to do that. But once they can, if you have millions of AIs running around trying different things, that's when we get the real acceleration and you'll feel it in your blood. When you say like millions of AIs, you've said that you think that there will be billions of AIs running around. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, how can we quantize? Are we just talking like chat GPT DAUs? Are we talking about individual threads? Because you can inference multiple threads on a single chip. That's right. That's right.

36:29Like, how are you thinking it when you think it sounds more concrete when you say there will be billions of AIs. But is that really just like there will be a hive mind that is equivalent to billions of people? Are we talking about like one or maybe each model is like one entity but then there's sub threads how do you think about like that concept of like billions of ais honestly i don't think anybody knows i think it'll just like depend on how the tech tree shapes out sure um i have heard like these wild ideas in some of these interviews where um one person at jay kotra mentioned this idea of the blob and the blob is right now you know um it's really hard for if you have an institution or organization company, it's really hard for the person at the center to have that much awareness of what's happening in the company to control it to any great extent.

37:16Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain as any other Chinese person or any other person in general. And in the future, you can imagine that, look, the thing at the center just has way more compute. And it's not clear whether you think about it as like more copies of AI Xi Jinping or AI Sun Darpechai or something. But you could just have this like huge block that's constantly you're you can you it's like learning more things it's like writing every single press release the company releases It's reading every single pull request. It's answering every single customer response That and no, I don't know if that at all helped answer the question.

37:52Yeah, it's just it's a very weird question of like how this will actually play out will What like do we need to recreate the concept of like an individual brain and then copy paste it a billion times? or do we just need one really big brain? It's unclear to me. I don't know. Jordy, what do you got? How did you feel on Wednesday, this sort of like Ghibli moment? A lot of people were saying, oh, I can't even go on X. It's just all slop. And my takeaway was this is not slop. This is beautiful. This is like actually the most beautiful the timeline has ever looked. And the most powerful thing about that moment, it was the first time that you, like I felt that the entire world could get consistently perfect outputs without any sort of like prompt engineering and basically just one-shotting these outputs in this sort of very scaled way are you are you um so to me i get very excited about it because it's like having any human be able to create beautiful images out of text is fantastic and i think we should be excited about that but what how how did you kind of react to some people saying like, you know, oh, this is bad or like I'm going to log off forever.

39:02Right. You saw people that were just like, OK, like I'm going to delete my account and just leave X now. It's over. How many times have those people said that? Yeah, exactly. I think that's a very zero. Some people were saying things like, oh, you're like eating up the like this, you know, fossil fuel, which is like our affection for Ghibli somehow by making these things. I think it's just a very zero sum view of the world where there can be a limited amount of beauty there can be a limited amount of joy um i just don't think that and can i be honest like the thing i was really feeling when all these ghibli images were coming out i became more of um i became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future um where like look you're getting you're getting a glimpse just from these like early images of how cool and beautiful the things ai makes or helps us make will be just imagine this scaled up like 100x 1000x integrate into all our senses, maybe even into our minds, integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth.

40:03Yeah, I'm just like the future could be really beautiful. I agree. Yeah, I'm wearing like a VR goggles and it's making everyone beautiful. It's really rose colored glasses, right? Yeah. Yeah. I thought you to begin with. Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel so Manus AI is apparently doing like a road show in the United States right now, sort of raising for American VCs, potentially. I saw some people pushing back on the timeline saying like, you know, bad look to any American VC that does that. How do you feel, you know, and the criticism would be like, you know, we're in this sort of AI, you know, Cold War, American, you know, venture capital dollars shouldn't be sort of funding companies that are potentially competing with US AI labs or application layer companies.

40:48What's your sort of broad take on this sort of like cross-border investment in AI? Yeah. I was in China a few months earlier, and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture capital system, their felt, and the tech ecosystem generally. Because after the 2021 crackdowns, people were just like really pulled back. And it sounds like after the deep seek moment, that sort of changed, at least in the AI, at least in AI, because now the state, you know, the city funds and whatever are more willing to push in.

41:23yeah and how should people react to this i'm up two minds because one i do believe that there is like there could be an intelligence explosion and you really want to be ahead of that and you don't want to help them get ahead on that um so i think like the expert controls and whatever are wise as for just man it seems like in the middle ground here where i wouldn't want to just generally try to harm China by tariffing batteries or cars or something. This is an application of AI, and it's complementary to American AI Foundation Labs because they're using the cloud model, right? Yeah. Honestly, I don't have a strong thing.

42:01What do you guys think? I'm exactly in the same position as you. I did find it a little bit weird that some American venture capitalists were just like cheering on DeepSeek, just like, you know, blanket statement, like, you know, open source is good, this is good, when it felt like the way the launch was like rolled out and announced was done in a way to potentially sort of harm American financial markets. But - I mean, my take has been that just on a pure investment finance level, like investing in a Chinese company just can be difficult to get your money back at a certain point because the money just gets kind of stranded there.

42:41And then depending on who's in charge of America at the time, it could be very onerous to bring that money back. But I want to stay on China real quick. I thought, I mean, fantastic piece. I don't even know what you call a video essay. But one of the things that really stuck out to me as a creator like yourself was the lack of Chinese Joe Rogan, basically. And I was wondering, like, have you thought about that more? Have you unpacked that more? like you would almost expect that even if all the crazy censorship is true why is there no power power law winner and there's a joe rogan who just spouts propaganda constantly like what is going on that's driving the lack of these like long tail like you know world like country renowned country famous people yeah i feel like you guys might actually have a good perspective on this because somebody might have said why doesn't tech have their like joe rogan equivalent and you guys started your podcast network and i think somebody could have said before you guys started your podcast network why doesn't something like this uh exist already um uh i i honestly i i don't speak chinese and i don't i this is just secondhand stuff i heard in china i feel like reluctant to make grand conclusions about chinese culture based on like why don't they have a joke and it's because like this is chinese culture is like this or something yeah um the sense i got was that they are more concerned like whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume is often more focused on practical matters um and if you listen to joe rogan it's very much like let's just shoot the shit about whatever uh i get the sense that it's like that is just not that uh interesting at least the people i met yeah yeah it's less practical stuff i wonder if there's also an effect where just some of the first social networks probably accelerated more quickly to these highly diffuse algorithmic driven TikTok feeds that allow for smaller micro celebrities, essentially.

44:46Whereas in America, we've been building up this celebrity culture for so long that we have this more of a power law dynamic. I don't know. I don't really have a thesis on it that's super built out, but it is fascinating. Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. Have you been there? I was there once on a layover, but Jordy did live there for a while. Oh, really? In 2016, I went to Fudan. It was a little hedge fund called High Flyer. Yeah, no big deal. No, I just studied abroad there. So I was there for a semester, and I worked out of China Accelerator, which is like a startup accelerator. So a very, very interesting experience that I don't need to go into now.

45:27I mean, the scale is crazy. I was in Guangzhou even just for a day and the scale of the buildings there, it's just, it really is remarkable. Like you need to see it in person because the pictures kind of compress everything. You don't really understand until you're there. The one, the one thing that I found that was weirdly fascinating is I would, I, for some reason, I don't know if it was the iPhone camera at that time, but I found it very difficult to get high quality images because it was so polluted that like something about like your own eyes would be able to kind of like, you know, huh i don't know but i would take a picture and i'm like that's not what it looks like and i and uh i realized every time that it was just like certain areas were so heavily polluted that interesting the iphone camera would just kind of bug out but it's like um i had a question for you uh i you know something from this week that i thought was uh funny was that sort of like we were all kind of like holding our breath for the next like chat gbt moment and then it was also you know chat gbt uh with with their image generation product uh do you do you think we should be holding our breath for sort of another company to sort of experience this sort of moment like that where it's just full you know complete takeover of the mindshare right because mindshare is just so important right now the sort of benchmarks come out and everybody in our corner of the internet is like hyper fixated on it but the average consumer you know one of the things I thought was fascinating is you know John and I had a couple Ghibli posts each that sort of broke containment and a lot of people were quoting it and saying all right like tell me what this app is everybody like what's the joke like they just still didn't know like chat gpt or anything like that but yeah i think it would be amazing for the industry if another company could have you know a moment that that big uh do you see something like that happening you know this year um or have we sort of reached yeah even like the agent stuff like flight booking you could see that like there's some application that would go real broad or is there any like next uh next milestone that you're waiting for?

47:22If somebody did get a reliable agent to work, I think that would just be like, that would have a similar break the internet in a way that you personally could use. And you could just like log in. And I think it'll probably be one of the foundational lab companies. People have been for years trying to build agents and they just haven't worked. And it makes me think that that's a fundamental limitation of the current models. And so it'll just be the company that is building a future model that is geared towards computer use and so forth. That is what I'd expect to be. I mean, I was thinking the other day, remember when Sam got fired and people were posting on Twitter, oh, there's something, what did Ilya see?

48:03There's a Q-star. Q-star, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's why he got fired. But it is notable that in retrospect, if you were following the Q-star rumors, you actually would have been in a good position to anticipate you know that there would be this like reasoning breakthrough that's kind of what they were talking about at the time similarly gpt 4.5 and grog 3 being not that much better uh if you were following twitter and six months ago you would have seen oh pre-training might plateau but we'll have to go with inference scaling or something so maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's gonna happen i mean i remember at the time i was just like how these these idiots on twitter or just like they don't know what they're talking about.

48:46It's like a rumor mill. And in retrospect, I'm like, eh, kind of like, I mean, you know, you like take it with a grain of salt, but they kind of had the big picture. There's like no secrets. Yeah, there was always this funny dynamic where people were criticizing Sam for launching ChatGPT without telling the board. But then at the same time, people were criticizing Sam for like being non-technical and not driving the product forward. And I was like, no matter what you think of Sam, like those two things cannot be true simultaneously. Like you have to pick a side here. You can't criticize them for both like not innovating and also innovating too fast.

49:15But anyway, I want to talk about like a flip side of the P-Doom argument that I've been kicking around. Basically, like we've seen these like accelerating trends before nuclear energy, energy too cheap to meter has been talked about before. And we have hit stagnation. Like it is possible that just something can break in our society and all these different economic and political forces can align to just say, hey, you know what? Nuclear energy is not going to double every couple of years. And it didn't. And I'm wondering, like, what is your P stagnation? Like just your probability that something happens.

49:51Maybe people freak out. Maybe there's just, you know, one world government or something. But we actually see AI stall for a significant amount of time, like 50 years. there's no intelligence explosion purely for stagnation reasons. Do you think that's a possibility? Like 10, 20%. I think there is a dynamic I talked about earlier where in the past we have underestimated how much it takes to make a coherent intelligence that has agency and so forth, right? That could be part of it. Another is that there is no intelligence explosion. So, sorry, I mean, the most important thing here is, look, we can keep increasing compute that we're putting into these systems for maybe the next five, 10 years, because computers is growing at this ridiculous rate, where in three years, we're going to have 10x the amount of global AI compute that we have right now.

50:47But at some point, right now, we're spending 2 % of GDP on compute and data centers and stuff like that. You can't just keep 10xing that forever. So if somehow this whole deep learning paradigm is wrong and we just like totally missed the boat somehow, then I could see it happening. That's I give it a 10, 20 percent. Otherwise, if we do get AGI, I'm of the opinion that we're not it would just be so hard to contain it. Like it's an incredibly powerful technology, even if there's no intelligence explosion, even if it doesn't help you make an ASI or something. just AGI alone is like would just make the economy explode and all kinds of crazy shit I mean on the on the like there's there's a little bit of a force of deceleration like the GDP question but also just I've had this idea that like no matter how intelligent you are you can't break the laws of physics at a certain point you need to like get the sand out of the ground and turn it into silicon and like at a certain point just moving the sand around fast enough even at light speed you're not 10xing every two years and so it feels like there could be a slowing down even as we're having the robots do basically everything it's like the robots are still maxed out by physics i don't know i was thinking about this this morning actually um and the intuition i was uh thinking about is so since 1750s we've had two percent economic growth in the world before that it was like a tenth of that right 0.2 percent if you're around in the 1500s or 1 ,000 and somebody said there'd be like 2 % growth.

52:21I think you might, given your reference class, have been like, look, it just takes a long time to learn how to artificially select crops and how to build like new structures and aqueducts and whatever. That is a process that takes a while. So why do you think you're just going to be going through like increasing that 2-3 % a year? And in retrospect, it is like a really weird. You look at the last 100 years of history. We're discovering all these new things in physics and chemistry and so forth. The last 50 years, we're like, we start with a transistor, and now we're talking on this magical screen.

53:01And that was just like, physics didn't bottleneck that. I think you get another 10x, and I don't see any in-principle reason why the next 10x of physics just would not allow the robots to move fast enough. Yeah, I mean, certainly on the GDP question, I think the energy question is like maybe a little bit murkier, but then there's probably other ways to optimize and still get those GDP lifts, even with energy growing at like a more reasonable, less explosive rate. So I think I agree with you there. I'm sure you've talked about this in other interviews and with some of the individuals that are sort of leading initiatives at these companies.

53:38But what's your sort of broad take on on Apple's position and how they've been approaching everything in AI? You know, it's sort of like I've seen, you know, they've sort of led with like Genmoji almost as much as they've led with like, you know, everything, all the potential of what you would want out of sort of AI assistant. but how do you think these you know companies like apple and google sort of like figure out product development and like proper distribution of these products is i feel like that's been the big critique uh it's just like they have every every possible advantage such talented uh you know team members and it has to be so frustrating it should be a sustaining advantage or sustaining innovation if you're looking at the innovators dilemma framework and yet it feels like it might wind up being disruptive?

54:28I don't know. Yeah. They're not AGI-filled enough. If you treat it like another feature, well, even if you treat it like another feature, it's mysterious why Siri doesn't work on my phone. But it's like more people basically, and if you take that seriously, you're not just going to be like, oh, and the 25th department in our complex is about making Siri better at speaking or something. This is the future. yeah and then that's is that the that that then becomes like the gigable case for safe super intelligence meaning like none of the features or like consumer applications really matter at all today and you shouldn't even release them and you should just sort of accelerate towards the the end goal that enables all the other goals that's an interesting point um

55:24I think maybe somewhere in between where like if you didn't really chat GPT you wouldn't have been able to just like know that this is a feature people really wanted to be a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot You just won't know what actually makes something a good coding bot. The counterargument to this, and I think what the SSI people would say, is that they actually are deploying, but they're deploying towards the one thing they care about, which is accelerating AI research. And they don't need to do that externally.

56:05They can just do that internally. And so the basic question is, can you get this closed loop where you build the AIs which are helping you accelerate AI research, dot, dot, dot, super intelligence? I'm like 50-50 on that question. But that other 50 % is like a big deal. Yeah. You mentioned AGI pilled. Is there a difference between AGI pilled and ASI pilled? And why do OpenAI co-founders seem incapable of starting anything but a foundation model company? Yeah. I always wondered, like, I just want one of them to be like, yeah, actually, I'm starting a travel company. But it seems to be like they only know one thing.

56:46They're all one trick ponies. I mean, I love them all, but it's just funny that none of them started anything else. It's the only thing that matters, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think some people, I wouldn't even put it as ASI, because even if you don't believe in this godlike intelligence that's going to control the world, I'm not sure I believe it either. I think there's AGI pill, and there's transformative AI pill, where you say, look, even if they're just like humans, if they have the advantages that AIs will just intrinsically have because of the fact that they're digital, which is the fact that they can be copied with all of their knowledge, right?

57:22So think of the most skilled engineer in your company, like Jeff Dean or Elias Setskover. You can copy that person with all their tacit knowledge and everything. You can merge different copies. You can scale and distill AGI's. Those advantages alone and the fact that there will be billions of copies as we increase the amount of compute in the world, that alone is enough for transformation in the sense of going from what we were like before the Industrial Revolution to the Industrial Revolution pace of growth and so I think somebody can be HGI-pilled in the sense to say yeah, I expect human level intelligence to emerge in the next 10 years but they still don't take that seriously as in like, okay, well, what does that imply about what is happening through the economy?

58:00Does that just mean like, oh, you've got a smart personal assistant or does it mean like, no, we're in a very different growth regime? Last question. two last questions i guess uh go for it one question so are there any people in the book that you feel like uh in the fullness of time uh are are sort of very under under hyped or not getting enough attention people that are unsung heroes that maybe don't post a lot on x today but when we look back you know 15 years from now we'll be like good question you know those were the people that we're doing because there's this this weird phenomenon right now where it's like if you're just loud on the internet like you just like you know you get you suck mind share and attention and maybe there's somebody like a building over that's doing more impactful work or really at the forefront that isn't posting at all because they're actually onto something that's a really good question um i think a lot of the people i've interviewed have subsequently or you know at the same time like are well known right so um even if you're not a lab ceo So if you're like a Leopold or a Sholto or a Trenton, people know who you are on Twitter as well.

59:07The person who I think might be underrated still is an interview I did that we only released in the book. So we have two interviews that we kept for the book. One of them is Ajayya Kotra. And she is somebody who has been doing this really interesting, like since the 2010s, these really interesting analyses of how much compute did evolution spend in total? in order to like over the billions of years evolution has been going like how do we model that as a computational like pathfinding exercise and using that as an upper bound on how long it will take to build a gi and then like how much computers the human brain use how much how much like time do we spend learning as kids and how much compute is that in total compared to how long it takes to train these models what does that teach us about how much better these models could get given this overhang um that has informed i think a lot of oh shit sorry that this is the wrong answer.

59:56Although Aja is excellent and she's also underrated. The one who is also super, super underrated is Carl Schulman. And I think, I don't know if this name rings a bell to you, this man is like, you would not believe the amount of ideas that are out there in the AI system from like the software only singularity, basically the intelligence explosion kind of stuff to these transformative AI and modeling out the economics of this new growth regime. So much more. It's like this one guy, it all came from him. He doesn't like to write that much. So he tells other people his ideas. I had him on my podcast and we put his stuff in there.

1:00:38He just has all these galaxy brain takes. One of them was, he looked at the research on what changed between chimpanzee brains and human brains. And he's like, oh, there's a bunch of structural similarities. It's just that the human brain is Baker. So this lends credence to the scaling hypothesis. I have one more question and then we'll let you go. By the way, X is down. I think you broke it or we broke it together, but, uh, but yeah, we're still live. Um, but, uh, how, how do you think about, uh, more on like the business side, because I've just, I think everybody's been fascinated with your journey.

1:01:12When, when you started your podcast, everybody would have said like, there's enough podcasts. Like we don't need, you know, we just don't need more of them. That clearly is not true. There's plenty of white space and your growth is proof of that. But how do you think about value capture and what you're doing? Because I'm sure you've had people come to you and say like, hey, look, like, you know, just just come keep doing the show. But we're going to give you 50 million dollars of sort of like shares. And you don't know. Nobody is coming to me with that. Well, they should. Yeah. But yeah. like how do you think about kind of um i think there's this general fear in the tech community right now where it's like this is the last two to three years where you can like you know accumulate wealth and then like it's over and i don't believe that that's true but how do you sort of balance like you know you're doing something you love all day long which is just like talking to interesting people and like thinking about the future and you know humanity's potential and technology and all this stuff but you know how do you balance how do you balance all that that fear and and you know wanting to capture value from your work uh but also wanting to not be conflicted right and being able to just be sort of this independent um actor yep um i actually i'm very curious about the answer for you guys because even though you're the the sort of the network you're starting now it like just it started with a much bigger bang than my products are starting out with so i i assume you actually got a bunch of these kinds of offers right as you're like oh this is like new and exciting well yeah we care we care a lot about you know being like switzerland but specifically from like the investor the investor side right like long term we want to have any sort of investor be able to come on the show and talk about what they're doing that's right and i would imagine the same thing for you like you don't want to be like you know so tied in or have uh to one you know foundation model you know company that you can't talk about the incredible things that someone else is doing right yeah yeah um i have had like different podcast networks or whatever reach out to me in the past and i've seriously considered them um in one case i was like close to saying yes and in retrospect it was like this was many many years ago before like the podcast had grown that much at all and it was like we'll give you um we'll edit the show for you and we'll produce it for you um and all we ask is 50 of the revenue you earn through the future um and you're 50 of your lifetime earnings 50 50 yeah um but i uh i had a couple of friends who i was like they're like dude it's like working just do it yourself and i'm glad because also another thing that might have influenced your decision as well is talent is so key um talent in the sense of i think it really matters to have one or in this case two in your case two people who are like, we care, this is our vision, and we are going to instill it rather than this is an institution where I'm the face of it.

1:04:05But secondly, what I was going for is like talent as your editors, your other people on your team. For me, I've just been super delighted with the people I get to work with there. And it just like the care and attention to detail they have just would not be replicated with, here's a team of editors at this podcast network. It's like instead of the people I've sought out and I love working with and I give them detailed feedback and they give me detailed feedback. And, you know, yeah, that's that's also what makes it special. Yeah. On to the specifics around. Do you think that the general techno, you know, techno capitalist fear of, you know, like, you know, basically like I think a lot of, you know, 22 year olds right now are coming in to their sort of careers and they're saying like, well, everybody's going to be paper clipped in a few years.

1:04:52like you've got to sort of like create value and capture it now so that you're okay in this sort of like AGI future. I do feel like that's maybe sort of common fear throughout history, right? Where there's like people have this sort of pending sense of doom sometimes. But do you think that's like, you know, what would you say to somebody that had that sense?

1:05:18um i i think like i think the way to model out the next few years from a career trajectory is you'll just have 100 extra leverage but um you want to be in a position where you can use that leverage there's a common thing and i'm sure you experience this now as well is that as you advance in your career before you're like i've got a bunch of time but i don't know what to work on and after you're further along, you're like, I have no time, but there's like a thousand different ideas I have for things that would be super valuable or I think would go really well or something. So I think what you should do is just get to a point where in whatever you think is interesting or care about, you're at the frontier and can see what the problem space actually looks like.

1:06:00If you care about AI, I would really recommend moving to SF and then just start working on problems and use the leverage that AI gives you. And if you end up getting paper clipped, it's like what's the point of you personally what's the point of you not doing anything worrying about that in the 80 % of worlds or 90 % of worlds where we don't get paper clipped you'll get to say you worked on something really cool at a time that was really important in the history of humanity that's great well said thanks for coming on this is fantastic this is fun guys we gotta have you back this is really really awesome let's make it a regular thing and super bullish around you guys I mean like thank you so much you're like well your previous thing is a couple months in but this is like a couple weeks in and you're already killing it that's awesome so much we really appreciate you coming on and for for for the record uh we're not building a network yeah it's actually a head fake it's a head fake uh it's just a show it's just a show forever that's right we'll never we'll never come to you and say give us half for for editing you know uh you can't and you you want at least 75 percent yeah exactly uh great having you on great having you on i'm excited to get you know everybody to get access to the book yeah yeah go get the book i i printed it out but you can buy the actual thing.

1:07:12Thank you for doing that. Stripe Press. The scaling era is here. Cheers. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Bye. See ya. Bye. And we got Casey Hanmer coming in. We kept him waiting. Sorry about that, Casey. Hopefully you're still here with us because we want to hear about Terraform. We want to... Have you seen his office? No. He builds from a castle in Burbank. It's like... Some guy built these crazy castles. Uh, it's a fascinating company. Uh, boom. Hey Casey, how are you doing? Hello? Very well. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Great. Are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else?

1:07:48Where are you? I'm, I'm in the castle. Um, I'm behind a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year, but yeah, I mean, the, the castle windowless wall is right by me here. So can you, can you, uh, give me just a little bit of intro explanation of the company? And then I, I mean, I do want to hear the story of like how the castle got built again, because it's a funny story. Sure. Well, let's start with Terraform. So three and a half years ago, I rage quit my job at NASA JPL and incorporated Terraform Industries to build cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air.

1:08:23And we've been at that three and a half years now. We've made a lot of progress. It's super exciting. The castle itself was built in the 80s by the Bandy family who built many of the industrial buildings in Burbank. And they worked with a a general contractor who, who was down to do crazy stuff. And it turns out if you're building from cinder blocks, you can make them any shape you like. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Um, can we, uh, can we start with this, uh, this quote tweet that went mega viral this week? Uh, you said, I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is, is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now.

1:09:03Don't at me. It's a video of Elon Musk landing a rocket. And I think Elon quote tweeted you and said, just read the instructions. But can you give us some more context on like, unpack that? Like what exactly is the outside context problem? What's going on? Yeah, it's a bit of a geeky deep cut. So the outside context problem is a concept popularized in in banks's uh culture novel series in particular the novel accession which primarily deals with um the culture coming in contact with uh with kind of a previously unknown uh alien i mean the whole books are full of aliens but this is like an alien alien intelligence um that that's um modality is very reactive and so their usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming force um uh and and then just read instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in uh in in mx novel so in this novel there's millions and millions of of fully sentient very very large spacecraft that fly around uh basically looking after humanity um the the deeper point is um i think elon's a very interesting person i think he's obviously very underestimated uh has been throughout his entire career for reason.

1:10:27Sorry to interrupt, but is he underestimated in our corner of the internet or just sort of broadly? Do you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon fanboy? I think even then. Yeah. And I think conventional wisdom a year ago was like, oh, Elon is getting involved in politics is going to shoot his feet off. And I think he genuinely took a big risk backing Donald Trump for the election. If Kamala had won, I doubt it would have gone very well for him.

1:11:02But now there's a person who a year ago we're hearing all these op-eds like, oh, he doesn't understand politics. He's still hearing he doesn't understand politics. He's taking a huge risk. He should just focus on Mars. What is he talking about, etc.? He's now in the White House, literally running the IT modernization process of the entire federal government, which is code for he has root access to the entire government.

1:11:24And I think ultimately, I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for the United States. Obviously, there's going to be some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way. That's always been clear from the outset. I wrote a blog post about this last year saying, why do we need a Department of Government Efficiency? But I think overall, we should probably regard ourselves is extremely lucky that someone of Elon's caliber has taken interest in fixing the processes that affect all of us, not just finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies or skirt around certain regulatory issues that just the normal way that you deal with these things.

1:11:58But I think the conversation needs to be had here. And my general complaint is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the Doge process are not constructive because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on. And I think this is a process that would be improved by constructive and high quality criticism and suggestions and better ideas flying into the system. I think that's always the case. But there's an outside context problem because most of the people who are jumping up and down about the various alleged outrages that Doge is committing do not understand what's going on.

1:12:32It's beyond their context, which is not a huge surprise, but it is a major problem. That's interesting. particularly for their interests. You know, and I wrote a post about this as well in the context of California. Like California, I live there. I love it. It's great. It's a great state, but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now. And that's a real problem for the future of the progressive movement. You know, like San Francisco needs to be a shining city on a hill. Yeah, I agree. I have a sort of a random question, but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it.

1:13:05Do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep tech or hard tech investors after years of SaaS and sort of Web3. And now it's sort of the hot thing. I mean, even you started your company in 2021. Even then, you know, it wasn't, you know, there's sort of the meme, right, which is, you know, deep tech would have loved zero interest rates, right? But like, there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being, you know, there were plenty, but there was not as many as there are now. Do you have advice to just sort of venture capitalists broadly about how you're evaluating, you know, if a, you know, bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible, like how do you actually, you know, how, how, how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that?

1:13:53Because like, it just seems like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed, but Like they're doing like very real work and, you know, very likely will have a dramatic impact. Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about, you know, acquiring the necessary expertise to make better than random judgments when it comes to potential deep tech startups. But, you know, the reality is it's extremely capital intensive. It operates on a different set of both physical and legal laws.

1:14:31than SaaS. And that actually makes it significantly less efficient, I think, in terms of the health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem in this case. But instead, you can look at like, well, what are the contemporary and historical cases where major innovations were successfully brought at scale into the market? And in almost all cases, it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing capital relationships and projects and in particular a large team of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value. And then you take that team and you throw the one in your kind of problem, in a new kind of problem and so on.

1:15:12And the most salient example in the recent past is the Elon Industrial Complex where Elon has this family of companies that are doing things that everyone else really struggles to even kind of wrap their heads around in most cases. But history is replete with examples. And I recently have kind of gone very deep on Henry Kaiser, who founded more than 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam, built 1500 ships in World War II. You know, stuff that we regard as impossible today. Like, oh, how can we fix the American shipbuilding? He just stood up a shipyard from scratch in like less than two months in 1941.

1:15:45Like they didn't have computers back then. It's just insane stuff. So, yeah, there are historical examples of this happening. And I think one way of thinking about it is that capital allocation in hard tech is a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money. And probably the optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already proved their worth. Speaking of organizations, you said you rage quit NASA. Is NASA's best work behind them? Or if, you know, now that Elon has root access, you know, could we see, you know, the organization sort of revitalized at some point?

1:16:32I very much hope that the Doge team will devote some efforts to helping NASA recover its historical capabilities, which we have to remember within living memory were the envy, remain the envy of the world. But unfortunately, my experience, It's personal experience. I didn't see all of it, obviously. But my experience at NASA was that the organization is still stuffed to the gills with brilliant people. But most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work, like actively being blocked and hindered and punished for going above and beyond, which is not how we should be running a space program competing with China.

1:17:11Like China's program managers in their space program, they fear the consequences of failure. and NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference. Can you talk a little bit about stagnation? You know, what happened in 1970? There's a whole bunch of different theories. Is it a culture issue? Do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset? I've always been tracking energy. That's the point where the energy growth kind of broke from 2.7 % per year to 2%. It feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear. Maybe it's this Doge stuff that's going on.

1:17:49Will it be political? But how important is unstagnating on the energy side to kick everything into gear? And what are the stack ranked priorities for actually seeing increased human flourishing, economic growth, energy, all the proxy metrics that are important? well you hit on the most important aspect there which is we can measure this right at the end of the day we either have total factor productivity growth or we don't and if we do then our children will have a better life than us no matter what and if we don't then they won't no matter what it doesn't matter how innovative we get about you know social programs and redistributive spending and like very sneaky forms of communism at the end of the day we're either growing the economy or we're not um and i think that you know what the hell happened in 1971 is over determined in some ways.

1:18:39You know, Henry Kaiser died in 1967, you know, various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so on occurred. We had the passage of NIPA and Sikra in the early seventies as well. You know, all of these things, I think, well-intentioned or kind of contingent at the time. But since then, I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moore's law and improved computing capacity, we would have been in much more dire straits as far as economic stagnation goes. But I'm also extremely optimistic that we're going to turn this around. First of all, because we seem to have gained the ability to talk about stagnation, first of all, and to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding, for example, the fertility rate.

1:19:17And the second thing is that, you know, obviously AI will help. But we've also got this incredible technology in solar power, which is allowing us to convert. In a sense, we're going back to the land.

1:19:30Converting sunlight into energy about 100 times more efficiently than plants do. and electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn. So I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem this decade. We might take a good crack at the permitting problem, at least in the West, this decade as well. And I think those two things combined, plus some intelligent AIs will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve. Can you talk more about solar? Why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear? there's a lot of chatter and everyone loves both right now but why why is solar what you've chosen to kind of make your life's work here yeah at least for now i mean to be clear i'm not bigoted against nuclear power i'm not worried about nuclear radiation i taught nuclear physics at caltech for a while um uh it's a fabulous technology but but again like we can theorize about it we can look at history and history shows us that nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted by various navies for operating, you know, clandestine, you know, underwater vessels that need air independent power supplies or nuclear aircraft carriers that need the ability to outrun said submarines.

1:20:43But other than that, you know, even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power their surface fleet. And I think if you want to honestly understand this, you need to kind of dive into why that is the case. At the end of the day, nuclear reactors are steam engines and steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton cycle. And there are certain irreducible costs associated with steam turbines and so on that just drive the cost up. And that's, even if NRC didn't exist tomorrow, right? Even if you could buy enriched uranium on amazon.com, it would still be the case that just the steam engine component of it is going to cost no less than coal.

1:21:18Solar on the other hand is fascinating because sunlight rains down on the earth every day for free there's a fusion reactor up in the sky um due to some like weird quantum effects and again silicon trickery it is possible to convert that into high grade energy in the form of electricity with you know a layer of uh a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper a considerably thinner than a sheet of paper um that the silicon is is enormously abundant on the earth we've gotten really quite good at making it there are factories worldwide now turning churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down if If anything, production is increasing 30 to 40 % per year, which is just bananas.

1:21:57It's a sort of growth rate you'd like to see for any technology. And the reason this is occurring is because there's a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off. So we don't have to theorize about, well, what is it going to take to get to first of a kind, second of a kind, hundredth of a kind, start getting those economies of scale down in solar that's already happening. It's a commoditized product. It has no moving parts. You don't need any special skills or labor to install and operate it. it's even easier to do than planting corn. It's put on the ground and it spits out power, which in our discussion about 1971, electrical power is basically wealth.

1:22:29It's a free money printer you can put on the ground. And this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated about the various tariffs on solar panels. I think if China, our geopolitical adversary is attempting to harm us by giving us solar panels subsidized at their taxpayer's expense, we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even worse uh and i don't pave nevada with them or something like we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track um but yeah basically that's the key uh you know some batteries on the side and the problem is solved yeah speaking of like paving nevada uh what does your what does the future of earth look like in 20 50 years is it solar panels all over in space is it solar panels all over the earth is this is it going to feel cyber punky or will there still be trees around at all?

1:23:21Am I just in a matrix pod and, but, but my total factor productivity is going up. So I'm happy. Uh, what does the long-term future look like for you or in your mind? I think it's a bit hard to say. Um, I'm quite optimistic. Um, you'd have to be to start a hardware company. And I think really what the future looks like comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build. Yeah. Right. Like if you want a great future go and build it um in terms of energy uh we can we can give every man woman and child on earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the united states which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year um with something like six percent of earth's surface under solar which is it's a it's much much less than we currently use for grazing or for row crops or for forestry wow it's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities But it's quite a bit less than agriculture.

1:24:10That's enough for everyone. If you, like the scenario, the previous call you were talking to Dwakesh about like getting paper clipped. We're not going to get paper clipped. What's going to happen is the net present value of land for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season. But for solar, it's about, you know, 100 to$200 ,000 per year. Now, if that's powering an AI, artificial super intelligence data center, which is a thousand times more economically productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain, uh which has to sleep eight hours a day and uh you know browse twitter um then then obviously economically speaking our farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to starve to death and like that's the that's the the true ai doom scenario um so again that's something we should be aware of and something we should should figure out how to how to forestall we will obviously have a lot of solar in space but i think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space i don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the earth at anytime anytime soon is that just because the economics don't work out i've seen a couple of these companies they're using mirrors or lasers yeah the mirror one is interesting actually um because because it kind of exploits the fact that like you're if you're a solar array owner you have no other way of getting more power um other than paying someone to reflect some more down to you which is super cool don't get me wrong um as far as solar cost goes the starlink constellation is solar powered uh it's in orbit it generates considerably more power than the space station does collectively, obviously, like maybe 100 times more power than the space station.

1:25:38And most of that power is used to amplify radio signals and transmit them down to Earth where they're received by our antennas. And the revenue per watt of electricity used to transmit microwaves through Earth's atmosphere to the consumer, because it's chopped up and turned into internet data, as opposed to just raw power, is about a billion times higher. like the revenue per watt is a billion times higher with it being internet at a few hundred watts or whatever uh transmission power than it being you know attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down for power plants where we pay you know 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that um now starlink is actually fabulously profitable and i'm super proud of the team there i just i think it's absolutely incredible what they've done but there's no way in hell that the profit margin is 10 million percent right so like it's just it's just not possible So I don't think that space-based solar power is likely to be a thing.

1:26:32Do you think that the average seed stage deep tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough? Because in almost every sort of question we've asked you, you've had sort of economic sort of rationale behind your answer. And I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that, you know, there's sort of this like sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing. and then what's waiting for them is potentially a product that like is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product but then there's sort of you can't actually get any value yeah i've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model and they did the thing but it just didn't it wasn't competitive on the grid at all yeah that's the nightmare scenario yeah i mean like at the end of the day if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you then go give it a give it a shot right you don't know i don't know like customers and consumers they like they like weird things we don't we just don't know like that's the fabulous thing about capitalism it it just fire hoses options and potentials at the market to see what sticks and if you think back to when we were children there's no way we would have known that like the uh the stable attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this that's not that's not how they worked back then so um for the younger listeners uh just like quiver in fear we didn't have cell phones when we were young um uh so so you should give it a go on the other hand if you are trying to do a hard hardware tech thing at massive scale you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you you cannot fight capitalism you know to get to massive scale forever you have to grab it's not a mystery economics yeah exactly would you would you rather have them on on your team or against you and and i just see this this mistake time and time again which is like well this technology will work if we can bring about some like massive uh behavioral change in the entire market or something like probably that's not going to happen but if you can produce a product like an iphone where when the new one comes out hundreds of millions hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by a thousand dollars of cash in their wallet and they just they just like shut up and take my money uh then then you've done the right thing right you're thrilling people that you're you're giving them something that they they'll happily part with their hard-earned cash to receive and um yeah i mean it's not like this is a mystery build something people want i've one too okay uh look uh we'll go fast yeah uh the scrolls project is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project um i think it's there's a certain kind of person who really likes to curate or curate and organize information and um and i think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical origins in past and i think that's worthwhile uh you mentioned briefly this sort of ai doomsday scenario where the ai just realizes that it should blanket the earth with solar panels and to uh you know feed itself uh what else scares you in the world to end on a high note um i think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 1930s and so we've we've literally allowed billions of people to die painfully lonely uh in old age when if we just had enough insight and enough effort we could have figured out how to stop that a long time ago wow interesting well hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree well unfortunately we used all the gpus to make ghibli this week so maybe next week we can put it next week we can put the ai to work on extending our lives thank Thank you so much for joining us.

1:30:12Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, what was that? I was going to say one last thing. Like, one of the major problems with Doge is that, like, we have these entitlements, costs of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicaid, and so on. Like, 1 % of the federal budget is spent on dialysis, right? These are all diseases of old age, right? If we can just increase human lifespan by 10%, we cut that whole tranche, trillions of dollars of annual spending by 10 % because 10 % fewer people die every year. Yep. And they also get to not die. it seems blindingly obvious uh and yet and yet you we spend less than 0.1 percent of our of our national health budget on anti-aging research that's less than 0.1 that's wild wow well we'll have to dig into that more thank you so much for stopping we would love to have you back on maybe we'll come over and we'll we'll do one in the in the castle at some point yeah i'd love to that'd be great thank you so much this is this is a fantastic conversation really enjoyed it have a great rest of your day have a great weekend talk to you soon what a brilliant what a brilliant mind yes uh scrolls enjoyer you always get good stuff with scrolls enjoyers the scroll guys the scroll guys uh we gotta have the whole the whole maybe you should do a scrolls day scrolls day uh but back away from scrolls we're going back to books we got nadia asperhub coming in the temple of technology uh she has uh just announced a new book called anti-memetics um she's a former Stripe Press author in the Hall of Fame of authors, in my opinion.

1:31:40If you publish on Stripe Press, you're going to publish there. You can publish anywhere. That's what people have been saying. Yeah, it's really the NFL of publishing. Yeah. Anyway, let's bring it in. Super excited for this. Let's see. Thanks so much for joining. We're having some fun. Yeah, thanks for joining. Can you give us surprised that delian didn't join by the way yeah because pavel was about to have his he was about to have this amazing you know his first do not send delian the link he will just bomb i think he has this interview he does have the link don't let him know that he could use the link because he's a great hype man uh anyway yeah would you mind just a brief introduction and and give us a little uh high level of the book sure um i'm nadia a writer and researcher um i just published this new book called Antimimetics, Why Ideas Resist Spreading.

1:32:34And it's about this idea of anti-memes, which are self-censoring ideas. So ideas that we find really interesting and compelling in the moment, but for whatever reason, they kind of resist sharing or being remembered. So I think we usually think that if an idea is good or interesting or compelling, it's going to find a way to share or be shared or spread on its own. But there's this whole other class of ideas. So things like taboos, forbidden ideas, stuff we don't really talk about in public, cognitive biases, so stuff that we are sort of like blind spots about ourselves that we don't really realize.

1:33:09All this kind of forms this class of ideas that are anti-mimetic and don't spread super easily, even though they're interesting and important ideas. So that's what I wanted to write about. How much of mimetics is just actually compressing the idea down? I was thinking about how Lulu's going direct manifesto has this really pithy phrase, going direct founder mode, same thing with the network state, kind of two words that really hits versus Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a fantastic essay about AI, called it situational awareness. We don't see people using situational awareness as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going.

1:33:44Is it just a packaging problem or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an anti-mimetic property? Yeah, I think some of it is a packaging problem. um like ideas themselves have these innate qualities that are mimetic or anti-imetic some of it is just about like how the person perceiving that or receiving it is um like how do they interact with that idea so you can think of certain ideas that are spread really really easily in certain networks but not in others um conspiracy theories are a good example of this uh so yeah i think it's a mix of both it's partly about the idea it's partly about the person that is like sharing it or receiving it sure jordy um well one i want to make this segment like the most beautiful ad for your book so i'd like to go like through a number a number of the of the ideas um i did want to uh a book had been going viral and i got a copy of it i wanted to get kind of your high level take on it it's funny there there was uh this was maybe released in 2021 there is no antimemetics division it sort of went viral a little bit last year but then it is no longer like for sale or i guess you can buy it or the paperbacks are trading is is that the great dollars on ebay right now yeah so i have one i should probably you know just sell it and buy like 20 no keep holding keep holding i'm sitting on something that's worth a million i just thought the great irony of like you know they were they're maybe going after like you know something similar to what you've been researching it but but the but then it's not even available anymore so it's like not not not uh not dog fooding do you have any sort of like uh yeah i'm curious like and then more more broadly like uh in researching this like what what's the full breadth of what you were kind of like looking at right because i imagine you were researching and finding like forbidden pdfs and books in a bunch of different areas right of like this sort of esoteric knowledge that uh humanity ignores for some reason yeah um i'll give a big uh plug for quantum who wrote there is no anti-memetics division and um he actually coined the term anti-meme like back in the day and it originates from this fiction uh like horror sci-fi kind of online wiki um and so yeah he published that book i think 2021 um it's a horror science fiction book and it's about uh anti-memes as this sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are kind of like these black holes they destroy everything they touch they consume everything that comes in contact with them, but for whatever reason, we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them.

1:36:11And so there's this intelligence unit that is trying to fight anti-memes, but like can't even remember that they're doing it. Hence the title, There is no Antimimetics Division. Super cool book, highly recommend it and all of his writing, honestly. And that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic. I had never heard of the concept of anti-memes before this. And yeah, I was reading that book kind of like depths of covid uh yeah 2021 sad dark times but like also you know it's kind of everyone's doing stuff in like group chats and they're doing stuff um like clubhouse was a thing and i had been working at substack and so i was thinking a lot just kind of about like how does this concept apply to the real world and um uh like where do antony show up in the rest of our life so it was definitely a direct inspiration for this book um but yeah i wanted just kind of like a non-fiction treatment of the concepts totally it was not practical in any way it was just sort of like you said a sci-fi horror exploration of it um can you talk about yeah can you talk about like i feel like we're in such a weird time like our generation was sort of like not born on the internet but we sort of like gained consciousness on the internet and the internet is something that just like circulates ideas both like fact and fiction like extremely rapidly and so in many ways like conspiracy theories and these like sort of forbidden potentially truths or maybe it's fiction you know you don't know that sort of like I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't you know like yeah the only conspiracy like the only conspiracy theory I believe is that they're just like many many many many conspiracies going on and all sorts of things at all times right so can you talk about like um yeah I think like what what can people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like process uh information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that or something that's factual or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just anti-memetic and it doesn't want to be known or it doesn't want to be identified as as truth yeah um i thought about that a lot while i writing this just because I think there's a lot of doom and gloom about kind of like where the internet is right now or like social media didn't turn out to be what we expected and I really didn't want to write that kind of a book because it is partly about this transition from you know once upon a time it was you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about like getting you know trolled, canceled, attacked, whatever and a lot of people I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of I just wanted to tune out all of that.

1:38:49But I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other. It's not like, oh, Twitter or whatever is over, and we're just going to all go back into our little caves and only talk to our friends. But both of these things actually feed off of each other, and all the things that get workshopped in the group chats kind of make their way back out into public channels and vice versa. And I think there are things about that that are good and bad, And maybe to your point, just about not being able to even tell what's real anymore, but like group chats aren't really like a safe haven from whatever is happening in public channels because they end up kind of like becoming these super incubators for crazy ideas.

1:39:30And so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshopped by like a small group of people. And so in some ways they're kind of like mutating and making ideas even crazier. But yeah, I mean, not to be like overly defeatist about it, but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it. And like where we decide to direct our attention, what we decide to focus on, that is what your reality becomes. And so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore. But I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about, then life is not really so bad.

1:40:05Yeah. And like you, you compared like, you know, what's happening in sort of the town square, like something like X and then what's happening in group chats right like oftentimes like we're in this world where there's sort of this like fiction appearing on the timeline and then the truth is like racing through group chats and on a long enough time horizon they intersect right because like they almost like an idea uh can be like put out there and maybe people agree with it in the moment but then eventually sort of what's happening in this sort of like private group chats like actually does start spreading and sort of like breaking containment.

1:40:41And in many ways, it feels like that's happening faster than ever, right? Yeah, I wanted to ask a question about kind of like practicality here. I think a lot of founders and business folks think about can they align their company or their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condense it down. Obviously, the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of like what Lulu does, and it's helped her business as opposed to, in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy. Is it possible to do the opposite, to take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti-meme so that the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss?

1:41:28Interesting. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I do talk in the book about this idea of obscurantism, which Nick Bostrom coined, but the idea of like, can you make things boring or can you kind of hide them as a way of sort of suppressing them? So if you think about like suppressing ideas, people often think about like putting a hard lock on it so that, you know, make it forbidden, make it password protected, whatever. But that often makes people more excited to figure out like what is actually going on under there. But if you make it really, really boring and really uninteresting and like, or just like really difficult to parse, people kind of just lose interest and wander away.

1:42:05And that's definitely, that would be like an anti-memetic information warfare tactic, I guess. I've seen this where I've seen people chirping at each other on X. And I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation. So you post, you know, I like SpaceX. And then I quote tweet you and you're like, SpaceX is terrible. But then if you quote tweet back with something that's just like an essay, I'll just be like, I'm tired. I'm out. And you kind of win by default. And I've also seen these attempts to take a legitimate attack vector and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right.

1:42:44And so if you're being attacked by someone, you can say, oh, well, that's an idea from 4chan or that's an idea that's from the Communist Manifesto. So we should disregard it and put it in the forbidden category, even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on. And so I don't know. It's a fascinating topic. Can you can you talk about some of the differences between anti-memetic ideas and anti-commercial ideas and anti-commercial? I would put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where nobody makes money if people eat less. Right. Like like it's sort of this idea that like there's there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting, which is like big breakfast was like came in and they're like, you got to eat a big breakfast.

1:43:26and like there's a bunch of people that benefit from like the big breakfast you know uh yeah uh you know complex uh and then if you start going around and saying like hey you know you can just have coffee or water and like just eat lunch like it's hard to monetize that right it's not like i can be like hey don't eat food and also like you know pay me to like teach you how to not eat food and and some people have done that but like i feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are anti-memetic and like just don't spread for one reason and then stuff that's maybe like slightly more obvious but it's just like not spreading because there's no like sort of economic or commercial interest that's like trying to spread a certain idea yeah that's super interesting i hadn't actually thought about that yet um yeah i think like there's still plenty of ideas that can spread mimetically even without sort of like a commercial engine behind them so So yeah, folk was aphorisms, things like that.

1:44:19But you're right that having, especially I think in like the realm of like health related things, I'm just thinking about like a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that, where people kind of have to like bumble around and like find their own answers to things. And it's partly even if they're like, you know, chronic health issues that tons of people are facing and dealing with, there's no like clear answer to them. And I think sometimes when the answer is something that can't be monetized or sold, then it's it uh if we think of it as just like another engine for driving the spread of information if that engine is missing then um something kind of might languish and not reach everyone that it should so yeah that's super interesting how do you think about uh elon's positioning with xai around the sort of like truth seeking ai like is it possible that a you know properly trained llm could be more inclined to spread ideas that that are sort of anti-memetic within humans yet like the machine is just like you ask it a question it's like well obviously like this is like you know what you're dealing with whereas a human would tell you uh you know you know some other you know answer that that uh maybe was like more correct in some ways i think it could be really useful for uh like ideas that are antimemetic on an individual level like i know some people use ais for this where it's like tell me based on the conversations we've been having like tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize.

1:45:41And maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might kind of not be super honest, that could be useful. I still think it's like really hard to spread things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas through a network. So even if one person really believes it and yeah, is totally bought into an idea, like how do you get it to actually spread from person to person? And yeah, it's a little bit harder to think about like how that takes place. well i'm super excited for the book congratulations yeah we should do what like once we get a full copy here yeah it's like actually ordering we'd love we'll do a deep dive on it yeah and we'd love to have you back we're gonna try to yeah we'll have you back on and we'll help the audience figure out how to make money how to make money because that's the theme that's what's gonna spread that's what's really gonna get the book yeah how do you oh my competitor no one's ever heard of them now all of a sudden no one can remember them yeah they just disappeared from the internet because we put antiphanetics to work in capitalism uh fantastic having you thanks so much for coming on the show yeah and congratulations two-time author now fantastic incredible uh we're going uh the opposite direction we're going straight into the uh the aisdr scandal that's going on we're going back revisiting 11x you you might have heard about it earlier this week uh 11x, there was a TechCrunch article said that maybe the ARR figures were inflated.

1:47:05Maybe they were using customer logos who had churned and they hadn't been removed from the website quickly enough. We have the founder of Rocks on, who is here to tell us all about SDRs, AI, SDR technology agents, and a whole lot more. But I'll let him introduce himself. Welcome to the Temple of technology. Great to have you here. How are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me on, John. Jordy, nice to meet you. Sam connected us. So excited, excited to join your Ramp sponsor. Yes, this is a Ramp sponsor segment. Seriously, I went to Ramp and I was like, okay, there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry, but there's probably something that's working.

1:47:51Just tell me what you guys use. And they were like, well, we use rocks and it's great. And so they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here. And I want to learn more about the product genuinely because it's not something that we're using yet, but in the future, we imagine that, you know, millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day, encouraging them to listen to the show, encouraging them to, you know, download, rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts. We want a really intense million AI Salesforce, and we're hoping you can help us with that. We want to swarm.

1:48:23We want to swarm. The born. Amazing. But anyway, what do you actually do? Yeah, absolutely. So we're set pretty early. Most of it is all word of mouth is yet. So there's a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a sales and marketing team. So we built the first enterprise ready agentic CRM. So it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you. So rocks in the system like and RAM gets installed. It unifies all your customer data in one place, keeps it in RAM's environment, and then feeds a swarm of agents. And our agents are designed to supercharge the max premiums, the sams of the world.

1:49:01Like how do you supercharge the highest compensated frontline kind of winners or killers that go to market? I love it. And the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work. And that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow, like Ramp, are going to have supercharged builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully rocks. So that's what we do. I love it. I have a ton of follow-up questions. I mean, it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the frontline actually writing copy, hitting send, and maybe we're more in the centaur era, where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone.

1:49:47Is that how you're thinking about it right now? Even if in the long term you're going full, the AI will actually send the emails. Yeah. And kind of going off of that specifically, I think everyone can see why back office work is getting sort of automated. Perfect for LLMs. And, you know, Cursor can have an amazing NPS, even if it has like a huge error rate. Yet front office work, when you're interacting with customers, like everybody's experienced this at some point you know either uh the individual themselves or an employee of the individual like sort of messes something up with a customer and it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost revenue versus like a lost five minutes like correcting a bug so yeah balancing that sort of front like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower yeah absolutely as lulu kind of gave me the best advice like we're building bath suits not butlers and the core idea comes from i've held the bag all my life and i ran a good market for a public company before we're not at a point where you can completely go fsd for your largest customers the core idea is how do you supercharge sam or max or eric with ai but they are the ones who are orchestrating or qb in the system where they review and send because the cost of really messing up is in in mike and the small term feels like a bad email but you you would degrade trust through the brand, through the person.

1:51:11And that's what we focus on is how do you build an agentic system that you could use today? It's not vaporware, things we can use today, but how do we supercharge the kind of frontline kind of back carriers? I think over time, like there's going to be dramatic seat compression or efficiencies to be had where people who support those back carriers, which is kind of 80 % of the employee base, they will have to kind of evolve to thrive or kind of risk basically not being relevant. Can you talk about the innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation? Logan Bartlett on his show said that, you know, if you go back to mobile, the sales force of mobile was just sales force.

1:51:54And his thesis was that maybe the sales force of AI is just sales force. And they're obviously doing stuff in AI. But at the same time, we're seeing Apple drop the ball on product development. Google's dropping the ball on product development. It feels like there's more fertile ground than ever. So how have you reasoned through that? And why are you taking this bet, even though there's some people that are saying, hey, it's only a matter of time until the big guys get it together? 100%. Like, Benioff's the goat. He's the goat of all goats. Let's hear it for Benioff, folks. They're a legend. Yeah, like I grew up not in the Bay Area.

1:52:28Like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration. So if you look at ServiceNow and Salesforce, they have a massive advantage because they have distribution but also data. Like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in working with intelligence providers and being, earning the right to be the custodian for enterprise data and bringing in public data. So our position is what we're arbitraging is what somebody who holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage. The users, they don't want to use them. They use new tools, but they've also lost data.

1:53:00Data is now in the warehouse. So if you 40 % of the data in a software kind of data warehouse, like a snowflake is actually go to market data. So when we think about kind of building these new systems, incumbents, a$3 billion kind of incumbent has a massive advantage. But what we're focused on is how can we earn the eyeballs of the SAMs and Max Freemans of the world, but do it in a way where we're doing a rug pull where we build a system of record, which indexes the data that's not already in the system of record. So ROX gets installed, indexes everything in the warehouse, brings in, you can connect all the other sources.

1:53:36And I think the winning kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of default platforms. Talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other companies, specifically in San Francisco around. You see these companies coming out, you see these revenue charts, right? It used to be investors. Seriously, in 2021, I remember saying investors would say, you know, sort of best in class companies are getting to one million ARR in nine months. And now it's basically like, OK, best in class companies are getting to 10 mil in three months.

1:54:14So if you're and so what the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like, well, if I want to win as a company, like we need to put up, you know, just these ridiculous numbers that, you know, and anybody that's built a company knows that like, like revenue ramp is not necessarily like always connect, you know, tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that. So I'm curious to know, like, do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is forcing people to make sort of like short term decisions or riskier decisions or in some cases even like, you know, misstate facts?

1:54:57Yes, I think it's ultimately the founder psyche. Like I've been around the block, but I have to say two things this time around. It makes me the most insecure. Like all of us are very insecure. Right. My wife's listening in. Obviously, like we're all insecure monkeys in some way. So two things. One is, I think this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of revenue curves. The way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy. So we focus on strategic, like the Siemens of the world, enterprise customers, like Redis and MongoDB and Ramp.

1:55:34Like, how do we land there? How do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses which would generate enduring revenue over time? as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own revenue. So that's how I internalize that. I think the game is going to be a quality about enduring revenue. And there are businesses like Waze and Datadog to be built now. It's just that Datadog and Waze, although they were rocket ships, they always focus on essential kind of solutions to really, really large businesses. And that's what we're focused on. The first part of the psyche, I think it's not spoken enough, is the fact is end consumer expectations are in this invisible asymptote where they're expecting singularity.

1:56:16Like consumers, because they've been sold singularity and are using perplexity in chat GPT, they expect all work to be done by software. So that is actually the one that keeps me up in mind. Like how do you deliver these authentic experiences which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations? And that's where I think the winning products are going to come from. So the revenue stuff kind of really, really hits, but I kind of process it out. But the consumers and their expectation, there's some stuff that kind of keeps me up 24-7. Is it internally, are you thinking with the team, like how do we achieve this sort of like chat GPT moment for the enterprise, right?

1:56:53Like you could imagine like there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that like you would get that. but cognition kind of had that where they launched devon and it was like this viral sensation yeah though it was an enterprise agent for coding um but it's a great question yeah like do you think that that's do you think that that's like maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize hey we have something magic here we're not going to talk about it we're just going to like you know it's antimematic you know we just right yeah you're spot on so we're the boring space of ERP and CRM, the most essential, but also the most lucrative software market.

1:57:33Like we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer facing knowledge workers. So we focus on building something that's a land expand land with the maxes and the sound of the world, but growing to a 200 plus kind of active users at ramp. Like that's kind of the core emotion. I think that authentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in, day out. And so we optimize for like internal, like post land virality. So there's no seats, you land rocks and everybody uses it. And I think that's, that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver. Can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product?

1:58:08Obviously, it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse, the snowflakes of the world. It sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations. Is there a rocks app? Like how does a salesperson actually interact with rocks day to day? Absolutely. Pure ramp like kind of cracked engineering shops. So we build product, we're pragmatic product builders and we work with the platforms. We have a web app, an iOS app, the guy who built Ramp and Robin is here. We have a Slack app, we have an email app. So we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of agents working for you.

1:58:43It's powered by our own warehouse, native CRM. So it's running in your warehouse and it's a two way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot. So that's kind of our core idea. In kind of large sophisticated organizations who are already winning, like the Mongols and these folks like we would definitely integrate our API into the internal tools in most of the rest we want to build an application that humans actually want to use and then hopefully get two to three x more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of 10 times more productive i love it jordy you got anything else that's all i got cool well this is fantastic we uh we need to get our news i hear there's big news coming i want him back when he announces it i want to hear it yeah absolutely well one shock sorry i'm a sports nerd i grew up in india getting up in the morning seeing sports center to see like jordan and the wizards that's that's when i started watching it so you're trying to success uh hey hey we talked about this morning like there's gonna be a one name entrepreneur yes for uh ai b2b sass and you could be that you could be that guy so you could be lebron you could be kobe of b2b sass we're rooting for you wilt let's go jordan well thanks for coming

1:59:58well we got another one name entrepreneur coming in the temple of technology any minute augustus you don't even need to know his last name you might know him by his uh augustus the rainmaker former roman emperor yeah yeah accused member of the deep state member of the deep state we're here to confront him put on the tinfoil hat break it down i promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the internet is watching and this will be clipped i won't go too crazy augustus i i really appreciate you taking uh taking a shot and taking a chance on this crazy man has no fear he faces his um he faces his vocal opponent opponents uh daily yeah he really is good at duking it out on the timeline never lets them get to the last quote tweet uh He's having fun with it too, but it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy.

2:00:57And we got Augustus here to break it down for us. There he is. Welcome to the Temple of Technology, Augustus. Wow. I feel like your hair grew an inch. You must be drinking a lot of like milk or whatever to stimulate that hair growth. I'm drinking Justin Mayer's bone broth, bro. There we go. There we go. Kettle and fire. Shout out. Let's hear it. Shout out, former brother of the week. Former brother of the week, Justin Mayer. Can you give us, just set the table for us for those who haven't been following the drama. what's going on uh how'd you wind up in this situation is it frustrating is it hilarious a little bit of both and it's and it's great it's the same effect as like the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like your attackers are like he is the most powerful man in silicon valley yes he is controlling the weather yeah yeah the hit pieces have gone direct now like you're getting the puff pieces in the in the mainstream media and then the decentralized media the citizen journalists are coming for you so break it down yeah yeah no dude one of my My favorite so far has been the guy that was like, this is clearly a CIA psyop to make weather modification cool.

2:01:56He's backed by Peter Thiel and the same like the same cabal of VCs as all these things. The state of the union is 29 states this year have proposed legislation to carte blanche all weather modification and atmospheric engineering. And so these bills, they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management chemtrails it's a suspicion that the government is like what you see is contrails long streaks in the sky they suspect that's just like poison probably not i haven't seen evidence of that yet but open to being convinced and then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the earth to cool the planet down so it's this climate intervention and then cloud seeding kind of just gets lumped in cloud seeding is what rainmaker does and it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing, but because nobody knows the difference, they're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that we're some sort of like agenda 2040 anti-human globalist initiative.

2:02:59And so surreal as it's been, I'm both in the trenches in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the union. A lot of them I haven't testified at because I realized that actually drums up a lot more craziness than maybe is good. But we're in this, we're in this public knife fight with the government of Florida and Tallahassee, just trying to you know that tweet that that iconic tweet where trump says like i just want to stop the world from killing itself um like i just want to bring people water that need it um and i think that if you ban five seating you're basically banning like rocketry or fission and so that's what we're trying to stop right now can you talk about water scarcity i think people it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out and it's not that expensive water comes from the faucet gasoline comes from we're here in los angeles which is you know one of the most you know sort of arid you know parts of the united states it's like only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to like reroute the river like 50 years ago right yeah yeah uh well there's one the owens valley situation so la county basically had to like send out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between like the owens river valley and then redirect the water um then there's a couple water barons that like you can't even say the name of or you'll be like here to california But the California State Water Supply Strategy, like from the Department of Natural Resources, says that half a million acres of farmland have to turn into desert by 2030 in California in order to like maintain water supply for the cities.

2:04:30Like Phoenix, Arizona is banning new housing development because there's not enough water. Salt Lake City, people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up and there's not enough water. And then, you know, like the wildfires that go on all over the country, that's because there's not enough water on the ground. And in the case of Florida, a lot of people have told me like, you know what, listen, I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that is a desert. But Florida, we get plenty of rain. Like, why do we need to bother modifying the weather here?

2:05:00Well, 14 million acres of farmland in Florida is currently in a drought. And then 30 ,000 acres of Miami-Dade County just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water, because there was a drought. So, like, if Mayor Suarez is listening, please save us. Yeah, we just want to bring people water. And drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential than people realize. Like, if you want to make America healthy again, we have to grow food domestically. And if we don't have enough water to do that, then it's going to be some kooky GMO, like Chinese stuff that gets shipped over the ocean or like Soylent Green product.

2:05:36Not to hear you. Deep cut. Yeah, that's that's where we're at right now with respect to drought. No, no. Yeah, a lot of just what are these? Is there anybody besides you fighting to save, you know, the private and public, just private and public groups from being able to do cloud seeding? Like, is it is are you the last man standing? Or do you have a team? so well i've got a great team at rainmaker and i'm really grateful for that and we've got a bunch of farmers um that are beneficiaries of our program go to bat for us because like they previously had to tear up their pistachio ranches or their pistachio orchards because they didn't have enough water for them and now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that we're doing um but you know that that part where or that like famous stanford speech where teal says um you know you should go after a really small market like if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late well i'm not like the last man standing i'm kind of like the first man standing um so it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members i have at rainmaker running around the country um it's it's uh augustus de rica v a couple states 30 states yeah um and and what is that yeah like how do you even balance this sort of simultaneously you have, uh, you know, you're, you're a company, you generate revenue, you have expenses, you're sort of planning timelines and you're also potentially fighting like legal battles.

2:07:13And you're also dealing with like technical risk in the business. Like, right. Like what you're doing is very hard. It can be done, but like, that's also a challenge. Like as, you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, how do you kind of balance all those things? And it feels to me like, you know, the sort of legal risk is like the most asymmetric, you know, risk, you know, you can always launch and create a new prototype, you know, take another flight, et cetera. But then if there's sort of these like blanket bands, that feels like, is that like taking up 60 % of your time now, just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in five years?

2:07:50Well, so not quite. I mean, it's definitely like a large double digit percentage. The The interesting thing with respect to the political dynamic, though, is this. It's not really like a right-left issue so much as it is like an east-west issue because the west doesn't have water. So Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the U.S. are like, oh, this is sick. I would love to have water. Then the people that have as much water as they conventionally need it and aren't a subject to drought, they're the ones more wary of it. So I'm not worried about Rainmaker domestically at a state level, just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet, like Nevada or Arizona or New Mexico.

2:08:29I do think that the domino theory thing holds true to some extent. So, yes, we do have to focus on it. um the super like uh funny crazy outcome is that i just like if rainmaker was totally banned from the u.s then we just double down on riad and then we like camp out there for five years and come back weathered and and you know wearing desert garb uh but uh my iraq lawrence of arabia mode my iraq engaged my dune my dune they're gonna send you to dune i watched i watched dune 2 in theaters five times bro a religious zealot comes to turn the desert planet green i love it that's great yeah so no i trust my team a lot i've really talked a little bit about um just like the general fear around cloud seeding i think that right now with health and maha there's just this general idea that like anything new is risky yeah fertilizer are having a heyday yeah bull market in the Luddite community.

2:09:30But I mean, at the same time, like, you know, you eat too much salt, your doctor will tell you that's gonna hurt your heart. And there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level, you take it up by 100X and it gets bad. And there's just all these balancing. And then also we do the mice studies, but does that really transfer? And, you know, what happens when someone's like, you know, vaping pink liquid for, you know, 50 years? Like we don't really know. And we're kind of figuring it out right now. How, what gives you confidence about the low impact of this? So, you know, I really sympathize with people that are worried about this because it sounds on its face like crazy to be modifying the weather and dispersing chemicals.

2:10:15But to your point about like vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcomes, like cloud seeding, even though Rainmaker is very innovative, even though a lot of new things have been done in academia that we're implementing from like the last five years cloud seeding is 80 years old dude this was invented in the united states in 1945 ge has the first patent from 1946 people have done 80 or 30 or 50 years depending on the watershed studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil and after decades of operation you only see parts per trillion of this stuff like you need super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place.

2:10:56So there's been no negligible health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment. And those studies, they've been done. And like, should Rainmaker replicate those? Should we continue to do it just to prove it out further? Totally agree. But like, it's totally safe. And if you think about the like LD50, like the lethal dose of subaritone, it's less than salt. It's less than table salt. It's milligrams per kilogram with salt. And then it's 2 ,800 for silver iodide. So this is like a resoundingly safe material to be using. And the data for a decade shows that. Can you talk about a little of the history of, I feel like when it's easy to look at the chem trails thing and be like, okay, well, like the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's like literally like mind control.

2:11:42And it's like, we're so divided in America. I don't know. the mind control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do? But there is a legitimate criticism that like when you fly a bunch of planes around, those contrails are emitting pollution and your skies get dirtier. And I remember after 9-11, all the planes were grounded. It was the clearest day in the skies ever. And there is some sort of like low key harm. And there's always these like knock on effects. I'm sure with the solar radiation management, same thing. We have been experiencing global warming, but we've also been experiencing global dimming.

2:12:20And those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way. Can you just talk about some of the history of these things and how you think about worrying about the second and third order effects of cloud seeding? Yeah, yeah, totally. So with respect to weather modification and climate engineering, the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years. Like build a city, then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation and precipitation patterns. If you have a coal plant or a steel plant or a nat gas plant, the steam and the aerosol you emit reliably creates more clouds and precipitation like tens of miles downwind as well.

2:13:01The emissions from our cars, right? Like those have pollutants in them apart from just like CO2 considerations. So we do modify the weather unintentionally all the time. Rainmaker's thesis is that like we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unfuck the earth as it stands or make it more lush and abundant once we've done the former. When it comes to knock on effects, the common question is like, you know, if you're making it rain more here, is that reducing precipitation downwind there? Yeah. Totally reasonable question. Like I think on its face that that logic makes sense. Unfortunately, the system is pretty complicated.

2:13:42It turns out that only 9 % of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States precipitates over it. The vast majority is either recycled by the oceans, precipitates over the oceans, evaporates away and never condenses again over the U.S. So if you just increase the utilized water in the atmosphere, then it's purely positive sun. And you can select to some extent for which clouds aren't naturally going to precipitate with the appropriate radar and probes. Um, the evidence of downwind drought is totally uncompelling. Nobody's provided reliable data there, but are people concerned about it?

2:14:17Are they rightfully concerned about it? Sure. Totally. Um, and then the last thing I'll say with respect to contrails, um, you know, there's this funny thing that people realized where if you fly a bunch of planes early in the morning, um, and then develop contrails, you'll actually cool that area locally and the planet to some extent, because it'll reflect sunlight before it warms the planet up with the light of day. And if you fly a bunch of planes at sunset, then that will retain the heat and kind of act like an insulating layer and keep the earth warmer. So like just plane flights, you know, American Airlines, Delta, whoever, they are doing weather modification unintentionally, apart from any chemtrail stuff.

2:14:57I'm just hoping to give a little bit more sanity to the ways in which for modifying the weather. Earlier this week, there was a video that went viral of a very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested. Do you think you'd have an easier time in the public eye if you were just planting trees? Or is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue regardless? And do they have to do cloud seeding in addition to that? Or are they just using traditional irrigation? Like, how does that, I wanted to talk to you about that, that Chinese video that went viral because it was so striking.

2:15:36And it was like, for me, it was like, I want that here for sure. But I don't know how other people took it. Yeah. It looks like you get like a thatched roof in the middle of the goby. Totally. Yeah. It felt like this idyllic, like little preserve. You put a ranch house on that. The golden retriever is running outside. You're taking the horse down to the local. Golden retriever mode. Yeah, to the local saloon. And it just seems like it's the West, right? Again, you have new land that people can go live in. And that's just like a land of opportunity. And I think that'd be so cool. But yeah, what's your take on it?

2:16:11Dude, I mean, that's what the Central Valley was. The Central Valley used to be deserts and swamps. And now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet. It produces like 30 % of all of the fruits and then the majority of like the red fruits in the United States. we used to terraform all the time the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the west I think that people maybe it's a last man problem maybe it's Ludditism maybe it's just general well no I won't say that but we've just lost the desire to be great I think in the United States we've lost the desire to build the future and see the future through if I was just planting trees yeah, for sure, it would be easier.

2:17:01You need the water, though. So unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is, and cloud seeding, in addition to that, it's a non-starter. There's a couple technologies, you know, I mentioned last time, like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water, that would be good. But, you know, trees, they emit dust that creates like a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation. Clive-steam mimics that natural process. It's just with the material that works a little bit better. So yeah, man, I plan to plant trees in the future. I plan to make as many things green as possible.

2:17:38I hope that people get on board with the vision to make deserts green and great, but it's going to take a minute. I had a funny experience at Hereticon. There was a guy talking about terraforming. I'm blanking on his name, but he put out this amazing Thomas Puehro. Thomas Puehro made this amazing presentation. It was like 40 minutes long, showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be. And one of the places that he highlighted was the Salton Sea and how you could theoretically divert the Colorado River. I've been there with Augustus. He went out there.

2:18:12And then I went up to him afterwards and I was like, this is an amazing project. I would love to make the Salton Sea like Dubai. It's just like, you know, it's a - It's a majority comes up. How do we make money off this? No, but I asked him, I was like, how do we actually do this? You know, I was thinking like the way to do it is through a hyper commercial project that says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxic surrounding this sort of evaporating sea. Like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the Salton Sea, that's now very depressed and then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen.

2:18:46like it feels like you need like like he i asked him how how does this get done he was like i have no idea like somebody should try it but like i don't know how they would actually get it done um is it is it really just like one person caring that that sort of like makes these kind of projects possible right and like in in the case right now there's like a good chance that whether you know weather modification cloud seating etc just would get banned if you weren't like flying to florida frequently great man theory of history great man theory of history um but but but yeah like like it feels like we miss air then the sort of doge era like if we do enter a period of like deregulation in some areas like some of these projects you know might be possible but um yeah how do you think about the salt and sea opportunity and then just like you know, if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore?

2:19:42So, um, a related thing, interestingly enough, is like, I think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employed. Um, I promise this is related. Um, I'm going to wait until Q1 or Q2 26 to do this, but, um, we're just going to stand up a land fund and we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't arable primarily in Arizona and California, because the same acre of land that's worth like six grand in either of those places has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does that would sell for like 70 to 500 ,000. Like we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity in to get LPs involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an agricultural asset that is only made viable because of the water that we bring.

2:20:30It has to be a commercial interest. I don't think that we, you know, Maybe America at one point had, maybe there's this idyllic previous America that existed. I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit or because it was cool. Now, yes, it has to be cool, but moreover, there has to be commercial interest. And yeah, I'm going to do exactly that. And I hope that somebody beats me to it for the sake of all the benefit that'll come from it. But if they don't, I'll make a lot more money because of them. This is hilarious because you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land.

2:21:02because Casey Hanmer, we had him on the show earlier. He wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a parking lot. And you're going to be like, no, I'll pay a dollar more per square foot. But I do - We can have the auction. We'll do the auction. Yeah, yeah. $5,$5,$6,$6. I do have a question about the cloud setting stuff. It feels like, I mean, all of this stuff is somewhat zero sum. Like we're not really creating new water. we're kind of moving it around. But desalination seems awesome. I was looking at it pretty intensely a year ago, and it seemed really difficult, honestly. But desalination, what is your take there?

2:21:46And it just feels like we have, I would expect a gundo company to be doing this. We have people working on nuclear now. We have people working on solar. You're working on cloud seeding. Like, like desalination, if I heard like, oh yeah, there's some hot guy, hot startup who's working on, um, on desalination. I wouldn't be like, oh, this is breaking my mind right now. I'd be like, of course, that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the El Segundo because like they've kind of checked the box on everything else. Uh, what's the state of desalination and what's your take? Yeah. Um, desal is great.

2:22:19I'm not anti-desal. I don't think that we step on each other's toes. Um, it is a modification of the water cycle, right? Whereas they're taking salt water out of the ocean, making it fresh and usable, we're taking cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable. It's relatively efficient right now. I think there's a lot of promise in catalytic desalination. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently innovative in the space, but I think that probably shows more promise than RO. It's relatively efficient as it is. The problem with desalination for gigascale American projects for a lot of the world that is currently undersupplied with respect to water is conveyance.

2:23:04We can set up a huge desal project in L.A. Sweet. No dice for Colorado. Doesn't matter for Nevada. Barely even matters for the Central Valley because you have to set hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists. And it's doable. Like the California State Water Project is evidence of conveyance working, but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes into shipping that water. So should California be more reliant on it? Totally. Could we like with tariffs or something strong arm Mexico into giving us like the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona?

2:23:42Maybe. But if you're in the interior of the United States, the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky. And that's who we're primarily trying to serve. This was Blake Master's point that I really enjoyed. He said, how do we get water into the interior states, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico? Well, we're going to reroute all the water from California into those states. And then California, the future of water in California is nuclear power desalination. And he said that like 10 years ago. Haven't heard anyone try and build it. Maybe he should have stuck with venture capital and back that company because I want it to happen.

2:24:18but maybe it'll happen soon that'd be great or no desal no cloud seeding boiling the ocean nuclear boilers on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly inland oh interesting okay so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river atmospheric rivers right many people have wanted to boil the ocean but not literally so we need more literal ocean boilers for sure uh i i have a more personal question how how are you doing with all this uh i care about you know i'm lucky to be an investor in rainmaker but i care about you you know even more on a personal level i think your prefrontal cortex is like you know about to maybe fully develop right but like you're under a lot of pressure for being like you know in your mid-20s like i i you know anybody who's had a post go viral or sort of break containment knows what happens like your your message requests on every platform are probably like you know very dark um and uh you know are you are you uh you know you seem like you're handling it incredibly well but uh does it ever does it ever get to you that's really that's really caring thanks for asking man um you know like i uh i view rainmaker as the best means by which i can serve god in my lifetime um and i owe everything in my life to jesus christ because of all that he's done for me in this life and then hopefully in next.

2:25:44So this, this situation that I'm going through, no big deal at all. Like if, if it ends up on the other side with, you know, ideally me having gotten to educate and convince some people and bring them more water in places where they need it, I am happy to take the punches and the death threats. And even if it didn't work out, you know, I'm going to give it my all and I was a high school debate kid so I live for this kind of dorky do not mess with the high school debate kids they will go to war with you on the timeline yeah I mean we kind of predicted like uh like the rise was so quick the mood would shift but I didn't expect that this was the instantiation of that mood the shift around the vibe of the company right yeah and I just have to say like there's so many people rooting for you right like you really are uh you know your your critics that call you an industry plant uh you know in many ways like you are uh you know you are a product of of of our industry and and uh there's just a lot of people uh you know rooting for for your success so uh proud of you for for not not letting the uh never back down never back down.

2:27:01Always claim victory. Always claim victory. Don't let the haters get to you. And, uh, I would say, you know, like have a good rest of your Friday, but I'm sure today's basically a Monday for the rainmaker team. Job's not finished. Uh, yeah, I, I, I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go. Uh, how are you getting fitness in these days then? I was, that was tragic, dude. Um, I am walking to and from the office because I live four blocks away in Gundale. And otherwise, I'm going hard skinny priest mode. I'm big skinny priest. Skinny priest mode. You've been the muscular warrior. I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly merchant.

2:27:45It's going to happen. You're going to IPO the company, sell it all, and become a private equity guy, roll it up the rest of the farmland or something. Yeah. the poorly merchant is the future for sure now i'm excited to uh i'm excited to have you back on when when when you're doing some of the land stuff because like that that does feel like you know verticalizing and like capturing the full value that that you guys can create over time is just like very obviously like you should own the land that you're raining water down on and and you know gain uh you know the full economic benefit of the work so uh it's fantastic having you on yeah this is great as always thanks guys our weather our weatherman our weatherman we needed a weatherman we got it we're forecasting for tppn yeah yeah you should it's it's you can't do for like forecasting would just be too easy for you because like yeah there's gonna be rain like in that square mile over there yeah we need the the zoom background like the green screen and it's you and like the map of uh next time you're on fake zoom background with the with the map of la and You can tell us where it's going to rain this weekend.

2:28:54I'll have you on Friday. Hang out. It'll be fun. Anyway, great hanging. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. That's great. And so next up, we have Mike Noop. He founded Zapier. He also founded ArcPrize, which we've talked about on the show before. So ArcPrize, I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them. So ArcPrize is a AGI eval, an evaluation that is designed to be hard for AI, but trivial for human beings. And so they look like puzzles, and there's a grid of squares that are different colors. And your goal is to recreate the pattern or understand the pattern. It gives you a whole bunch of references.

2:29:44And then you are tasked with creating the solution to the puzzle. And it's been very, very difficult for AI. AI has struggled with this, even though it looks like something that should be able to be one shot. And Mike is in the studio now. Here we go. Welcome, Mike. How are you doing? Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm doing good. How's your Friday going? Oh, that's great. How's yours? Quite excellent. Spent a lot of time with the research team. Oh, awesome. Can you give us just a brief introduction, your background, and then how you wound up working on ArcPrize and kind of what you're excited to announce most recently?

2:30:19Yeah. So I guess probably best known for co-founding Zapier about 15 years ago, an automation company. That's what I've been working on the last 13 plus years. I had sort of like calling me AI curious. I went sort of all in on AI early January 2022 when the chain of thought paper first came out. All these like LM reasoning benchmarks were sort of like spiking up in performance and it got me really curious. Like, are we on path for AGI or not? And this ended up leading to Zapier deploying, I think, a lot of AI products really early into the market. And there was this trend I had seen and heard.

2:30:52I spent probably hundreds of hours talking with customers around deploying AI agents. Zapier's been deploying it for a couple of years now. And the feedback was always consistent. Like, hey, I get the hype, but they're not reliable enough yet. They don't work two out of 10 times and that just doesn't work for these unsupervised automation products. And this was sort of in contrast to all this EGI hype that I see on Twitter all day long. Same thing I'm sure you guys saw in the 2023, 2024 era. And so I tried to figure out how do I explain this? Because I have two sets of lived experience that sort of match.

2:31:24And this is how I rediscovered Francois Cholet's ARC benchmark that was originally published in 2019. And I sort of expected to have gotten kind of beaten by this point, you know, first looking into probably, again, 2023, 2024, surprised that basically hadn't, and not only hadn't been beaten, there basically been no progress, which I thought was really fascinating, given the fact that we've like, scaled up these language model systems by almost like 50 ,000 times over the last three, four years prior. And so that was kind of the genesis of me leading to meeting Francois and kind of pitching with this idea of like, hey, I think this is literally the most important unbeaten AI benchmark in the world.

2:32:00I think it makes a really important statement that like pre-training scaling alone is not sufficient to get to AGI and more people should know about this fact. And so we launched ArcPrize together to try to sort of raise awareness of the benchmark and just honestly inspire more people to work on new ideas again towards AGI. Can you talk about a little bit about the prize money and then what happened with ARC Prize 1 and then what's happening now with the second iteration? Yeah, so when we launched last year, like I said, there's been very little progress towards I think GPT-40 was scoring 4 % on the benchmark.

2:32:29That's really four years in, five years in. And again, like an eight-year-old should be able to do these? Yeah, especially ARC-EGI 1. It turned out to be quite simple. It's a very binary sort of fluid intelligence test. Yeah. And yeah, like, you know, all the knowledge you need to solve this benchmark are doable by you acquire the knowledge very early on in childhood development. You can take the tasks. In fact, yourself, if you go to arcprize.org, we have a big player. You know, I think what's what's special about Arc is that it is a, the sort of design concept of it is it targets something that's quite straightforward and easy and simple for humans, but hard for AI.

2:33:06And this is in contrast to every other AI benchmark that exists today, which are trying to like challenge this like PhD++ frontier, you know, like frontier math or, you know, humanities last exam. You know, these are sort of AI benchmarks that you really do need to be like PhD level plus to be able to even solve as a human. And in contrast, ARC makes a very different claim that, hey, there's still a lot of like very straightforward for human capability that these frontier AI systems don't have. And so that's why we launched our prize during the contest. I think one of the things our price 2024 will be noted for is probably the introduction of this like test time adaptation method.

2:33:41That was some of the papers that came out from the contest. We had a big million dollar prize in order to beat the benchmark to get to 85%. No one did. You also have to do it with a very high degree of efficiency. And we kind of expected that was going to be the case. We also this paper track where people could submit new ideas and push the conceptual forward force, which is where most of the coolest progress came out from from last year. And then at the end of the year, obviously last fall, we started seeing things like 01 and 03. And these are, this is a very big, this is a very big update, I think, because systems like 01, particularly 01 Pro and things like 03, are not just purely scaling up language models.

2:34:20These are not language models anymore. These are really AI systems. They have a big model as a component of the system, but they have some sort of sort of synthesis engine on top that allows them to reuse their existing pre-training knowledge at test time to recombine the knowledge. And that allows them to make significant progress towards Arc. And we saw it with three in December score at a pretty high degree of efficiency solve Arc at AGO on it. It's 75%, so not quite at the 85%. And then OpenAI tested an even higher compute version of it that probably was probably a couple million dollars to test.

2:34:50They got 87%, I think. it's crazy um and so that's kind of where we we wrapped up uh last year uh we've been part of work over actually a couple years just real quickly while you were saying that uh fantastic setting the table uh i went to arc prize.org play i did the daily puzzle i still got it i'm still got a job uh you could do it at home if you want arc prize.org play do you think uh with all the billions of dollars flowing around the ecosystem do you think arc prize is capital constrained in any way like would we have seen you know better results to date or is this sort of social status of just like you know achieve achieving kind of like scaling are we are we compute bound here or is it algorithm bound right now i think arc agi2 that we just introduced this week on monday uh is pretty direct evidence that we need new ideas still to get to agi um we shared i don't know if we can throw it up or we can put in the shows or something um there's a chart i shared on twitter that shows the scaling performance of even Frontier AI systems like O1 Pro and O3 against the version one of the data set that we've been using for the last five years, and then version two that we just introduced this week.

2:36:00And basically, it resets the baseline back to 0 % language models. Pure LLM systems are scoring like 0 % now, again, on ArcB2. Single COT systems like R1 and O1 score like 1%. And the sort of estimates we have right now for the frontier systems that are actually adding pretty sophisticated, you know, synthesis engines on top, like O1 Pro and O3 single digit percentages on their efficient compute settings. So I think there's a very interesting point that like, you know, we kind of moved from this regime where people were claiming, oh, we're just going to scale up language models, right? More data, more parameters, we're getting to AGI.

2:36:36And people realize, I think that's not quite the story now. And then there's a new story that's emerged over the last like five months, which is, oh, we're going to scale up this test time compute, and that's going to get us to AGI. And I think what V2 shows is that that's not quite either. We still need some structural ideas in order to get to a regime where we can scale up to actually reach human performance on this stuff. Do you think with how much human capital is concentrated in San Francisco, do you think that is in the geographic concentration of so many of the brightest minds and AI is sort of like potentially even holding back like new random ideas.

2:37:13And that's why ARK can potentially sort of, uh, if we need new ideas, like maybe they don't come from the sort of the center of the AI universe. And maybe they come from, you know, some random, uh, kid on the internet who's just like, you know, has, has the time to think, you know, completely independently. And this feels kind of scrolls adjacent. Yeah, exactly. You, you put this idea out and a bunch of people can take wild, wild swings at it and you get just new idea generation. I got to say, thank you to Nat Freeman. You talked about the Pesebius challenge. Of course. Literally, I'm very inspired by what they were able to accomplish.

2:37:46And that was one of the motivations for actually running the prize in the way we did. I think, yes, part of the goal of running our prize was specifically to try and reach independent researchers and teams and give them a problem to work on that they could actually make meaningful frontier progress on. I think especially in academia in the last maybe five years, there's been this disheartening belief of like, hey, can we really advance the frontier? Because you have to have billions of dollars in funding to scale up these language models. And I think Arc shows that, yeah, there actually are frontier problems that are unsolved that individual people and individual teams can actually make a difference on today.

2:38:21That part of our whole goal of launching ArcPrizer was re-inspire a lot of independent researchers to work on things like this and bring new ideas to the fold. I remember when ChatGPT got a computer and it was able to write some Python code, then execute it. Are there restrictions on kind of custom systems that are LLM or reasoning model driven, but fine tuned to help with the execution of ArcPrizes? Is that breaking the rules or is that something that is actually encouraged and fine? How do you think about, I guess it all boils down to overfitting on this problem, but it seems like even with the incentive to overfit, it hasn't really happened yet.

2:39:14Yeah. This is one of the reasons ARC-BY lasted five years was because it had very good original design built into it with a public test set and a private test set. Sure. And that private test set really prevented folks from being able to sort of overfit on it. And so there's actually two tracks for the ArchPrize Foundation. We have the contest track. This is on Kaggle. This is the big grand prize. All the prize money is attached to this. Kaggle graciously donates a lot of compute to allow us to host there. And on the grand prize is basically to get to that 85 % within Kaggle's efficiency limits.

2:39:47So this is about, get about $50 worth of compute per submission that you send in. And this is like a pretty high bar for efficiency. And in fact, this is not an arbitrary bar. We do think that efficiency is actually a really, really important aspect of intelligence. You know, you can force your way up to intelligence, but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff. That's the contest. When we launched last year, there was a lot of demand from just the community of the world on like, Hey, I, okay, I get that. Like, I can't run my big language model on this, you know, in Kaggle, but I really want to know how to frontier AI systems do.

2:40:18And so we launched a second track that's hosted on arcprize.org, where we benchmark and test all the like frontier commercial systems to showcase what are they, you know, capable of doing basically these existence proofs that I think will eventually, you know, filter down to the higher efficiency solutions and open source solutions that can be run on something like Kaggle. And even there, like within the sort of same efficiency, you know, accuracy specs, we still haven't seen any frontier AI system beat RKGI 2, let alone RKGI 1. So there's still a long way to go. What does that track actually look like?

2:40:47Does that mean that the team from OpenAI is writing the specific prompt? Are they doing prompt engineering? Or is it your team is just taking the API and giving everyone kind of the same goal? Is there any standardization there? There is. Arkprys does most of the testing today ourself. We basically wait for API access, either get early access or wait for the public access. And we have a GitHub repo where we just have a standard, very simple prompt that we use to baseline across all the sort of frontier systems that we test. OpenAI situation was a little different because they had reached out to us and said, hey, we think we've got a really impressive result on the public eval set.

2:41:25And we'd like your help to verify on the semi-private set, which is what we created that data set to be able to do. And in that case, there was really, you know, very little prompt engineering at all. It was very mostly just a verification of what we'd seen from them. um so yeah the in all these cases the the amount of prompting that goes into these is extremely minimal basically just giving it the sort of grid with numbers and asking it to solve and it directly goes into it very cool can you talk about uh consumer ai agents we've talked about on this show like it feels like you know once a week someone comes out and says they're building the consumer ai agent that's gonna like book you a hotel or book you a flight or like do these things that sound really simple and then like nobody's delivered to our knowledge like a truly magic agentic consumer experience to book a flight even even you know you could use like open ai's operator to do this but like even when you're sort of watching operator work it's like it feels like you're using it doesn't feel like truly magic yet and just you know given like in In many ways, Zapier is just such a foundational company when it comes to automating anything on the internet.

2:42:38I remember that was magic to me as a kid, where I was like, oh, data, you know, not a kid. I'd say like in college, right? It's like, wait, data came in here and then it just went and did this other thing or like I did this one thing. Yeah, it feels like a superpower, right? Yeah. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. it's like criminally like underrated in terms of getting to that sort of like you know agentic internet uh but like why haven't people been able to like uh i even saw like perplexity like was saying last week like we're building you know consumer agents that's gonna like book your flight so like and apple's promised this and everybody's promised it but we haven't seen that magic experience yet and i'm curious why you think that is we've been trying to deploy agents for two years at Zapier.

2:43:20And this was kind of what led me to sort of originally get a bit interested in Arc is, you know, it's this reliability problem. Language models fundamentally are stochastic in terms of how they work. And so you're just never going to get that 100 % accuracy directly from the model without adding a lot of extra additional guardrails. So we're like processing on top. We've done some of that for Zapier. The way that I kind of think about it, you've got these concentric rings of use cases that kind of get unlocked as reliability and consistency goes up. And today we're pretty much still in the, and this is true at the frontier, we're pretty much still in a kind of concentric ring of like personal productivity and team-based automation where the risk to failure isn't very high uh right like if you're going to start deploying one of these like completely unsupervised agents into the wild you're going to have a pretty high bar right if there's a sort of high degree of risk if this thing goes wrong you know i'll burn customer trust or brand trust or something like that um so that's what we've been kind of seeing is companies and users sort of slowly increasing those concentric rings as the progress as the technology is improving.

2:44:16I actually think we're going to start to see agents start to work this year, specifically because of progress in ARK. I think this is an underappreciated fact. People always ask, hey, don't ARK look like puzzles? What's the economic utility of this stuff? One of the most important things that ARK tests for is your ability to adapt to problems you haven't seen before. That's really the spirit and the essence of what it is. It's saying, hey, can you solve problems you didn't just memorize, but you actually have used knowledge you did memorize to solve new things that you've never seen before. for.

2:44:41This is fundamentally the same aspect, like thing we're testing for in terms of generalization or reliability with agents. So I think because we're starting to see AI reasoning systems that are able to make progress against ArcGGI 1, albeit relatively inefficiently, but the capability is sort of now existing. There are AI systems out there that exist some degree of fluid intelligence. That's going to start increasing the reliability and more and more of those concentric rings are going to get unlocked, I think, starting to share. I want to talk about just like AI, AGI, ASI metrics. I feel like ARC prize is a fantastically important benchmark.

2:45:16I agree with you on that. Ray Kurzweil has been benchmarking against just like flops to human flops. Basically, he's put the singularity at 2045. He kind of nailed the Turing test date, I believe. but I've been kicking around this idea of like, maybe the real test of like AI hitting some sort of like tipping point is just like, how much economic value is being created by AI, and once that hits some sort of like 10 % of total global GDP or 50%, then we've reached the AI singularity or something. Are there any metrics that you're looking at for kind of this like intelligence explosion, ASI, AGI, but outside of like an individual moment or, you know, application use case benchmark, something more global and like human relevant?

2:46:11You know, pragmatically, you know, I think the definition that I use for AGI these days is basically when we stop being able to easily find tasks that humans can do that AI can't do, we've got EGI. And I think that's, like I said, a bit of a pragmatic answer. One of the things that surprised me about RKGI 2 was the relative degree of ease by which we were able to create it. Given this big moment in December of 03 beating RKGI 1, it was actually not too hard for us to come up with tasks that we were able to sort of verify. We actually did a controlled human study to make sure every task in the V2 dataset was solvable by at least two humans on the same rule set.

2:46:53And we're able to find that relatively easily. So I think that shows we still have ways to go. I think once we hit that bar, though, when the gap between easy for humans, hard for AI is zero, I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to argue the opposite side, that we don't have EGI. I don't find the economic measurements quite as useful for understanding the capabilities of what Frontier AI does. I think it's a good measure of impact. And I have no problems using it for that point. But I think if you want to use like an economic measure to make a statement about capabilities, the challenges that obscures, and there's multiple ways to get to that outcome.

2:47:31And this is one of the challenges like language models, like language models generally work in like a memorization style regime where they're learning lots of data. They're able to apply to very similar types of patterns that they've seen before, but not novel patterns of RKGI shows. And like those have economic utility. It turns out that like intelligence is just memorizing actually does interesting things for us. Zapier is making money with the current regime of AI today. And so I think if you really want to like understand capabilities of frontier AI systems to make predictions based on the capabilities, you need more precise, narrow like wedges on that capability.

2:48:05And that's really what RKGI tries to be is this wedge on, you know, do these AI systems have the ability to actually adapt to problems that they haven't seen before and acquire skills, you know, rapidly and efficiently to apply it to new things that haven't been done before. A little more fun question. What was your reaction to this week's sort of Ghibli moment? It felt like we talked about this on the show earlier. but the funny thing for me is like so we had a couple of posts each that sort of like broke containment out of like traditional like teapot or whatever yeah and you know there were there was a lot of people quoting like normies people quoting our posts being like all right the jig is up like what app what filter app did you use for this so like there's still people out there that like you know are just like completely unaware of like progress but like for those that sort of use these tools every day, it felt like this magic moment where people are just one shotting these sort of image generation models and getting these sort of incredible outputs.

2:49:07But, but, and yeah, it just felt magical. And one that we're excited about, like, I guess my, my question to you guys is, you know, do you think that the degree by which we saw like the, you know, Ghibli-ization of like Twitter and X over this week, do you think that was the degree of baseline interest in that like series and movie prior to this week or do you think like most of the people that were posting that stuff were this is the first time they've ever really got exposed to that kind of content yeah i i kind of ran a test on this inadvertently because i posted both a scene from oppenheimer giblified it got like 30 000 likes uh and then i posted an actual picture from spirited away a real still from the actual movie 24 likes and so there's a little bit of like i I love the fact you're running experiments.

2:49:55That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And so there's a little bit of like, okay, it's not just the filter, it's this recontextualization. I thought a lot of it was like, there's a reason we're using Studio Ghibli specifically, because there are other art styles that you can recreate with style transfer for a long time. But Studio Ghibli fits this like perfect, it doesn't quite go into the uncanny valley. And then if the AI, if you say, hey, I want you to recreate a picture of me, but use a Hollywood VFX pipeline to recreate the 3D model and then do exactly what they do in the Avengers and take it to the top level.

2:50:34It'll just look like a photo because VFX has now become photo real. And so you can't go full photo real or else it just doesn't look like a filter at all. And if you go to stick figure, it's unimpressive. And so you need this like perfect art style that looks clearly different, but still recognizable. and the level of alteration that happens in Studio Ghibli's animation style is that perfect intersection where it feels like impossible to just create with a vanilla style transfer or like edge detection and just pixel manipulation. You're not just recoloring. It's not a filter, but at the same time, it's not just, oh, so it's so photo real that it's just like, oh yeah, you took a picture of me like this and then it looks like this and it's like, that's impressive, but it just looks like you took the photo like this.

2:51:21I don't know. That was my take. I guess like I just get, you know, my own answer to that is like, I think it significantly increased the awareness of like this art style, this media. I don't know by how much, but clearly like people are doing it who've never even like seen Spirited Away or heard of the director or like anything like that. And so I do think that there's really important, you know, thing around the ease of use of the tools, you know, actually gets people like I think exposed and empowered to actually like do this stuff on a very mass scale and very rapidly i think it's the thing we saw totally saw this week that you actually really matters for mass adoption on this stuff yeah um yeah i think i'm very excited to see it what would you do human like the human creativity like we had basic like ai image generation for a while and then we got the harry potter balenciaga video and that was clearly like ai generated but the idea to combine harry potter and balenciaga which are these two very orthogonal concepts, like that creates the humor and that came clearly from a human.

2:52:22And so I'm excited to see like where this goes to where I will see a Ghibli or a Ghibli inspired video and be like, oh, wow, this is like actually entertaining to me, not just a tech demo. Jordi, what was your take? So I'm curious to get your take. So, you know, if you were running an image, it was a bad week to be running an image generation model because unless you're you're having your users prompt and get that quality of output that consistently uh and and there's just sort of like a distribution effect too where like you know i'm sure they're they're you know even just like the the user base increased uh you know dramatically just off of this one sort of meme cycle like uh where where would you you know if you were running one of these sort of image generation models where would you go and do you think that some of these players should be thinking in a more weird way like kind of trying to generate these new ideas versus making like sort of derivative foundation model um efforts there's an interesting tie-in to things like arc that we were talking about before and trying to assess capabilities and pushing new ideas forward, right?

2:53:32Like, um, this is steering the conversation a little differently from how you sort of framed it there. But like, you know, one of the, you know, risks of like a sort of frontier of AI that is sort of dogmatic and its view of scaling up is going to produce systems that end users are using that all look the same and have the exact same capability. And, um, you know, our arc shows is like, Hey, there are still frontiers that are unsolved for, there are interesting things. Here's a benchmark that shoes that you can kind of go measure against and actually direct progress and inspire folks towards, that potentially could have some sort of large step function change in capability of what these systems are actually able to do.

2:54:11You want people, I think, pushing and exploring that frontier. Measures of benchmarks, I think, are actually good ways to help direct and guide research attention there. I don't know the full details on how the new image generation from RR works, but at a high level, it does seem quite structurally different from the diffusion approach that even Dolly 3 and a lot of other image generators are using. They're doing some sort of like tokenization like system decoding system. You know, they're like clearly have tried something new that like doesn't exist that didn't exist before this week. That's allowing them to get these like frontier results.

2:54:43I think we want to see basically that mindset continue to get pushed across like the entire field, both on, you know, media, obviously, but also on the sort of reasoning and AI side. I think that's going to unlock a ton of use cases that people sort of written off AI for today. They're like, OK, I think I think I know what I can do and can't do. And, you know, now I'm comfortable in my sort of, you know, what we might my job or, you know, the things I'm going to ask it to do. And like, I think there's still a lot that we want it to do that it can't yet. And things like ARK are hopefully useful measures towards towards those tasks.

2:55:13Yeah, my reaction was just generally like if you have a hundred million dollars in a bank and you're in the bank and you were trying to do what OpenAI is now doing like remarkably better than you are doing, then like maybe you need to focus on like you know true innovation and trying to create these sort of like novel approaches to do said thing otherwise it may be difficult or maybe some unique distribution or something yeah we talked about the prize i had this hot take like a year ago i was like i think anyone who's like just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on fire uh if you really want to make a unique difference especially if you're a small startup like a founder like you've got to go take an orthogonal approach you got to try something different than whatever else is doing that's the only way you're going to be able to potentially like i think capture attention and provide a lot new value to the world yeah we talk talk uh i know we're probably over time but like there there's no capital constraints in early stage ai right now right and like with zapier like i think the number one one of the number one reasons that i would like see you guys in headlines is like another story of like oh zapier raised x you know single digit millions or whatever you want to hear the funny quick quib on that it was about a million bucks back in 2012 uh we never spent the money uh by time we actually got the round closed figured out who we wanted to hire got the payroll started like revenue had caught up and so literally i think you could trace every dollar we raised all the way to yeah there's sort of an like it's potentially a problem right now that people aren't forced to be hyper creative because they just are like oh well we have 30 million dollars like we might as well like we're supposed to spend it and like spending money to be innovative is different than like, you know, like being innovative because you are constrained on the capital side.

2:56:55Yeah. I have a follow-up here. How should we be thinking about Gary Marcus these days? He wrote deep learning alone isn't getting us to human-like AI. He's been an advocate for symbol manipulation. He's been kind of on the outs in inner AI circles. Rich Sutton wrote the, you know, scale is all you need, the bitter lesson, of course. But we're in this weird scenario where we're like, we've done the scaling, we're still bullish on scaling, we are going to build bigger data centers and do bigger training runs, but then we might also need new algorithms. So he's like, kind of right. How do you interpret, maybe not just his legacy, but just the puzzle of how scaling fits into all of this?

2:57:37I generally think he's been more right than wrong. I think if you like just take a limited five year view on this from 2020 up until 2020, end of 2024, you know, I think it was a generally right. Like he was making the right ideas. You know, I think one of the reasons I personally find things like ARK more useful is they provide a direct way to do sense finding on this stuff. You know, I don't have to like rely on my trust of another individual or another human in order to make like statements or build my confidence or intuition or my model, personal model of the world based on like trusting someone else's analysis.

2:58:09I can just look at reality. Mark is a contact with reality mode. We can have AI systems. I could go try to do this stuff, have humans try to do it and measure the difference and actually look. And like, I've always found that that's a going straight to the truth is like a much faster way to get to the frontier of knowledge. If you really want to know what's true or not, you kind of just have to look for things like that that measure it as opposed to like, you know, relying on proxies like other folks. But yeah, I would say Marcus has generally been more right than wrong. And for what it's worth, I think actually the bitter lesson is somewhat under like, I think often gets misinterpreted, you know, makes a statement about search and learning as these general four methods of scaling.

2:58:44But Zan also makes the key point in the paper that, hey, like these are the thing that we are actually applying search and learning on top of is an architecture that was invented by a human in the first place. The core idea of the thing that we are scaling finally came from a person, from a human. And that's still to do true today still. And I think that is very inspiring, even in the current regime we find ourselves here in March 2025, where, yeah, I think we actually do need some idea changes. I think we need some structural changes in terms of how the architecture, how the algorithms work here in order to, you know, certainly beat something like RGJ2, the high degree of efficiency.

2:59:21And yeah, there's going to be a scaling component to it. But like, don't miss that. Like, yes, there's actually an idea component, too, that often gets like kind of brushed over. Final question. Who do you want to highlight that you feel like is doing important research in AI that's maybe underhyped and not super online, but whether they're attacking ARC or just generally doing work? because there's a lot of people that love, you know, the sort of hyper commercial approaches to AI, you know, going and working at the labs, but there's totally valid if you just want to like do research somewhere and just like focus on that.

3:00:00Probably a few individuals that I think are sort of doing really interesting work in and around program synthesis, which is a sort of parallel paradigm, AI paradigm to deep learning. I actually don't think either is sufficient. I what's necessary to get to AGI. Top story for another day. But there's quite a few people that are sort of working in this alternative paradigm that are doing some interesting work. On Twitter, this is not this person is extremely online, but Victor Tailin is a really good follow on X and Twitter. Been working on this sort of alternative like system called HVM that does this like crazy like enumeration of program synthesis really quickly.

3:00:38There's a couple academics that I respect a lot. Josh Genebaum at MIT, Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute are two folks who've been really deep in the ARC world and the program synthesis world for many years and have sort of cultivated and steward some of the community over the last five years for its working towards new ideas. So I really do respect and appreciate those folks for that. I have one last question and then we'll let you go. Would you recommend against learning to code And do you think it's possible to try and build an ARC prize for programmers, a task that a novice or reasonable programmer could do that no AI could solve?

3:01:15Yes. In fact, let me answer the second one first. ARC is that challenge itself. So one thing that is somewhat maybe confusing is like we present the puzzles very visually for humans to take, right? They look like grids. You like draw on the pixels. When these challenges are presented to computers, it's not an actual image processing challenge at all. It's just a 2D list of numbers. It's a matrix of numbers that represent the input grid. It's just zero to nine for each number represents a color. And then you get an output matrix for the output. And your job as a programmer is to write a program that maps the input sequence to the output sequence.

3:01:51And that is absolutely a challenge that every programmer human today could do because they'd be able to look at the pattern and say, okay, I'll just write the program that transforms just because I can figure out the rules because I'm like a smart, intelligent human. I have like the capability of adapting to problems that I haven't seen before. And this is actually a like program synthesis challenge. You literally are asking a human to write a program to solve it. And that's the same thing we're asking AI to do as well is to produce a program that can solve it. And things like O3 are kind of unique because they're like language programs, right?

3:02:18They have this chain of thought. You know, you can think of a chain of thought as like, you know, a program in that in English that transforms the input to the output. But yeah, literally, Arc is the second thing that you asked for there. On the first question, should you learn to code? I haven't, like, I guess, thought super deeply about this. My hot take is, like, yes, you should still learn to code. Like, primarily because it's been, it gives you, like, leverage over technology today. And yeah, like, I don't see that leverage over technology going away anytime soon, particularly if you want to work on the frontier of this stuff.

3:02:55And so I sort of think that the arc of humanity's history has generally been to produce tools that give individual humans more leverage over the universe around us. And I still think code is that thing today. I think AI will probably eclipse it, but I don't think code is going to go away in that future. Got it. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation. We'll have to get back. I know that there's going to be more developments with arc prize too i want to stay abreast of them so please uh come back when there's big news thanks guys arcpries.org if people want to enter the contest yeah go check it out cheers have a great day thanks for coming on bye I mean, I love, I love ARK prize.

3:03:36I think that they should take out like a huge billboard for it. go to adquick.com. They should be doing out of home advertising, especially with adquick. They could make it easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home technology. Wait, I have an idea. Yes. Let's donate them enough money just to run a billboard with adquick. That'd be fantastic. Now we're talking. I want everyone working on, uh, on ARC prizes. It's a, it's a fantastic project. It's very, very fascinating. We'll have to have Francois Shirley, the creator of the actual test as well on the show at some point.

3:04:09And maybe we can get them to pick up a watch on bezel because they have over 23 ,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts. And you know, if any company running on ramp will save time and money, and then they can sort of actually, you know, potentially do more distributions. And then the shareholders would actually be able to spend more money on bezel, which is one of the many reasons to use ramp. That's great. and I mean if they're doing all that like where should they stay when they're on vacation I would find your happy place find your happy place book a wander uh with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service folks it's a vacation home but better uh do you want to do any of these uh in any of these timeline posts before we get out of here it's already past two uh we've done a great job this week I think we've streamed a lot i'm excited to get home and just start prepping monday sleep on my eight sleep because that's right late sleep brings you nights that feel your best days you can turn any bed into ultimate sleeping experience go to eightsleep.com slash tbpn i love that i love the head fake oh should we get into some content oh actually it's another ad baby let's do it and uh i mean there's there's some other news we should cover crusoe raised 225 million dollars in debt to buy more nvidia gpus uh and they're using current nvidia gpus as collateral and people are saying this is very circular but it makes sense i mean nvidia gpus have uh have value and of course uh they can be priced and my leverage lever up do it again 10 times you know just just one hand washes the other i love it uh we have we also have a post that we should we should shout out to rob schultz over at snagged they're officially launching domain sales and brokerage service we're starting with a list of 50 plus premium domains like try.com, tuscany.com, geeks.com, and beverage.com.

3:06:01You had me at tuscany.com, Rob. Yeah. No, but here's the real story. Rob got us tbpn.com. He did. And he did it in a shockingly little amount of time. It was like, I messaged it. A lot of people have been like, oh, tbpn, kind of a mouthful. It's a lot of letters. But I'm like, okay, think of another four-letter.com that we could get very quickly. And we have the four-letter handle on X. And so I think that it's underrated to find one of these short single word domains, single acronym domains, and then build your brand world around it. And I think even though it's been, it's probably harder to get people to remember TBPN the first time they hear it.

3:06:38After they hear it about 10 times, it has the chat GPT effect. Where you're like, oh yeah, TBPN. It's a weird thing, but it just, it stands for what it stands for. It's great. Anyway, also Xi Jinping advocates for stable trade at Beijing business meetings. This is a bigger story I'm sure we'll be digging into later. But the Chinese president Xi Jinping engaged in a series of meetings with global business leaders and foreign dignitaries in Beijing, highlighted by his discussions with representatives of the international business community. Xi emphasized China's continued openness to foreign investment.

3:07:08He's saying, let's open the floodgates. Let's get some capital in here. Let's build some tech. We'll see how it goes. And we'll close out with an Elon Musk post that you were alluding to earlier. Kitsy, he's quote tweeting Kitsy, who says, finishing touches, we need more compute to cure cancer, right? And you can see that the image is loading, looks like a Simpsons character. And so it's very funny wearing this weird thing. Do you think that loading effect is just to make it more addictive? It's not. I think it actually does relate to the change in the algorithm or technology because we're no longer using pure diffusion where it's all random noise and then you're de-noising it iteratively at the whole image level, which is what you see on Midjourney when they're sending you those updates.

3:07:58Now it is more going line by line because it's a token-based system. So there's some diffusion that's going in, but then there's also some tokenization. And I think OpenAI, the gibbification kind of drowned out the technical discussion that should follow. So Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. I'm sure there will be other deep dives. And I'm sure there'll be open source versions of this. Like every time a new, you know, Manus came out and there was open Manus and people always love to dig into, even though the papers aren't released, you know, this is not an open source technology. I'm sure we will see an open source version of this technology within six months to a year, probably two weeks if we're being honest.

3:08:38Because as soon as people see this tech, they want to build it, they want to figure it out. and so that's the story anyway thanks for listening fantastic go leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify uh and stay tuned we have a bunch of stuff lined up for next week already going to be doing more special days we had a really fun time with defense day today kind of turned into ai author day there was also some terraforming day in there um but we're very excited for it uh you never know what you're gonna get you never know what you're gonna get so stay tuned follow us we are excited for monday and have a great weekend folks we'll talk to you soon talk soon have a good one