TECH008: Emerging Tech Overview: Driverless Cars, Image Generation, Energy Infrastructure w/ Seb Bunney (Tech Podcast)

26:43And more importantly, I don't know how anybody's going to exist from a car. Like if you want a driverless car, which is a whole nother conversation point. But if you want a driverless car, I don't know how people are going to be able to compete with him in 10 years from now. Preston Pyshko And it kind of leads me on to like, I'm curious if we want to move on to kind of the next point, because it kind of ties into this point, which is, I think the challenge right now is one of the things that kind of kneecaps us is you can only have a certain size battery in a car, you can feed this, you can have as many sensors as you want, you can take in as much information as you want.

27:17But do you have one, the processing power to process all this information? By trying to discard what is value, what is signal and what is noise. And this kind of brings me to kind of like the next kind of tech point, which is the University of Massachusetts have supposedly, one of their labs, have just developed the first kind of artificial but biological neuron. So researchers have created this low voltage artificial neuron that uses bacteria growth protein nanowires, enabling direct communication with biological systems. So what does this essentially mean in my mind? How do I interpret this?

27:52And I'll relate it back to the Waymo point in a second, which is it's essentially just an artificial neuron that operates the same voltage as human neurons. And human neurons operate at like around 0.1 volts, supposedly. Previously, artificial neurons, because they've been more digital and physical in a sense, they have needed 10 times to 100 times more power to be able to compete against a biological neuron. And so this new device kind of matches biological voltage almost exactly. And that means that one day we could interface directly with the human brain. Well, the point I wanted to quickly make was when it comes to like Waymo, I think the challenge is you can have all this information.

28:30Elon Musk can put more and more sensors, LiDAR, you name it on these cars, but it's just too compute heavy to be able to actually use this data effectively. And we are starting to see in other areas, people are probably seeing this like organic AI where they're using kind of their version of a brain to start computing because the human brain is unbelievably efficient in comparison to an actual large language model. And so what does the world look like when we actually start moving some of this compute power over to these hybrid biological bacteriogram protein nanowires? What does that look like?

29:07And this is where I find it just really, really fascinating. Because it's essentially, I think, because these are digital, but they can interact with biological systems, I think the world looks really, really fascinating from a prosthetic standpoint, helping people heal. Do they have neurological issues? If they had a broken back, that kind of stuff, they've got paralysis. Are we able to eventually repair these type of things? I find this stuff really fascinating. That's scary as hell. Because I mean, this is effectively the matrix, man, that you're talking about is, I mean, the whole point of the movie was they were harvesting human brains because they were energy efficient and blah, blah, blah, right?

29:46That's really what you're talking about here. And I saw this a couple months ago that somebody was doing this. And I don't know, it's pretty wild when you think about like, hey, the best way to store something is just using the human brain, which that's not exactly what they're doing, but you're using biologies, you're harnessing biology's efficiency for storage and neural nets. And that's nuts, but it's happening. I encourage people to do some Google searching on this particular topic. And you might be very frightened what you read or see, but I mean, it's happening. So, I don't know what to say other than that.

30:27At the moment as well, when we're using a lot of these prosthetics, you need an outside energy source, given that the brain supposedly, from one of these articles that said the brain runs on about 20 watts, the same as like a dim light bulb. That is such a minimal amount of energy. And so, to be able to power these artificial neurons, you need to be able to have an external, historically, you've needed to have an external power source. If you've got prosthetics, you need an external power source. But what happens when we actually have enough power inside our body to start running these artificial neurons and they can communicate with our biological systems?

30:58That starts to just get really, really interesting. And so kind of what comes to mind as I'm thinking about this is I like to try and play devil's advocate, not because I'm like a doomsdayer, but it's just like, I think that it's interesting just to, we can move forward with technology, but what are going to be the repercussions? And I think about this discussion of kind of healing or advancement, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. I'm like fully supportive of technology being used to heal people. So we can like restore vision, we can regain mobility, we can repair neural damage. These are all like extraordinarily and like deeply amazing uses of technology.

31:30But I think there's a line between healing and enhancement. And one, when technology goes beyond just kind of restoring someone's sight to like a baseline level and actually starts to improve it a hundred times, or what happens when we start to be able to improve someone's strength. And I think that this augmentation could create a bit of a two-tier society because if enhancements are expensive, then only certain groups are going to get these enhancements. And then you're basically creating a caste system of people that are far and above intellectually, physically, cognitively, you're far and above the average individual.

32:05And so I'm curious to see like your thoughts on it. This technology is amazing, but does that? I'm a very anti-regulation, deregulation type person, but there's a part of me that wonders like, do we actually need regulation in some of these industries to prevent these massive disparities of capacity in society? Even if you have the regulations, are you going to prevent the end game of what you're describing? And I kind of don't think that it would. It doesn't seem like regulations ever prevent the free and open market solution of nature from taking place. I might slow it down, but I don't know that it actually prevents whatever is inevitable of what nature is trying to manifest.

32:50And that might be my bias for free and open markets coming out. But I don't know, Seb. It's getting weird, man. I don't know how else to put it other than it's getting weird. And I don't think that's the answer people want to hear. Trey Lockerbie Ultimately, and this isn't to bring it back to Bitcoin, but it's just like, I think the best thing we can do is have a monetary system that aligns with our deflationary society where prices should be falling over time because at least then this technology is available to the average individual quicker. I think that when they're living in a society where the cost of living is rising, and they have less and less capacity, what ends up happening is that this technology takes a lot longer to potentially scale to people that can't afford it.

33:34And so at its heart, I think that we at least need to fix our monetary system. So this technology is in alignment, or at least somewhat in alignment with human ingenuity and money and such. which the you know when you think about it the ai is going to demand uh free and open market money that is not being manipulated it's going to want a fair money in order to transact whether humans like that or not and i mean we go down a whole nother path there as far as like ai is being able to own anything that point there i've thought a lot about this over the years and i don't have like a, I wouldn't even necessarily say like a deep intellectual response to it.

34:15But I think that what does come to mind is that if you are, let's just say you're an AI agent, and you no longer have scarcity of life kind of dominating your decision making, because you can essentially live indefinitely into the future, as long as you've got a power source, what you're then going to be thinking about, if you're just a hyper rational actor that doesn't have code swaying you with various biases, I think that you're going to be thinking, okay, if I need a storm purchasing power in something, I want to be storing it in the thing that has the highest probability of being able to preserve that purchasing power into the future.

34:47And fiat currencies are not going to be that thing, given that they can just look at the data. If they're able to read Ray Dalio's big debt crises book in a second and go and read every other book on the subject, they're going to realize that most of these currencies have like a 50 to 7 ,500-year-old lifespan and then they're gone. So I just think the rational decision is, hey, I'm going to preserve my purchasing power the thing that's going to hopefully enable me to transact digitally, borderlessly, and preserve that purchasing power into the future. Preston Pyshko And you already see it with Grok online, as far as its understanding of Bitcoin.

35:18I know we're going off on a Bitcoin tangent here, but I've seen people start arguing with Grok that clearly hate Bitcoin or just don't understand it. And they're there throwing out these arguments. And I see Grok just stepping in and just slaughtering their arguments as to why Bitcoin is a viable money in the future. And it's crazy, because it does not miss an argument. It understands it better than anybody out there as to any argument I've ever come across in that particular space. So yeah. Preston Pyshko And ultimately, there's that famous saying, which is, science advances every time what a scientist dies, something along those lines.

35:55And I probably butchered that. But I think that humans, we have such incredible biases. We want to conform to the crowd. And so I think that we don't recognize just how profound the information we've consumed for our educational systems, through the media. And so I think it's really hard for us, even with something like Bitcoin, to be able to drop our biases and just be like, I'm going to look at this thing rationally without all of this previous knowledge that I've accumulated. Yeah. I'm going to move on to the next one. This one's going to be funny. Okay. So are you familiar with this Nano Banana Pro?

36:30Are you familiar with this? I've heard, I've seen a couple of little posts about it, but I can't tell you much about it. Okay. So this is Google with their Gemini. This is to compete with MidJourney for people, if you're not familiar with any of this stuff we're talking about. So MidJourney is this image generator that really had the first mover advantage in AI image generation. And just like any other AI, it's gone out there, it's ingested a ton of different pictures and the labeling that's associated with those pictures in order to generate realistic pictures of whatever the person prompts it via text and say, hey, I want to be standing in front of a bookcase and there with my arms crossed and generate picture and it generates the picture.

37:16Google came out with their first AI image generator, and it was a disaster. It was very woke. You could tell there was a ton of bias put into it. But recently, just in this past couple of weeks, this, and I'm hopefully going to say this correctly this time, the Nano Banana Pro is what they're calling their new image generator. And it uses the Gemini reasoning engine so that it can plan the 3D scene, it can calculate the light, and it's using material density before it renders a single picture. And so it's using this physics before it goes in there and just kind of replicates all the previous images that it was fed.

38:03It's using this 3D physics kind of basis behind the images that they're doing. So I wanted to try it. I'd never played with this. I wanted to try this out and you're going to really laugh at what I'm about to show you here, Seb. So 10 minutes before we started recording this, I went and took a picture of myself and I wanted to put this thing to the test. So here's the picture. I'm just sitting in the chair that I'm sitting at right now. And I told this Nano Banana Pro software to take a godlike picture from the ceiling of the image that I just gave it. And so I gave it this picture of me sitting here in front of the bookcase, like where I always record.

38:44And so this is what it came back with. And you can see it's me holding up an iPhone, taking a picture of myself. The books are there kind of on the left. They're not behind me. But I guess the interpretation is that the bookcase could be wrapped around. But what I noticed on this picture that was off, I don't know if you're seeing what is definitely wrong about the picture, Seb. What is very wrong about the picture. You've got a full head of hair? Is that it?

39:17No, I think the hair is actually pretty accurate. I think it's pretty accurate. It's pretty accurate. Surprisingly, I am wearing jeans that look just like that, even though that wasn't even in the picture. And you know what? This is also pretty interesting. The watch is not in the original picture and that's exactly like the watch I've got. Look at this. That is so weird. Did you just pick up on that now? Yeah, I just picked up on that right now. It literally nailed the watch that I have. I wonder how much... So, people have probably heard that like, ChatGPT, when was this? Maybe about six months ago, it came out and said, okay, from now on, you can give it permission to look through when you're kind of obviously creating a new thread.

40:01You can give permission to not only reference the thread you're in, but reference all of your previous threads. And so you wonder how much information is coming into this image. Is this image just the information you fed it and whatever simulation? Or is it starting to be like, hey, this is coming from Preston's account. We're going to go look at YouTube videos. Oh, look, it looks like he's wearing this watch and all of these other YouTube videos. So it makes you wonder just like, how interconnected is this technology in with all of this information about us on the internet? Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's just, that's wild.

40:33And I don't know what the answer is. I do know this. I hadn't fed it any pictures prior to me sending this into, because I'd never used it before until like right before we recorded this. Now, the thing that I picked up immediately when I looked at this picture is the image on the phone, see the little image of me that I originally fed it. It's not the same as the image that I fed it because there's a bookshelf behind me in the original image, which this was the original image I gave it. And I said, hey, give me the overhead view of myself taking a selfie of myself. And this is what it gave me.

41:10And it's not the same image on the phone. And you would think that it would be that image on the phone, right? So I said this in the chat window. I said, hey, you got it wrong. The image on the iPhone would not be that. It would be the original photo. And so what did it do, this is what it gave me. Preston Pyshkoff Fascinating. And so, yeah, it just updated that. Everything else stayed the same, and then it just updated the mistake that I called out on it. I mean, this is pretty crazy. When you really take a step back and you think about what's happening here, this is pretty crazy, right? Preston Pyshkoff I've noticed that AI, especially with a lot of these image generation, sometimes if you fed information, it's as if it can't take that information that you fed it and use it exactly.

41:52It has to do some form of change to that information. you've probably seen those threads where someone has asked it to generate an image or change an image subtly. And then it feeds it the output and has the same prompt. And then it feeds it the output and has the same prompt. And what you see over time is it's just the image goes off in these really weird, weird directions. And so I feel like there is this odd, it's almost like it's got a lack of a tether to reality at the moment. It seems to go off on these odd tangents. Now, something else that I read on this is you should be able to take a picture of a plate that was broken and basically say, hey, reassemble the plate, like glue the plate back together.

42:29And the way that the plate was broken, as it would glue it back together, would still be on par with what it should look like. Just to kind of demonstrate why this is so different than some of the other AI image generation that's out there. Pretty fascinating, right? So I work with a guy that used to be an architect and he was doing some renovations on his house. So he has this doorway in his lounge where you walk into the lounge and what he wanted to do, if I remember correctly, is put a bit of a bookcase that extends up the wall over the top of the doorway. And so he sketched on a piece of paper, the dimensions kind of sketched the doorway, fed image generation, a picture of the doorway and a picture of his sketch, and then say, can you render this for me?

43:14And it looks unbelievably realistic. I think that we're starting to be able to, especially if you're curious and you're like, hey, I want to improve this thing in my house. I want to see what it roughly looks like. Oh, it's absolutely amazing. You can start to get an idea about how things look. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I've also read that this really excels at is if you just take, let's say you were a fashion person or whatever, right? And you drew a sketch of just some pants with a pencil and you take a picture and make this look lifelike and make it look, it's really good at transforming just sketches into very photorealistic images.

43:54So yeah, I would encourage people to play around with it. The little bit that I have, I've been blown away. And then I would just say, why is this so important? How could this be used along with all the other tech that's kind of emerging at the moment? And it seems like maybe a humanoid robot or just something that's navigating an environment, if it's able to think in terms of spatial orientation, going back to the Tesla stuff we were talking about, if it's able to really understand, that word in itself needs a lot of definition. And I don't know that we can provide any definition, but if it can understand its 3D environment, its ability to interact with it is going to be way more profound than this, everything is just a picture and you don't really have context as it relates to everything else in the room.

44:44As you're saying that, what I think becomes apparent is that because we haven't had this technology and we're seeing this technology, we're kind of just like blown away by it. But in reality, when we compare this even to the most, I don't know, a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old trying to interpret this picture, and if you were to get them to draw what you have just prompted it to do, the first thing I see in your picture right there is I see your bookshelf wrapping around the corner of your room and I see the window in the back corner. Well, immediately, the AI put you facing a wall with a light that doesn't exist.

45:15And so, it's just like very, very basic mistakes. As in, it just doesn't seem to be interpreting the picture correctly. You know what I mean? And so, I think that we see this technology and we think this is unbelievable and it is a stepping stone. And I think we think it's unbelievable because we've just never had this technology before. But if you just compare it to a young child, it's still, is struggling to compete. And so I think that that's where this conversation we've had previously around AI on our Empire of AI book review. It was this idea that what is AGI, artificial general intelligence?

45:47They say it's when the average AI agent is able to perform tasks at or above the average human. And so for sure, encoding in certain research assignments, phenomenal. But in other things, it's still definitely struggling. Yeah, it's amazing because on very specific tasks, it's pretty much there on nearly everything. But the ability to kind of piece it together and just logically, like if you give it a really hard project that involves taking all of these different pieces and putting it together, it's nowhere close to what humans are able to do today from a project management standpoint, right?

46:23That's what humans are really good is they're able to take a very complex project and piece it all together and know when a deliverable is crap, whether the deliverable is perfect in order to kind of fit it in almost like a Lego piece to a much broader program or project that it's building with a complex output. But I don't know. I think we're getting there pretty quick. So yeah, who knows? Well, that kind of leads into the next point that I found really interesting. So I was doing a little bit of research and I stumbled upon, And I should kind of preface this by saying that there's so many moving parts in AI right now.

47:02There's so much technology kind of evolving. And some of it is, I think, a bit of a facade. Some of it, there's a lot of embellishment as to its capacities. But I think that we just know we are moving towards these things. But so one that I stumbled across this week was called Cosmos AI. And it relates to what you were talking about when it comes to structuring or kind of project management when it comes to all this information that's coming in. So this technical report or preprint is titled Cosmos, an AI scientist for autonomous discovery. And it was submitted on the 4th of November in 2025. So this report, basically, one of the kind of statements which it says is that it can run for 12 hours.

47:40And in those 12 hours, execute on average 42 ,000 lines of code and read 1 ,500 papers, scientific papers. and the authors of this study claim that in a single what they call a 20 cycle cosmos run they perform the equivalent of six months of their own work and a single run is 12 hours so in 12 hours they were able to do what their team did in six months and so essentially how does it work it says that it works by kind of releasing hundreds of little tiny agents all at once ai agents and one is digging through papers another one is crunching data sets another one is writing code testing hypotheses.

48:16And when one of these agents finds something that they feel is valuable, it then posts its findings to kind of a shared digital whiteboard. And the key innovation is that every agent uses this whiteboard in real time. So, they're building on each other's work instead of operating in isolation. And so, the researchers behind Cosmos, they weren't trying to make like a super smart single model. They were trying to create something of like a collective mind. And they describe this as kind of a structured world model. And so it's like a coordinated system. And so what I found is really fascinating about this is just like, how quick they're able to ingest information, and they're working collaboratively.

48:54And it kind of talks to your point, which is, it may ingest all of this information and have, sorry, a lot of these image generation models, it may ingest all this information, have these various different agents operating in sync, analyzing this information, but how much that information is shared between these various agents because they're all looking at a different perspective. One is maybe trying to figure out, okay, where is the light coming from? What are the shadows? Another one is trying to figure out, okay, what is in the room? You've got a bookcase. What are the angles? Another one is trying to figure out what is, I don't know, the complexion of your skin and all this kind of stuff.

49:25And so being able to analyze all this information in sync, but share that information, I think is so, so fascinating. And like, what does the world look like moving forward when we can crunch this unbelievable amounts of data? Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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53:46where the Grok Heavy has four different AI agents. And then I suspect that they go through and they have a consolidation and a re-adjudication as to what the final answer should be before it gives it. So similar to what you're describing with that, Seb, but this is the thing that I think, well, I think a lot of people are talking about this, the energy consumption to then run all of these checks, these additional agents. If we put 20 more agents on finding the mistakes, of what the first one generated so that we can do another iteration of it. It's just 20 times the amount of energy that's required to provide that answer.

54:26And this takes us down a whole path, which is, and I don't know if you want to move on to the next topic, but this is my next topic, which is this nuclear power energy being the limb fact of like where this can all go. You literally had Jensen Huang from Nvidia come out and say that he thinks in the grand scheme of things, China has a better chance at achieving AGI than the United States because they have the energy infrastructure to support the training and the inference on the models. And I mean, I don't know if this was a political statement to then allow the current US administration to go out and start spending a bunch of money on energy and to reinvigorate nuclear and all that kind of stuff.

55:12But it is the one thing that I keep hearing in this particular space is where we need to be spending a lot of our time is just taking the grid to the next level. As a Bitcoiner that watched all the, how terrible Bitcoin is because of the energy consumption, specifically from people in tech for what felt like a decade, now pivot and they're all on board for conducting nuclear power, small modular reactor, innovation tech. It's very smirk worthy to see how many people are jumping on this train. Any comments on that, Seb, or anything that you want to wrap up? Because I just kind of moved on to the next thing without letting you finish your point.

55:56There's one point that I'll quickly add, which is, I think it's so important to be able to obviously increase 1R, the efficiency of these models. So we're not necessarily just kind of like throwing tons and tons and tons of energy, which could potentially have another use. Although you could argue in the free market, energy only flows to where value is being created. So it's never going to be wasted. But I also think that as we're firing more energy into these models and we're getting more information out, we're still kneecapped, not by the models or the amount of energy, we're kneecapped by ourselves because there's the speed of discovery and then there's the speed of verification of the information coming out of these models.

56:32And I think that AI is accelerating the creation of ideas and research pathways and code and scientific claims at a pace that as humans, we just cannot match. So verification is like slow, meticulous work of like checking all these assumptions, validating these experiments, and actually reviewing all this code. And that still happens at human speed. And so when you speak to a lot of like coders, they're saying, awesome, it's great that you've now, you're a bank, and you've just spat out all of this code to create a whole new system. But we've now got to go through and read all of that code and make sure that code actually does what it says it's meant to be doing.

57:06And so I think it kind of brings up a couple of questions I'm curious on your thoughts on, which is like, what happens when kind of the rate of ideation just massively outpaces the rate of validation? And does our progress almost kind of stall a little bit because of this just backlog of all of these amazing ideas and we don't quite know which avenues to go down because we just can't keep up with how much information is coming at us as humans. Well, to this point, so I have a stat for you. A Google search prior to AI, well, even today, if it's not using AI, uses 0.3 watt hours of energy. But if you take Gemini or ChatGPT, any of these large language models, and you put in a query, it's three to five watt hours for a 15X increase in what we would refer to as a click.

57:56So you go there historically, in 2010, if you went and did a Google search, you were consuming 15 times less energy than you are by going in the chat GPT and typing in your question and hitting enter. Now, the response you're getting back is, I would say on the magnitude of 15 times better. But what it doesn't speak to is if somebody's asking, and we were taught in school, there's no bad questions, right? There's no bad questions. But what if people are asking really dumb questions, things that don't require so much comprehension to get a simple response? And I think that where we're at now is the default is that you're not going to Google.

58:40And I don't go to Google for nearly anything. I always go to one of these AI, whether it's Grok, now Gemini, or ChatGPT, that's like the first place I go if I want to find something out. I don't go to Google anymore. I'm curious if you go to Google anymore. Almost never. And to be honest, even when I do go to Google, most of the time my answer, what I'm looking for, the answer is given in the AI summary at the top anyway. So we're still naturally the results we're looking for. AI is bringing that information to us these days as opposed to having to go and scan tons of pages. But I think that transparency, it may say it provides all of the links.

59:19And this I do think is really interesting is that just we may be getting transparency. It gets an amazing output that gives us all of these hyperlinked text, which says, this is the answer to the question you're looking for. But I think that sometimes transparency isn't necessarily trust. And we can put so much trust into these models, even when it's giving us a complete false story or a bit of a facade. And so it kind of comes back to this question of just like how much, like, of course, these are improving, but how much trust are we putting in these models and just expecting and getting used to, oh, that output's pretty good.

59:50I'm just going to use that output. The kids are in college or high school or wherever. They're using it to write their reports. And then I don't put it past the professors that they're then taking the reports and running it through AI to provide the feedback. So you have the AIs writing the reports and giving the feedback and the humans are just kind of like the paper pushers. You've probably seen it. There's a meme of, it's kind of got a woman at her desk sending an email to her boss and she goes and types into AI, gets this amazingly worded email that explains her opinions and this and that and then she sends it and he was like, feeling accomplished.

1:00:31And then you see the other side of it, which the boss received an email, he takes the email, puts it into AI, what are the key points she's trying to highlight and condenses 3 ,000 words down to three sentences. And so it's just like everyone is kind of fluffing everything up. And then everyone's taking that fluff and then decompressing it again. And you're just like, what is happening? Preston Pyshko The AI slop. I keep hearing about AI slop, and it's real. It's real. The AI slop is real. I just want to - Preston Pyshko Okay, nuclear. Preston Pyshko Yeah. I want to just highlight this real fast.

1:01:00So after the comment from Jensen on AI or China potentially beating the US to AGI because of the energy infrastructure, This article came out, I want to say like on the same day, this article is from November 19th, or the 19th of November of this year, 2025, from Bloomberg, US to own nuclear reactors stemming from Japan's$550 billion pledge. Check this out, Seb, as I'm scrolling down the key takeaways by Bloomberg AI. You don't even have to read all of this, which is probably AI slop beneath this. You can read the AI summary, and it says the US government plans to buy and own as many as 10 new large nuclear reactors that could be paid for using Japan's$550 billion funding pledge.

1:01:47The funding pledge is part of a push to meet surging demand for electricity, including for energy-hungry data centers that power artificial intelligence. The Trump administration has set a target to get 10 large conventional reactors under construction by 2030. So it seems like the US understands the limitation, which is energy infrastructure. It seems like it's trying to do things from a policy standpoint to reinvigorate some of these. I saw the Three Mile Island, is they're going to bring that back online? And I think this is the thing I'm really wanting to talk about. The years and years of ESG, energy equals bad, is over.

1:02:29It seems like this whole thing, the climate change energy is bad. If you consume any sort of energy, it's bad. All of those talking points are just going by the wayside because the key players and the string pullers of the world have figured out that if they're going to win this next race, the race of intelligence, it requires more energy, not less energy. And it just seems to be dead on the vine. What are your thoughts, Seb? I could not agree more. And I just think that we just have this society that seems to have this idea that consuming energy, as you're saying, is bad, when in reality, life consumes energy.

1:03:04And if you just look at any chart out there, there is like a 99 % correlation between GDP per capita and energy consumption. There is no low energy consuming high GDP countries, they just don't exist. And so I think that life naturally requires energy. However, there is a discussion to be said around there's a difference between consuming energy and environmental destruction. And There's obviously ways in which you can decimate the environment, whether it is a lot of these lithium mines and whatnot, trying to obtain heavy metals and even just some of the various fossil fuel approaches. And I don't want to necessarily have an opinion on that.

1:03:41But I think that it's really interesting seeing the nuclear narrative starting to shift, because I think that it's unbelievably important. To me, I read a book a few years ago called Atomic Awakening, and it dove into the world of nuclear energy. and one of the stats that stood out to me, I just went and found kind of the information, is it talks about how we tend to think that nuclear is unbelievably dangerous and the reason why we don't use it is because it's just killed so many people throughout history and that information could not be further from the truth and I think that it is because we see things like Chernobyl and Fukushima and we hear about radiation poisoning and in reality, so one of the stats it looks at is per terawatt hour of energy used coal, there are around 25 deaths because of obviously the pollution in the air, the people that are actually working in factories and such, the coal mining.

1:04:33In the oil industry, it's around 18 deaths per terawatt hour. The gas industry is three deaths per terawatt hour. Hydropower is 1.3 deaths per terawatt hour. Nuclear is 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour. We're talking about a minuscule amount in comparison to every other type of energy source. And so I think it's awesome to be able to see the narrative shifting. I think the biggest thing is now just seeing the policy and the legal side of things shift because I think it's been kneecapped because of all of the legislation that has been kind of rammed down through the legislative system. Nothing more to add.

1:05:11Can't agree more. Did you have a final topic that you want to discuss, Seb? I would say, actually, you know what? I have a couple more topics, but we can always leave those to another time. But I would say there's a topic I'm curious to hear your thoughts on. And it kind of goes back to AI again. And it's this idea of wisdom and diversity of thought. And so in my mind, wisdom has never really come from everyone thinking the same way. It emerges from contrast. And so hearing radically different positions, holding them together and discovering new insights and the space between these various insights.

1:05:47And so throughout history, we've seen all of these breakthroughs in various sciences and whatnot, always from the fringe. It is not consensus. It is not from the sensor, but it's from all of these various individuals who have thought outside the box and noticed something that others have overlooked. And I think that what is interesting is AI is different in that we're feeding all of these models the same information. And on top of that, AI, I think, is built on weights from the way that I understand it. And the lower the weight, even if the idea is brilliant, the idea doesn't necessarily, because it doesn't carry that much weight, AI doesn't necessarily reproduce it or talk about it in the text.

1:06:28And so if children are growing up learning about from these centralized models, well, I think they're also inheriting the same baseline worldview. Instead of tens of thousands of unique teachers, all with unique life experiences, all with a different intellectual starting point, and they're sharing this information with these students, I think that's what creates wisdom and curiosity, as opposed to this uniformity that all these kids are learning from the exact same models. I'm curious if we fast forward 10, 20, 30 years, if these kids are going to be being taught by AI, but they're all going to be fed the same information.

1:07:01What happens to innovation? What happens to wisdom and knowledge? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Robert Leonard My conversation with my wife on anything AI almost always comes back to this discussion point that you're bringing up. It really comes down to, are we training the AI, or is the AI starting to train us? Then the question is, what would it be trying to train you on if it was trying to train you, which I think the answer to that is it wants to have more novel insights of what it doesn't know. It's going to try to lead you into those domains, which is scary that it would be leading you that way.

1:07:40But in more general terms, I just think that the challenge that you're really facing is the one that we brought up before, where everybody's using AI to write their papers or to do their research, and then they're handing that in. And it's just a bunch of AI slop that's kind of replacing deep thought. And I think the other concern that you get, Seb, is as the world becomes, it becomes harder and harder to compete or to stand out or to provide novel insights because the competition is so fierce with anybody armed with AI. I don't know what this does from just a human motivation standpoint. I think you're have a lot of people that are just like, it's not even worth my time or effort to try because somebody armed with AI is just going to kick my butt or I just can't stand out.

1:08:31And if I can stand out, it's only going to last for three days before somebody else in the market comes with more competition and erodes away whatever competitive advantage I had. Preston Pysh, MD, Where I would push back is there are plenty of industries out there, not plenty, but there's some industries out there that you can still provide value for if you're servicing human beings. And where they aren't, or at least where they appear to not be, is in services, soft services, digital services. It seems to be crazy competitive. But in providing service from a physical standpoint, like for example, if you want your yard mode, if you want work to be done around the house, if you want your plumbing, a lot of these skills that I think people in the United States have really veered away from and just looked at that and said, oh, that's not going to pay me a lot.

1:09:27So I'm not going to go work in those different industries. I think that that is ripe for disruption and opportunity for a lot of people to actually make quite a bit of money, especially if they can do it from a standpoint of they do it really well with high quality work, but it involves physical labor. It involves people getting out in the physical space and doing things and not sitting behind a computer and clacking on keys. I would love to hear the audience. If you guys are listening to this and you got comments on this particular topic, I would love to hear what you got. But sorry, I'm going to hear what you have to say too.

1:10:03No, you make a really interesting point. And I'm curious, again, just to hear your reflection on this, which is I've spoken to many individuals through the Bitcoin space that have come from traditional finance. And they used to work in consulting, and they used to work in the banking sector, and they used to work for CPAs and various other kind of financial industries. And what I find really interesting is that they're actually stepping back from that sector because the white-collar worker, the knowledge worker is being completely disrupted through AI. They're stepping back and they're looking, okay, where can I direct my time and energy into something that's not going to be replaced immediately or in the foreseeable future?

1:10:42and one of my good friends who I speak to who's in the Bitcoin space, I speak to him bi-weekly, he's saying that, you know what, I'm looking actually to buy a painting company with a whole bunch of painters. I'm looking to buy a storage company. I'm looking to buy things that we are not going to see them overtaken anytime soon. And so if you have a handful of painters or a handful of plumbers, or you've got like a trade company, I think those companies, they can provide a reasonable lifestyle. You don't need to be worth 50 million, 100 million. It's like, what do you want to be able to show up for your family?

1:11:11What do you want to be able to afford a house and to be able to live comfortably? And I think sometimes the financial world, social media says we need more. And in reality, I think you can live a relatively comfortable life with a decent little income of kind of low, mid six figures through one of these kind of more manual labor, physical trades. Yeah. I mean, the counter argument that somebody from tech is going to immediately bring up the humanoid robots, which we didn't even discuss during the show, but at this moment in time in 2025, any type of humanoid robot video that I've watched, it goes over and it's like emptying a dishwasher and it literally takes it five minutes to put a spatula in the dishwasher and then it like fumbles all over the place.

1:11:53So that could change very quickly. But I think humans, if I'm going to hire somebody to do something around the house or whatever it might be, right, I'm going to a human and not a humanoid robot, at least not anytime soon. And you know, like, I think that naturally, we've got this world where I think there's a lack of connection. People want to interact with people. And so, I'm noticing, and I think it's an awesome swing, I'm noticing companies today, the majority of them, you cannot speak to someone on the phone. You're getting an AI bot through the chat. But the companies that do say, hey, you know what, here's our number.

1:12:28You give us a call and you're actually going to get a person. They're starting to see a lot of success. And so, it's really cool just to recognize that technology, the pendulum always swings. And I think we've swung to this point where we've almost replaced us in many ways or tried to replace us, but we're recognizing that first, AI and a lot of these technologies are not people and people know that they're not people. And secondly, we're missing that connection. And so I'm curious to see over the next few years, does that pendulum continue to swing back a little bit more towards center where people are recognizing the importance of physical connection, spending time with friends, actually having a number to talk to someone to deal with any issues.

1:13:04Okay. I've got one final surprise before we wrap this up. While we were recording today, I took a screen grab of Seb and I having our conversation and I had it take our banana-rama, whatever the heck it's called, a pro Gemini model and a nano banana. Thank you, sir. and I asked it to, what would these two podcasters look like if there was a camera behind them and it took a picture while they were having the conversation? Okay. Now you're going to see the picture that the screen grab that I got is probably one of the most flattering pictures of Seb that you will ever see. This is such a bad picture.

1:13:50Check this out. Okay. So here you are. You were mid blinking your eyes and looking up and I'm just stone cold staring at the camera. And it's just the video feed of him and I having the car. You ready to see what it interpreted the back of our head taking a picture from behind us looks like.

1:14:14okay for the person that can't see this it's not bad like there's a lot right with this picture as far as uh it looks like seb your room it did not reverse your room right like your room is there but it is showing that you are talking to you're looking at a computer the back of your head and all that looks like it pretty normal, but you're talking to yourself and not me. Oh, this is interesting. Look at your background. Your background is my background. And have you seen that it's also given me your headphones, but not in the... Oh, that's right. Yeah. Look at that. That's wild. And then my picture is like really jacked because the microphone is literally behind me.

1:15:03And then I'm talking to you, which is correct. And it's the image of you looking forward. Okay. So like that all looks correct. It's pretty close. Okay. So like not bad, but there's a couple of hiccups. Now, if I went in there and I like pointed these things out, I think it would actually get it all correct. If I went on a back and forth, I mean, obviously I didn't have time to really do anything other than quickly type the prompt in there. And that was the first go around coming back to me. So pretty wild, but not quite right. But it's coming along very fast. Similar to your watch thing, it had my monitor.

1:15:40It has my exact... Get the heck out of here. No, 100%. Really, hold on, let me pull this back up. It's got my exact monitor. And that's why I'm just like, what? I didn't know what my monitor looked like. Get the heck out of here. That's the monitor you have. That's got my monitor. Yeah. Dude, that's weird. That is definitely not my monitor. In fact, I have three screens here in front of me. In fact, I get comments online. Why is he looking off to the side? Well, I'm looking over at my second or third monitor to pull up all the things on the fly during the show. So yeah, no, my monitor's way off.

1:16:09It looks like my monitor's on the floor too. You're really, you're stacking sats. You don't have a chair. Oh yeah, that's right. So it did get that correct. Yeah. Pierre Rochard, AI knows I don't have a chair. I'm sitting in no chair. It's a little ways off. It'll get there. Wow. Seb, I love this. This was so much fun. If you guys enjoy this format, I enjoy this format, but maybe the audience doesn't like this format. If you like this format, please tell us in the comments of, if you're on X, let us know. Because if you like it, we want to keep doing these types of things. And Seb, thank you so much for your comments and what you brought to the show today.

1:16:50Give people a handoff to anything you want to highlight, Seb. And thank you so much for joining on us today on the show. But Seb, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you. Absolutely. And I would start by saying as well, if you enjoyed this discussion, when you listen to it, feel free to just post a comment with anything that you think is happening in the world that is interesting. And on the next time we record in this style, we'd love to bring it up. Because I think that sometimes there's so much stuff happening that a lot of it slips between the cracks. And it's just the world is a fascinating place, and there's incredible things that people are working on.

1:17:23No, you can just find me at saidbunny, and bunny is B-U-N-E-Y. I'm saidbunny on Twitter. I still kind of go by Twitter. I just feel like X to me, it doesn't resonate. No, you can find me at saidbunny.com on Twitter, and my book is The Hidden Cost of Money. And yeah, I just really appreciate you guys listening, and thanks for having me on Preston. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining us, and until next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Infinite Tech on your favorite podcast app, and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes and courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.

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