Bankless - LIMITLESS: This Is Far Bigger Than The Internet Boom | Shaun Maguire

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia and former physicist turned investor, joins the Limitless Podcast to explore why we’re on the verge of a technological renaissance. From AI and silicon photonics to humanoid robots and space infrastructure, Shaun makes the case that the next 20 years will make the internet boom look tame. We dive deep into why America needs 10 SpaceX-level companies, the return of hardware innovation, the energy constraints of the future, and how frontier technologies like Neuralink and Mars colonization might reshape civilization. ------ 💫 LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW https://pod.link/1813210890 https://www.youtube.com/@Limitless-FT https://x.com/LimitlessFT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:36 Who’s Shaun Maguire? 9:24 Investing in the AI Age 13:06 Hardware Manufacturing 21:58 Hardware Precedes Software Revolutions 42:20 Energy 49:53 Space Solar Reflectors 55:45 Space Economy 1:04:15 Elon Musk 1:14:24 Robotics 1:17:39 Neuralink 1:25:22 Doom Scenarios 1:32:02 Closing Thoughts ------ RESOURCES Shaun Maguire https://x.com/shaunmmaguire Sequoia Capital https://www.sequoiacap.com/ Josh Kale https://x.com/Josh_Kale David Hoffman https://x.com/TrustlessState ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

If America can stay at the cutting edge of space, gets the cutting edge of silicon photonics. If Tesla and then others can basically get to the cutting edge of humanoid robotics, which is something that, like, I strongly believe is... Why fundamentally, cheap space travel will unlock so many things that will actually turn into quality of life improvements for the average person who's left on planet Earth. You know, people have this mental model that space is very...

Picture a guy who treats the frontier like his backyard. That's Sean McGuble. wire. And he was gracious enough to join us on the show today to discuss energy breakthroughs, factory floors humming with humanoid robots, brain machine computers, and space exploration. In fact, Sean's even invested in a company who shoots satellites into outer space to beam light rays back at Earth and turn night into day. This is, it's crazy stuff. And he walks us through exactly which of these sci-fi visions are already sneakily here today, which will up end entire industries in months, and which have the opportunity to reshape entire civilizations

over the next couple of years. Some of the timelines even left me speechless. And that is the Limitless podcast is all about. So Bankless Nation, welcome to Limitless, where we explore the frontier technologies that are poised to reshape our world. I'm David Hoffman, joined by my co-host Josh Kale, and our very first guest is Sequoia Capital Frontier Tech investor Sean McGuire. Now, if you are hearing this on the Bankless feed, don't worry. Bankless isn't going anywhere. And if you found us on the Limitless feed, congrats, you're ahead of the curve. Limitless is a brand new podcast out of Bankless, focusing, on frontier technologies and getting ahead of a rapidly accelerating future.

Bankless will return to focusing on crypto and Marcus with Ryan and me at the helm, and Limitless is where Josh, Jaws, and I, and also sometimes Ryan, will chase the future. How AI and other frontier technologies are going to impact our lives and what we need to know and do about it. If you're familiar with the bankless cadence, you'll find yourself right at home with Limitless. On Monday, we're going to do deep dive interviews with founders and investors that are building the future. and then on Thursdays we have the weekly AI roll-up

our fast-moving recap of the week's biggest AI headlines. Now, I'm pretty biased here, but I think the AI roll-up is truly the most accessible, informative, and engaging AI news show out there. So if all of this sounds like your jam, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app or YouTube. There's a link in the show notes to go find Limitless. And if you don't mind, we would definitely appreciate a quick five-star review

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Sean's got one of the more interesting backgrounds that I've ever seen, starting out working as a physicist working on quantum gravity, then spent time working at DARPA, where he was deployed to Afghanistan, then shift gears into startups and investing. He co-founded a cybersecurity company called Expanse, which is later acquired by Palo Alto Networks. And then he's also been an early backer of companies like Visa, Watershed, SpaceX. At Sequoia, he's focusing on early stage investments, especially in hard and frontier technologies, which is why we wanted to bring him on the show today. Sean, welcome to Bankless. What's up, guys? Thrill to be here. First of all, did not start with quantum gravity. Started probably with an F in algebra two. So I've had a lot of

failures before the successes. And unfortunately, I was on early backer in Visa. I think he meant viz. And I just all good. VISA would have been pretty legendary and hopefully Viz becomes even bigger. Yeah, I guess VISA is just the wrong generation. It's a little bit earlier than all of us here. So maybe with that, since I need a little bit more help kind of understanding your background, just expand on your perch a little bit for listeners who just might need more context about, you know, what your deal is, who you are.

And especially as we get into more modern times with all of the crazy technologies that we have today, just explaining a little bit of your context and what interests you and how your arc has been. I think would be pretty helpful. Thrill to be here. I've been a big fan of the pod for a long time. So I'll try to keep this pretty brief, but I would say kind of my childhood was characterized by just like not listening to what I was told to do

instead of paying attention in school or like even going to class a lot of the time. I just stayed home or would do or even in school would focus on my own learning. And I've basically been obsessed with computers, the internet, then physics, then math, basically my entire life. Like, computers really started at age of seven. And so I kind of sacrificed not learning English very well for learning a lot about computers at a young age. And, you know, I took it pretty seriously. I was really into building computers, really into, like, honestly, understanding, like, how computers are made, understanding silicon at a pretty young age and understanding a lot of industries. I've just kind of

been driven my curiosity my whole life. I was really obsessed with the chemical industry as a kid. I'm happy to talk about the chemical industry today. To me, it's honestly one of the most fascinating industries in the world. It's five trillion a year in sales. No one knows anything about it. It's bigger than oil and gas. It's where everything comes from. But it's just like I'm giving that as an example that I have a hundred anecdotes like that. It's just kind of being really interested in different things and spending time going pretty deep at a young age. And now as an investor, I get to kind of invest in those things. Basically, I get to invest in things that were childhood passions.

And so I can make chemicals instance. I'm an investor in a chemicals marketplace called Node, K&OWDE, and almost every investment I've made at Sequoia can be traced to some deep childhood obsession. Like with SpaceX, I was completely obsessed with space from a very young age. I started off at age of nine, being obsessed with the solar system, but then starting to learn about rockets and, you know, like, taking that all the way to having a failed space launch company in my early 20s. But kind of, I think that's what people need to understand about me,

is that the investments I make now, like, it's not coming from two years of thinking about something. It's coming from, you know, 20 to 30 years. I think that background is really helpful because the reason of why we want to get you on today is just really just to talk about all the frontier technologies that really seem to be maturing seemingly all at once. People often joke that the world has not been the same ever since Harambe was killed in 2016. But I think I want to actually take that a little bit more seriously

and fast forward to the world has not been the same ever since ChatGBT-GPT 3.5 came out in 2022 because now just a few years later, Elon is catching rockets flying out of the air. We have actual robots walking among us. I just saw a video today of a robot boxing league coming out of China. So that's pretty crazy. Driverless cars are actually in production, driving people around. And then now also, of course, we have people talking about actual AGI

coming in two years or less. So it just feels like this current moment of time seems especially unique. And it seems like you've been thinking about a lot of these things as they have been maturing. From your vantage point, as an investor in Sequoia, how does this just period of history feel for you right now? Well articulated. I mean, this period feels insanely exciting. I truly feel like unbelievably privileged and lucky to be an investor in this time. I have been very passionate about the history of venture capital,

you know, for honestly for over 20 years. And I think that if you look in VC, there were kind of like, depends how you define it, but like two to four really great periods before today. And I think we're, you know, in some examples were the early computing, era. It depends how broad your interests are, but early internet era, then like the dot-com era. I would say, in my opinion, like the early mobile era was incredible with giant companies being

created very quickly. And now we're in this kind of new era where you have both AI and a research of hardware happening simultaneously. And so I truly feel incredibly lucky to be an investor right now. And I think the, like, to build on that, I think the AI stuff is more obvious to the public. Like it's talked about all the time. Like you're, you know, it's kind of incredible. And Vida has become, like a hardware company has become such a popular hot company. But to take a bigger look at this, I wrote a manifesto at Sequo about three years ago. It was like a hardware manifesto.

And basically what I said in it was, if you look at Sequoia, it's 53-year-old firm now, is 50 years old when I wrote this. But the first 25 years of the firm, Sequoia made almost all of its money in hardware. In the last 25 years, we've made almost all of our money in software. And the question I asked was, like, is hardware dead long-lived hardware? Or was there some weird kind of quirk of history or secular trend of why, you know, hardware was not as popular or not as great of a way to make money, and that might come back. And I'm like, it was a straw man question. I'm strongly in the latter camp. And if you want,

like right now, I can kind of drill into some of the like insights I have there. But I really think we're entering this dual kind of golden phase of both hardware returning in mass at the same time that AI, which has both a hardware element and the software elements happening simultaneously, so it's pretty wild. I think that actually is where we want to go first in this agenda, not specifically through hardware, but also discussing manufacturing. There's a bunch of subjects that we want to go one by one. Starting with hardware and manufacturing, we also want to talk about energy, space exploration,

everything Elon Musk is doing, hardware, human connections, even chemistry, if we can find time. But let's start there about manufacturing. As you said, the first 25 years of Sequoia's returns were all hardware investments. And I think this question of manufacturing is also especially timely, given that we are in the midst of this Trump's Liberation Day maneuvers, trying to bring back manufacturing back to the United States. Maybe just talk about the importance of hardware manufacturing, generally speaking, for software,

and then also how important it is for here inside the United States. Yeah, I mean, I'll start with, I mean, like, whatever one's view of politics are, America found itself in a position over the last 25 years where very little of advanced technologies are made in America anymore. And this makes it much harder. This is one of the reasons why it's been hard to create hardware companies in America. I think it was much bigger than that.

The primary thing is just where we were in Moore's Law and where we were in different big platforms. but whenever the hardware supply chain is in a place, it's much easier to innovate on the final end product. And if you go back, so I'll give an analogy from history, I was incredibly lucky as a child, like genuinely just insanely lucky. I met this man in Arnold Beckman. He, I ran the men who's being pushed in a stroller,

and he asked me a bunch of science questions. It's kind of a crazy story. I was like eight years old. Or sorry, I was nine years old. And this guy, I think Arnold is probably the most underrated person in the history of American technology, quite literally, like, I think the most underrated person. I'll spend a couple minutes on this. I think it is, like, very important anecdote to understand kind of the challenges of manufacturing in America today. So basically, Beckman was a professor at Caltech.

He was a chemistry professor. He invented the, so he was doing advanced chemistry, but he invented the portable pH meter to help farmers measure the acidity. of oranges and when it was right time to pick oranges. And that ended becoming a company called Beckman Instruments, which ended up at his height employing about 2000 chemistry PhDs. And they made many, many different instruments, primarily for the chemicals industry and then for early pharma industry. And so anyway, so he was doing that. And he was known as like one of the apex mines at Caltech. And there was an undergrad named Bill Shockley, like Shockley was a brilliant guy. and he was attracted to Beckman,

and so he became one of Beckman's kind of protégés. And then Shockley went to MIT to do his PhD. Then he went to Bell Labs, he invented the Silicon Transistor. When he was at Bell Labs, Shockley is a much more common name than Beckman. Shockley got the Nobel Prize for inventing the silicon transistor. He went, this is the part of the story that people don't know.

So Shockley ended up going actually back to Caltech after Bell Labs for a couple of years to be visiting faculty kind of, figure out what to do next and kind of back to work with his mentor, Arnold Beckman. And this is where they decided to start Shockley Semiconductor. Something that people don't know has kind of been lost in history is Shackley was actually not an independent company. There was a wholly owned subsidiary of Beckman instruments of this chemical instrumentation

company. And so he started Shockley. Beckman was the chairman. You know, they hired brilliant people like Bob Noisse and Gordamore and all, you know, all these people that became the Traders 8, they left to start Fairchild, then Intel spun out of that. Beckman continued to be mentor to the Intel founders as they built the company. Okay, so here's where we get to the core point.

For probably the first 30 years or so of building silicon, the hard thing was making wafers, like it was making very pure, waferers and other chemical processes. Like to make a silicon wafer has about 20 chemical steps. And then a bunch of the other hard problems really on. We're all chemical problems. In the last 20 years, the hard problem has become lithography. It's etching out these very fine, you know, features. But for 20 to 30 years, the hardest thing was chemicals. And having this guy, Arnold Beckman, that had this insane chemicals company with 2000 genius chemistry PhDs

that were always making new equipment. Having that sit literally right next to Intel meant that whenever Intel was running into a problem, kind of scaling the next generation of silicon, trying to push Moore's Law forward, they would basically just share in real time. Like, hey, we're running into this problem. They'd share it with Beckman and his,

is chemists, and they'd be like, oh, you know, this might be able to solve it, or if not, they would come up with some new instrument that could solve it. And having this coupling of the people that were pushing silicon forward, sitting right next to people that were pushing chemicals forward and chemical instrumentation and sensors, et cetera, is what led to being able to scale the whole system, lightning speed. And the thing that we've lost in America in the last 25 years is we've lost this supply chain, we've lost this coupling. You know, and so you have a couple very unique instances. You have Elon, basically, that has gone and into these kind of totally new areas,

and builds his own supply chains kind of himself for his own companies. And so he's able to have this tight coupling because he's basically doing everything within his own companies. But for almost every other company, like if you are a drone company and your limiting factors making motors, like the motors are being made in China, at least the best ones are being made in China. And, you know, it's much harder to talk to the engineers.

I mean, and now with what's happening in the world, like we can't even buy motors from them for a defense-grade drone, but you don't get to go talk to the people, building the components and learn what's coming one year from now. What are the hard? And you don't get to tell them what are your problems and have them go start putting them in the components. their roadmap right now. And kind of getting that back, getting the whole supply chain back,

the whole like all these different components, it is not something you can do in five years. Like it's it's not even something you can really do in a decade. Maybe an individual verticals. Like if we decide, you know, making drones is a core national priority, then we can probably bring the supply chain just for drones into America in less than 10 years. But like if you wanted to do leading edge chip fabrication, like I think America would really struggle even with like 100% max effort to, you know, catch up to where the cutting edge will be in 10 years over the next 10 years because the supply chain is a few orders of magnitude more complex than for drones. And so this is kind of, it was one of the biggest mistakes, I think, in business history or in national history for America

to let its entire supply chain kind of go starting in the late 90s to China. And I personally think it's very important that we bring it back. And I have a bunch of theories and philosophies about how we should do this. I think my view is like kind of different than how most people are thinking about it today. But, you know, if your view of the world, is that there will never be conflict again. Like, we're at the end of history. Then sure, globalization is great. Like, outsource your supply changes buy from everyone.

But if you believe that, like, we're not at the end of history, then I think it's pretty important to, like, make at least critical components in America. And, you know, but I think we can't be naive about how hard this will be. And, like, you have to do it kind of systematically. Yeah, that's what I was super interested in talking to you about, is where those constraints actually lie. comes to manufacturing here, what does the optimistic bull case look like for bringing that back on shore? And you said that you made this point a little while ago that I really liked,

which was that every software evolution is proceeded by a hardware revolution. And I guess I was really interested on where we are on that spectrum of progress and where we are on the spectrum of progress and how we're able to get to the place where we have this optimistic case for manufacturing. It's like the example was like, because of the iPhone, we got the app store, because of the GPU, we have AI mining. Are we software constrained? Or are we, Are we hardware constrained and where are those limitations and how do we break through them to bring the manufacturing back to the United States? Man, thank you for asking this.

What a layup. This is my favorite question. I would say there were two parts to it. On the point that hardware revolutions precede software revolutions, I really strongly believe this. I think it's almost a definitional point. you know, if you want to have the app store, which enabled creating a bunch of, you know, creating Uber and a bunch of these big companies, you have to have the iPhone.

To have the iPhone, you have to have the iPhone, you have to have Qualcomm, you have to have broadcom, you have to have 20 years of building out networks and building out, you know, comms, technology, almost all of that was on the hardware level. If you want to have deep learning, you need to have the GPU, that's 20 years of progress. If you want to have cloud computing, you have to have very cheap commodity. Kind of the whole point of what is a cloud, it's basically the idea that you can put a bunch of cheap commodity hardware in one place and then put distributed systems. You basically use algorithms on top of this commodity hardware to kind of handle failure, handle things breaking in the hardware in a fault-tolerant way, which gives you a job. cost advantage over, you know, hosting your own hardware.

And basically we had to have 20 plus years of, of, like, memory and CPUs, et cetera, getting cheaper to do that. You know, part of why VR is not better right now, I mean, this is what people talk about. The hardware is not that great. And it's gone a lot better, and, you know, the Vision Pro is a lot better, but we're still not there. I, with AI, I personally, and I think this is much more obvious now, but I've been saying this for many years. Like, I still think we're wildly hardware limited right now.

And so, like, even if we have AGI in two years, like the number of units of AGII we would have would probably be very small. You know, like, in a hypothetical world, let's say it takes a gigawatt data center to have, like, one AGII. you know, we won't have that many gigawatt data centers at that point. And for any gigawatt data center, you can probably do the same thing with, call it 10 megawatts. Like 100x more efficient, not even on the algorithm side, purely on the hardware level. Like if you start using more silicon botonics, like optimized chips, just way better interconnects, these types of things. you know, you can probably get like 100x improvements, simply just by better hardware. Anyways, I think that AI is going to be limited by hardware for the next five to 10 years.

And don't get me wrong, I think we're going to make unbelievable progress on the software side as well in parallel. This is one of these beautiful periods where, like, the software and hardware co-evolving with each other. But the software basically always evolves faster than hardware. So anyways, I like on a much bigger level I think we basically hit the end of a bunch of a bunch of like software

revolutions more or less at the same time and so it didn't really leave many places to go like we hit the end of the mobile revolution roughly at the same time and I think we hit the end of the traditional cloud revolution I'm not talking AI

AI is like the one area of software that I think is kind of at the beginning of a giant, giant revolution. You know, powered by hardware, though, and I will just say even in AI hardware, like what we're seeing right now wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for NVIDIA buying Melanox, you know, or Melanox existing independently if NVIDA was still able to use it. This thing, Melanox is an internet connect company,

it's actually an Israeli company. Sequoia was the seed investor. It's required for $8 billion by $1,000, 5 or 6 years ago, I can't remember one. And basically, like, Melanox is what lets Nvidia have good full systems,

not just, you know, single GPUs, but full systems and, you know, ultra-high bandwidth in these systems. And it's probably the real reason why Nvidia has a moat over AMD and Intel today was Melanox. But there was a lot of progress on the hardware side that's enabling

the AI revolution, we're seeing right now on the first question, which was how do we bring back manufacturing to the West? What would that look like? I think we should all learn from the best examples we've seen. To me, the two companies in America

doing manufacturing the best right now are SpaceX and Tesla. I'm wearing a SpaceX hat right now. Nice. Amazing company, my favorite company in the world. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to stick favorites, but come on. Likewise, bad asses.

It's just an incredible company. But basically, look, I think SpaceX is one of the only, I think it's maybe, it's the only company I can think of, along with actually Melanox that is outperforming China across the board. Even Tesla is facing very real competition from Chinese auto companies. And there's certain areas where Tesla's ahead. There's certain areas where the Chinese EV companies are ahead. But SpaceX is very far ahead of every Chinese rocket company. SpaceX should not take this for granted. They will never take it for granted.

They work at maximum speed. But I think we should learn from the fact that these two companies were able to build supply chains, build giant manufacturing companies in America that are the best in the world in their categories. And I think basically the lesson that I would take away is they started off with, initial vehicles that were like that had a market but were like a low enough level of complexity that a company could do it so like the roadster for Tesla or the Falcon 1 for SpaceX which was you know the Falcon 1 was not a great rocket but proved that they can do it and then it became the Falcon 9 which was a like an okay rocket before the Falcon 9 could be reused like it was

still not at the state of the art you know in the history of rocketry like they they were probably some better rockets than the Falcon 9 expendable. But by starting with these things and vertically integrated along the way, it put these companies into position to where then when they got to like the Falcon 9 reusable or call it the Model S, they had actually intersected and become like best in the world in their classes. And they controlled their own supply chain. And so then as the company scaled, they could keep investing in the supply chain. SpaceX announced recently that with Starlink use terminals, they're now even making their own PCB, you know, doing their own PCB assembly, which is a much easier problem than, say, like, making a leading edge chip.

But we haven't been doing much of this in North America recently. And so, like, the fact that you start off as a rocket company and it leads all the way to be doing, like, PCB assembly is just very bullish for manufacturing. in America. And then once you have a big factory doing PCB assembly, you know, the people that work at SpaceX doing that, like, someday some of them will leave. And like, they'll, they'll actually know how to do this and they'll probably start doing, maybe they'll start a company that just does PCB assembly for other American companies and just these things catalyze entire supply chains and then ecosystems beyond that. And so anyways, for me, I think a giant mistake would be America of trying to intersect Chinese manufacturing in areas that are already mature or already on

exponential trends. I think we have to go try to find what are the next areas. Like what are the things that are relatively new where we can go kind of invest in them now and get ahead and then build vertically integrated supply chains there. And we have like roughly two today in, you know, electric vehicle manufacturing with Tesla and SpaceX with Space Launch. But I think we need like 10 of these. And honestly, I think that if America had,

I think it's as simple as if you have roughly 10 SpaceX's and Teslas that are vertically integrated, primarily manufacturing in the West, that alone will basically make all of manufacturing. That's like enough to revitalize all of manufacturing in the West. And so to take this like one step further, I am unbelievably bullish on a 20-year time frame on silicon photonics. So almost everything that we use today with silicon are silicon electronics. So a GPU is, it's electronics.

Like the computation is happening via electrons, not photons. You know, almost every sensor we use is an electronic sensor. So like a lot of the sensors in the iPhone, et cetera, like electronic sensors. Almost every, anyways, like CPUs or electronic, almost everything is electronic. Silicon Electronics is so far along in its manufacturing curve that getting to the leading edge is very hard. I mean, like hundreds of billions of dollars minimum plus 10 years at a minimum to even have a chance of getting to the leading edge. I think even there probably wouldn't catch up.

Silicon Photonics, in my opinion, is just now, like just now getting to the point where, like, the first real commercial applications have started to happen. And once you have first real commercial applications of something, that's when you can start to, you get this feedback loop where you start to get revenue, which causes investment. And that that drives the cost down, because I'm building fab facilities that are optimized for photonics, not for electronics. And then as the cost goes down, you can make other products. And then the supply chain gets better. And we get better at making reliable lasers that go on chip, which are a prerequisite for silicon photonics. And I mean, I could talk for a long time about silicon photonics. But I am, I think it's, I think silicon photonics will be

as important in the 21st century as silicon electronics was in the 20th. And I think that no one is ahead, now, like this is something where America can easily win in Silicon Photonics manufacturing if we're to kind of do it the right way and be smart about it right now. That said, like, both China and Taiwan have, they feel the same way. And I think they've identified in the last, really just in the last, like, 18 months, Silicon Photonics as critical technologies for the next, you know, two decades. And so they're now just starting to very heavily invest in it. And I'm going to take this a little further. These things are of national strategic importance.

And so with TSM, until about 18 months ago, TSM was willing to, so when you make a chip, there's many steps to it. One step is fabricating the device. Another step is packaging it, which is kind of when you take the chip or whatever and you kind of more or less like put the hood on it and put all the wires that come in and out of the chip

and you test and make sure that everything is kind of working properly and a few other steps in there. Until about 18 months ago, TSM was willing to package. So packaging is incredibly hard. Packaging is probably harder than fabricating the chips. And most people don't understand this, but packaging is probably harder than fabricating the chips. and TSMC was willing to package silicon photonics chips made by other fabs.

Like if you had a chip made by global foundries, TSM was still willing to package it because TSM is the best in the world at packaging chips. But in the last 18 months, they basically stopped packaging silicon photonic chips made by other companies. So you have to now do everything with TSMC, which basically makes it. it makes a strong incentive for the leading companies to only work with TSM, which makes it hard for any other company to kind of get inroads in Silicon Photonics. And so I think this is like highly symbolic of how strategic Taiwan and TSM view,

which are deeply intertwined, view Silicon Photonics. I think that's smart of them. Like I don't blame them. I think that's brilliant. Like great leadership by Taiwan. They're playing the game the right way. But it's just, it's, I think, real confirmation of my point of how important silicon photonics is. And this is one area.

Like, if America can stay at the cutting edge of space, stay, like, you know, get to the cutting edge of silicon photonics, you know, stay at the cutting edge of EVs. If Tesla and then others can basically get to the cutting edge of humanoid robotics, which is something that, like, I strongly believe is coming. And I think Tesla is very well suited to manufacture these things at scale. And, like, I hope the space, I hope there are many winners in America. I hope it's, like, a highly competitive space with many winners. But manufacturing things at scale is really, really hard. I think Tesla's very well suited for making humanoid robots.

Just as a, like, I'll, I'll come. kind of end this monologue in one second, but something that I think is oftentimes missed when people look at hardware companies. Well, basically, I think hardware company, so with software companies, software companies usually get harder to build the bigger you get. Like, it gets harder to acquire customers. Once you, because there's not, it's not that hard to replicate the code of the software company. Once you prove that the market's good, competitors will come in. and then it becomes harder to acquire customers and all these things. With hardware companies, it's really hard to get them to work,

but once they work, they actually generally get easier with scale. There's many reasons for this. Like, it's insanely hard to get the supply chain working. It's very hard to make the thing. It's very hard to work out all the kinks in the system. It's, you know, there's usually like a baseline number of things you have to build to get the system to work. But once you have,

a working, if you look at basically every hardware company in history, almost every hardware company has produced many of their own products organically. You know, Apple has so many products. Tesla has many products. Invita has many products. Broadcom has many products. Any hardware company has lots of products. And so if you use Apple as an analogy, you know, Apple isn't fabricating their own devices, but they are designing them. The Vision Pro reuses a, you know, huge number of components from the iPhone. So like the, you know, face ID is reused.

A bunch, you know, the accelerometers are reused. The magnetometers are reused. Like, I think, I may be wrong on this, but I think the vision has about a thousand sensors in it. And some of those are like, you know, 10 of the same sensor. But I think my estimate is something like 950 of the thousand were reused, like ported over from other Apple products. and there's called 50 that were like net new designed for the Vision Pro.

This is such an advantage of hardware companies. Once you get going, you've getting to reuse other products. And this is something where for Tesla with Optimus, like I think quite, there's a lot of things that get to be reused from, and even if not of specific like components, the processes are supply chain to make them. It's basically the same supply chain as making cars. And so it's like by starting off,

by getting really good at making cars, cars in America, it can lead to making many other products and even reusing a lot of the components in there. This is kind of like my core thesis is we have to have about 10 SpaceX Tesla's, and that's how you really bring manufacturing back to America. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain. That's exactly what Mantle is building, powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable on-chain financial hub. As part of their 2025 expansion, Mantle is introducing three new core innovation pillars that bridge traditional finance with decentralized technology. First is their

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Man, and there it is. I personally, I love the monologue. That was great. I think you're really good at explaining things on first principles. So I kind of want to apply that to the next category, which is how do we power all of these things that you just spoke about. It's how do we power the robotics, the electric cars, the actual manufacturing and factories that are required to build all these things. Do we have the energy capability now to even do that? Or are there key unlocks that need to happen on the way before we could start making things at the scale that you're describing? I mean, another great question. I'm very happy that America has woken up to just how fundamental

energy is and this was kind of lost from the conversation for a decade or so as like climate change took priority over kind of growth and I understand that philosophy but if you like GDP is just extremely correlated with power production electricity generation and and we really stopped investing in power generation in America. And I don't mean fully stop. We've had a lot of growth, but we have not been investing in it anywhere near the same to the same level as China.

I think probably, like, if America were to fail in like manufacturing research ends, I think it would be because of just power constraints, just not having low enough power costs and not having enough just power generation. So I think this is the most important question. And how do we get there? I mean, look, so obviously we need to start, we need to invest in things that will be good long-term power generation sources. But I think the only thing that lets you really have

lots of power generation in short-term is using fossil fuels. And it's kind of kind of, this is maybe an unpopular view, but I basically view the world is like there's peace time and there's wartime and kind of different, you should have different optimization during peacetime versus wartime. You know, obviously there's hot wars, things like World War I, World War II, where a lot of American industry got devoted towards making, you know, equipment for the wars. But then you have the Cold War, which is, something slightly different where, you know, this is, again, an unpopular view, but you just have a different set of rules during war. And personally, I'm glad that America bought the Cold War. I think

there were many blunders during the Cold War, you know, like many aspects of Vietnam War were giant mistakes and stupid. But I think, it would have been a much worse outcome for the world if America would have just ceded the world to the Soviet Union and basically let communism spread. So I'm generally very happy that we did this. I personally think we're going through a very similar thing right now with China. It's Cold War 2.0. And like China is not playing by their like, you know, they have a wartime attitude. And I think, it would be foolish for the West to not simultaneously have a wartime attitude. And kind of a end byproduct of this is I think that we need to be investing like crazy in fossil fuels right now

because I think the stakes are too big. Like I think like liberal democracy is at stake. That's my personal view. I'm happy. A lot of people would disagree with me on that. And I don't think it's as clear. I think that China has been very strategic with not making this as obvious as it was during the Cold War. I think they learned from Cold War 1.0 and some of the mistakes made by the Soviets. But I think basically in the short run, we have to really deregulate fossil fuels. Granted, we should do it as clean as possible. And this is something where there's a pretty big narrative violation. Like, you know, if you look at the CO2 emissions of a, like a clean coal power plant versus dirty coal power plant, you know, you can have wildly more efficient coal power plants. And, you know, I, hopefully we don't use too much coal, but things like natural gas, like we should be using huge amounts of gas right now. But at the same time, we have to be investing in much better, longer term technology. And to me, that's like solar is.

unbelievably important. Solar is basically at a point right now where the price per watts, like nothing will ever catch up to the cost of solar, or sorry, nothing in the next, nothing that is even close to working today. Like fusion could get there, but with uncertain timeline. Nuclear, I don't think can catch up to solar is my kind of personal opinion on this full system level, given where solar is now. If we were to go back in time, if we had a time machine, we went back 30 years and we deregulated nuclear 30 years ago and let nuclear go down an exponential cost curve starting 30 years ago, I think it would probably be way ahead of solar today. And I don't think solar would have even got into where it is now

because nuclear would, we wouldn't have needed it. Nuclear would have been so good. But I still, I think America should be investing very heavily in nuclear, even though it won't be as low of a cost as solar. One, I think China has basically a lock on large-scale solar manufacturing for at least the next decade or so. And they have, they basically control the supply chain up a lot of the components that are required to make solar panels. And so I, just from like a strategic perspective, I don't think we can only rely on solar. And so I would be investing in nuclear to have nuclear be even reasonable costs, you basically have to build like at least 100.

You have to build a bunch of nuclear power plants using the same design, basically the same construction crew, et cetera, where people, you get economies of scale and people kind of learn what they're doing on the first one and do it more efficiently by the fifth and then 10th one. I would love to see America, you know, start building another 100 nuclear power plants, if nothing else for the strategic significance.

But in the immediate term, I think we need to really invest more in natural gas and other fossil fuels. Awesome. Yeah. I was super curious in the dynamic between fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, which one will be more important on what time scale? It sounds like solar is the best medium term prior to getting nuclear, which leads me to a fun question that I'm just super interested in because it seems too good to be true. you're invested in this company called Reflect Orbital, which is literally planning to take rockets and send satellites up into space

and reflect them down onto solar farms at night. Is this possible? What are the dynamics of this? Is this where solar is headed to? So it's a complex thing to answer. So one of my lessons of being an investor now for basically a decade and being in startups for 20 years is, so I'll use an analogy from VARTA.

So, as you guys know, Delian's company, Varda? Absolutely, yeah. So I love Delian. He's a character, smart guy. I passed on the Varda seed, and I have no idea if they'll make it as a company. Like, it's always impossible to predict these things. But I didn't like their initial idea. Their initial idea was trying to make, you know.

So I love the general idea of build a space company, because I just thought the timing for it was very good that launch costs over the next decade are going to drop dramatically and mass to orbit is going to increase dramatically and that like a really smart team will figure out some way to, like by assembling a really smart team, they'll figure out some way to profit from that.

But their initial idea was making this thing called ZBLAN. ZBLAN is ultra-pure, like fiber optic cables that's especially good for really long range like data transmission. I just personally don't think ZeebLand is that important. I think it'll be a shrinking market, especially with Starlink. Like Starlink is just the best way to send data over long distances. And so I passed Fonvarded because I basically felt like they had the right macro idea

around like building a space company now assembling the talents. But I felt like they had the wrong micro idea of ZBLAN as a starting point. And a listen for me from that was like, if you think that the macro on something is unbelievably good and the team is insanely good, even if the, and it's a seed investment, even if the micro idea is,

you know, you're not fully certain about it, then you should still make the investment and that an unbelievable team will, like, take advantage of the macro tailwind. And so for reflect, it's a very similar thesis for me.

The, again, I think almost everyone, is underestimating what the space economy is going to look like in a decade. Like in 10 years, people's minds are going to be blown. You know, like, we are certainly going to have some infrastructure on Mars. You know, like Elon's talking about, you know, there's a Mars launch window every 26 months. The next one is end of next year. SpaceX is trying to send some uncrewed by human,

created by optimists starships to Mars, then I hope they make it. I think they have a real shot, but I don't think it's guaranteed. I think in 2020, in the next window after 26, I think it's basically guaranteed that SpaceX

sends some starships to Mars. And I think in the window after that, which I think would be like early 2031, I think it's basically guaranteed that SpaceX starts to send some like forward cargo and stuff to Mars,

a useful cargo, whether it's solar panels, sending stuff that will be infrastructure for humans to go eventually. And by the time you get to 2035, I think we're going to have... I just think people are going to be shocked at the amount of mass going to orbit, the amount of money made in space,

you know, Starlink is one of the fastest growing products in history in terms of revenue. If you fast forward 10 years, like I am very confident Starlink will have over $100 billion of revenue. I think there will be other space businesses that have lots of revenue.

And there's only like, there's only like five credible teams in my opinion. Like there's a bunch of teams, but there's like five that I think are heads and shoulders above the rest. that are really kind of building towards this feature right now. And whatever, I can't tell you exactly what they'll do that will be valuable. But I think just like learning how to actually do things in space

and assembling teams that are absolutely cracked that know how to do things in space right now, you know, I think it's like buying land next to the railroad stops. like when you knew, like, you already knew that they're being constructed. You knew the railroad lines were being constructed, and you knew where the stops were, and you go and buy the land at the stops. And you maybe don't know exactly how you're going to develop it, but you sure as hell know it's going to be really valuable. And so that's kind of how I view.

Honestly, that's how I view reflect. Like, I bought gold, like, A plus real estate. It's like I bought the real estate right next to San Francisco station at the end of the trans-Pacific railroad. I think listeners broadly, the base case for maybe not just listeners because the bankless audience tends to be pretty optimistic and curious about their future, but the average person in the United States, when they hear about how much investment or how hard we are going to invest in getting into space, their first reaction might be, how does that benefit

my life? And we have space, we have, God, I'm forgetting the name of the satellite, the Wi-Fi, Elon's Wi-Fi satellite. Starlink. Starlink. Okay. And we have Starlink, which is a very awesome, very strong example. Like, I've run into businesses in, like, United States National Parks where there's no Wi-Fi

and they have a Starlink so they can actually hold, maintain their business. It's great. But that's just like one example. I think understanding that Elon is trying to like reduce the cost of getting things into state, he's trying to bring it down to zero, trying to get it as close to zero as possible, like all technology. People are still having a hard time imagining how that. benefits them, like how that impacts their life. And I know maybe Sean, like the takeaway from what you just said is like, oh, I don't really

know. I just know that some teams are going to figure it out, therefore I'm buying the real estate. But are there any like any things you could leave the listener with to go explain to the rest of the world like why like fundamentally cheap space travel will unlock so many things that will actually turn into quality of life improvements for the average person who's left on planet Earth? I'll say the things. and this is not directly interesting your question,

it's an analogy to the past, but like what's, you know, people have this mental model that space is very hard and expensive and space is very hard and will always be hard, but space didn't make much progress for about 30 to 40 years. And when a field is stalled for like 40 years,

it gives people bad intuition when the field starts to go through exponential progress because like you're overweeting this stalled period. If you look at the cost per kilogram to orbit, it was basically stalled for like 30 years, around $100,000 a kilogram. SpaceX is going to push that with Starship, when it's fully reusable,

down to like $20 a kilogram. This is like a 50,000 X reduction in cost. The, whenever in history, something like that has happened, the, and for this worth, it's not just the cost, it's also the amount of stuff you can put in space. It's been very limited in the past. But we're going to be able to put up, call it a million times in 10 years,

like a million times more stuff per year than we were able to put up, you know, 20 years ago. And when those two things happen, like cost goes down by 50,000 X and a amount of stuff, you can send up goes up by a million. The only, literally the only analogies I can think of that are like semi-appropriate are early railroad, like, era where we basically, you went from needing to take a horse-drawn carriage across America

where you had a very high chance of, like, dying or getting a vicious disease along the track, you know, to, you could just very easily and comfortably send extremely large amounts of stuff very cheaply across America and all the businesses that unlocked and what it did to the value of real estate in like in the West. And the other analogy is like early shipping and like the invention of the ship and then discovery of new places and what that did like the global economy. I just I really can't stress how this is basically this is basically the same thing.

We, you know, we are going to have railroads space. We're going from horse-drawn carriages to space to railroad space. That is happening right now and over this next decade. And in terms of what the businesses will be, I think that, again, I would look at when NASA was at its peak and was still able to take risk before the Challenger shuttle disaster, they invent it, like, when you have this clear goal of like, we need to win the space race, we want to put humans,

on the moon, we'll spend a lot of money to do it. There were so many spin-out technologies that came as a result that deeply benefited just regular people, whether it's breakthroughs in radio technology or, you know, like the microwave oven or all sorts of materials that were used in many different products, you know, on and on and on. as SpaceX builds a city on Mars, whatever you think of the value of that city, the technologies that are going to go into building that city

will be unbelievably valuable on Earth. And there's something very ironic that when you try to solve the even harder problem where you're more constrained, it's actually in some ways easier to solve some hard problems. And if you want, I can get into why I think that is. But here's some of the things that are going to come from building a city on Mars. We're going to have better farming tech than we've ever had before.

It's basically going to force us to figure out how to actually do vertical farming, which no one has like, you haven't had SpaceX level engineers go and try to solve that problem. We're going to probably, like, I think that there's going to be huge breakthroughs in power production. I don't know exactly what will make sense on Mars, whether it will be. it would be like nuclear or solar, but there will be huge breakthroughs in that. There will be, like, I actually think there will be huge breakthroughs in electronics fabrication. So we'll basically have to build autonomous fabs or very, very low human labor fabs. I'm not saying that will happen in 10 years, but I think 30 years from now, you know, the goal is to have a Mars city be fully self-sustaining, which would mean that it has to have a fab. And that will have to be a fab. And that will

have to be like a basically autonomous fab. And that fab would probably be even better than the fabs we have on Earth. And anyways, like, when you try to build a fully autonomous city on Mars, like, it forces you to rethink from first principles almost every technology that we consume today, every input down to like, how do you have, I'm going to say something really crazy that is the truth, we don't even have clean food in America today. Like our food, dear America, I love you. This is tragic. Our food supply is literally poison. It is filled, our food is filled with arsenic, lead, and forever chemicals, and it's in the soil all over the country. And we can't

get rid of it, or we haven't built technology yet to figure out how to get rid of it. I really only started to understand this over the last six months or so, a founder that I work with, who was a very smart guy, like, started measuring, like doing detailed chemical analysis of soil all over America. And it's literally all contaminated. And if on Mars we start figuring it out how to make food kind of with, in a fully closed system, we can use that same technology to make safe food in America. Like, we're going to basically get to the point where we don't even need soil to make food. And so even though the soil is contaminated, it's OK.

We'll be able to make food without soil and measure what's in it and get back to basics. And I know that sounds crazy, but like the path towards having clean food in America might actually be Mars. And I hope we figured out sooner than that. But that's the sad reality of where some of our industries are today. Yeah, I love that as the accessible bull case for Mars. I definitely share your optimism sometimes over a little bit too much in terms of timeline and like what we're actually capable of and find us in the minority because it is so challenging

to wrap your head around the fact that we actually can place things on another planet within the next decade, which is super exciting. But there is one part of this that is slightly disturbing in the sense that a lot of this has to do with one single person, one single company. And this is SpaceX. This is Elon. And this is true in a lot of other categories where they are the leader in autonomous robots. They are the leader in robotaxies.

They are the leader in a lot of. of these categories that we're talking about that of the future. And you are someone who's uniquely positioned to talk about this because of your exposure to what is it? I think it's SpaceX, boring company, XAI, you are mega Elon supporter, mega Elon Bull. Like Bull case for Elon and also why there's no clear first or second best in these industries. And where can we find more people like this to build these important projects? In my opinion, Elon is by far the best entrepreneur in the world today and almost

certainly of all time. I think it comes from many places. One is his, like, radical first principle thinking. Another is his, like, psycho-level work ethic. You just can't, I don't think anyone should... People can't comprehend how hard the guy works unless you've seen him do it. Like, most humans would drop dead trying to work as hard as he does. And I think he ramped up to that capability over many decades.

But I actually, so I think Elon is the most important entrepreneur in the world, but I actually think most of his companies would be fine today if, you know, in the worst case scenario, God forbid something happened to him such as if he got sick. You know, I think that it would severely impair the long-term potential of the companies, but it's kind of like how tragically when Steve Jobs passed away, you know, from Apple, like they had already designed the iPhone. They already had a roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years, and other people were able to execute on that roadmap.

Well, I think that Apple hasn't innovated anywhere close to as much as it would have with Steve still there. But I want to be clear, I actually think that, God forbid, in the worst case, if something happened to Elon, I think that optimist would still happen. I think that autonomous vehicles are mature enough, like that would happen. I think that, like, Marry,

stars would still happen. Starship would definitely still happen. Starlink would get to absolutely insane scale. The direct-to-sell program would really still happen. So I just, I actually, I'm kind of of of these two minds. Like I, he, I think humanity would not move nearly as fast as it will with him. And like overall innovation would be way lower. But actually, I wouldn't underestimate just how far.

long and mature these different product lines are today. And so sorry, the first question was like, or so what was the second part of the question? What did I miss? How do we find what Elon's? Yeah, where are the other, where are the second best companies? Where are the companies that are also going to take us to Mars? Is it just one and will it just be one? Or are there other people capable? And what does it take to build a company like that so that there is more people working on these hard problems? I don't think you can create an Elon overnight. Like I think Elon is the, like Elon as an individual is the product of 50 years of pain, like suffering, work, compounding all of this. Like I really believe that. I also think that something that is underappreciated about how effective he is today is that over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, has you've been able to assemble like a,

group a collective of call it 20 people around him that are some of the most talented humans on the planet that it's like you only come across one of these people every like or call it a couple of these people every year and you know and it takes a decade of like testing someone and test what they can do to really learn their true potential and learn that they're reliable um so like if you go look at SpaceX there are people like mark jankosa or a boring company where there's Steve Davis, you know, or basically every one of his companies has five or so people that are just out of this world talented. And you can't, and all these people have a mind meld with each other. They know how to work well. They know how, like, they don't even need to speak to know what needs to get done. And you can't rush that. It literally takes like 20 years to kind of build an organism almost that is self-sustaining

and like maximally evolved to be effective so like I think to have second Elon's like if you wanted to have one emerge

over the next decade it would have to be someone that's already like 10 plus years into doing really incredible things to where their own personal rate of learning is kind of has been on this maximum trajectory for 10 years, and they're kind of like the leverage they have in the world

is on a maximum trajectory, leverage meaning, you know, like building these insane teams, building trust with these people, acquiring kind of credibility, acquiring capital, you know, building manufacturing capability, et cetera. And so some candidates, I mean, there are people like John and Patrick Carlson, who are unbelievably talented humans, and they're still quite young. And, like, I think they love Stripe so much, and I think for them, like, strike will be the

vehicle through which they do most of their other projects over the course of lives, rather than how Elon has started a bunch of different companies. But, like, I could see John and Patrick 10 years from now really surprising the world with, like what they're the scale of what they're able to do and like leveraging the learning they've had over the last 10 years and the position they're in now to like push an order of magnitude or two beyond where they are now but i i think you basically have to look at other really really great founders or companies that are already quite far along right now to even to find the people that are even eligible to kind of be the next erons in 10 years and what happens a lot of

of times is people, it's really hard to sustain, like, look at Warren Buffett's net worth, and this is a weird analogy, look at Warren Buffett's net worth, and it's like only the last 20 years or whatever that he's actually become so insanely rich. If you go back to the 90s, like he was a billionaire or whatever, but it was like single-digit billionaire. We can't underestimate compounding. And Elon is one of the only entrepreneurs that hasn't stopped his rate of compounding because he's still willing to work at this maximum intensity. And it's very hard to do that. It's very, very, very hard to keep going and work 100-hour weeks every single week and embarrass yourself. Like, by definition, to be at maximum rate of compounding, the way you really really

learn is by making mistakes. And to still be willing to embarrass yourself, take enough risk that you make mistakes, test starship in public where inevitably a lot of them are going to blow up and the media is going to write bad articles. Like it's just exhausting. And most people get burned out from doing that. And so to have another Elon or more of them, we need, it would require some of the people that have compounded at incredible rates early on to keep going and push through. And I think that's where Elon's personality of, like, you know, growing up in South Africa and dealing with, like, a lot of challenges at an early age and, like, the infinite grit, and also just probably some singular aspect of how he was born, how he was raised, you know, like, who his mother is.

Like, I think all these things play, and it's like, you need someone to do enough early on to where they're compounded at the maximum rate, and there's only maybe, like, one per person. than a year that breaks through, you know, to like level two of that or whatever. And to go to level three, you also need kind of these very unique personality and kind of crazy challenging life and upbringing. And so, anyways, I hope we get more. But we should all appreciate, like, how lucky we are. And I'm sorry to, like, get into this because obviously Elon is a very controversial figure

right now. but and so you have people like attacking Tesla dealerships and all that and here I am like I honestly think we should all whatever you think of the man's politics like we should celebrate his work ethic and like celebrate what he's done to push technology forward in in the world it's like it's like it's really really important yeah I think most listeners are going to be familiar with basically every company and project that Elon has except for maybe his most recent for into robotics. That's, I think, the most opaque one. That's just the newest one on the scene that I'd like to dive into a little bit more. As we're talking about space and colonizing Mars, I would imagine the order of operations is to not put humans on Mars, but first put robots on Mars. And we can even see the robots that he's debuting here on Earth. And it's all very iRobot-y. Turns out they actually are just looking like actual humans. Maybe you could just kind of ground us and the listeners. I'm pretty unfamiliar. Josh is far more familiar than me.

about just like the state of robotics as an industry, why they actually ended up looking exactly like humans, is that the way things are going to be? And just overall, where are we in the robotics arc of technology development? So on the question of like why are robots looking like humans, I think there's two primary answers for that. One is that the world has been designed for humans. and that may sound simple

that's actually incredibly important you know like humans can go upstairs no problem if you're a wheeled robot going upstairs it's hard if we were to like go start building new cities for robots like you probably wouldn't put stairs in there and then you can have wheeled robots everywhere and wheeled robots are like easier than

actually like robots that have actuating legs but we've already built cities for for humans, they go upstairs, since there's stairs everywhere. You know, like, warehouses are built for humans. And so, like, the height of where things are, and, like, the, you know, the layouts,

they work for humans. So basically, if you deviate too much from the human form factor, it actually starts to become, like, all sorts of things become really hard to do just simply because of how the physical world was designed,

almost from like an architecture perspective. and from a form factor. And then the second thing is, I think, less important, but it's the psychological thing, which is, you know, I think humans just react better when robots look like humans. You know, if you take a robot and you make it some very different form factor,

I mean, even like the face. whatever, like if you don't have the eyes, whatever, if you make it like just a fully black face, like, it's fine, we can start to, like, if you put in like three eyes or whatever instead of two, I think that's kind of scary, honestly, for some people. And it's just like, it's unnecessary. Like, why? If it's, if you don't need to do that, why? So just kind of conformed to what people are already comfortable with. But I think the first reason is way more important. There is one thing that is absent from the portfolio that I saw that is one of Elon's ventures that I'm super excited about. And also a bit dystopian, which is Neurrelink.

And it is the connection between this new form of intelligence that we have and our analog biological meat space selves. And I'm curious of your takes on just brain machine interfaces in general, the practicality or even realistic version of what those look like. Will we actually get there? Are they critical? Who are the critical to? and kind of what is the order of operations that we get to this point that Elon is guiding to

which is basically emerging with artificial intelligence is we are pretty slow we are building this thing that's very fast is there a peaceful coexistence of those two things through companies like Neurrelink

you're asking great questions so Sequoia we're not investors in Neurlink but I have personally known a lot of the like I mean I followed the company from the very beginning I have some very close friends

that were there basically from the beginning. Like, I knew most of the founding team. As social friends and some of whom were actually Burning Man campmates back when I used to go to Burning Man a long time ago, I haven't been in a long time. But believe it or not, like, a lot of the early team was from my Burning Man camp. We were called The Phage.

It was a bunch of scientists, especially a lot of biologists. It was like Matthew McDougal, who's the chief scientist of the company was in my camp for a long time. I think that Elon's philosophy with starting companies has, people will not believe me when I say this, but I really think he's basically said, what are the biggest existential risks for humanity? And then once he finds one,

he goes and starts a company to actually try to address that risk. And in the case of SpaceX, it's like, God forbid, if some astronomical event happens that destroys life on Earth, such as an asteroid, hitting our planet, we need to have humans somewhere else and have a fully self-sustaining city in that place. So another one is Tesla, where he saw the challenges of climate change early on and you know I

like I think there are many other challenges too but saw it as a challenge and I think he also had very strong intuition for what was happening with both solar production and with the ability of batteries to create Tesla

with open AI which you know he basically started I think he was I mean in his words he was afraid of He was afraid of other people building AGI or superintelligence that he, you know, that we're not maximally truth-seeking and were not taking safety as seriously as he wanted. And so he decided to create an AI company or an AI nonprofit to go try to be the first to superintelligence. I'm sorry, I said AGI and superintelligence.

They're different, slightly different things, but let's say superintelligence, not HGI. Let's try to be the first of superintelligence and to do it in an maximumity truth-seeking and safe way. In the case of Neurrelink, I think once he started working on AI, felt like the timescale for superintelligence is closer than most humans would have thought a decade ago and that we should have a company that, or sorry, and on superintelligence, even in the case of trying to do it in the safest way, I think the numbers he's said in podcasts and things like that, or like even doing, even in the best case, he thinks it's something like 80% chance that that superintelligence is safe for humans and that

everything happens very smoothly and, you know, hopefully he's wrong. Hopefully it's 100% 99.9.99% or whatever, but I think he said about 80%. And I think NeurLink is a hedge against that of, you know, and granted, when you started the company, I don't think anyone knew the exact time scale of when we'd get to superintelligence. Now, I think we're, most people in the field would say, we're probably going to get superintelligence, like meaningfully before we have high bandwidth, like readily manufacturable brain machine interfaces. But if you go back like seven years, and if you would have thought it's like 20 years for

superintelligence, we maybe could have intersected that, you know, kind of or even got there ahead of time with brain machine interfaces. And there's actually a hedge against, call it, slightly dangerous. superintelligence because, and it's like a radical idea that a lot of people would disagree with, but you can basically merge with that super intelligence. And I'm not, I don't want to put words in his mouth. That may not be how he was thinking about it. But I think that no matter like the level you want to take this, I think that's like the furthest extreme. And I don't mean merging like the Borg. I mean like, you know, like having a,

symbiotic relationship that, you know, where humans get leverage from this and are better able to understand, like, the superintelligence and what its goals are. Anyways, I think that basically everything, you know, the last one of the boring company, maybe that was not an existential, I think this is probably the only one that's not an existential threat to humanity, but traffic is really damn annoying. and we can have much, much higher quality of life by solving traffic. And then with X, I think that was existential to humanity.

Maybe not to human life, but definitely to democracy. And I'm strongly in the camp that freedom of speech was on the way, like the way out the window. And so I personally think it was necessary. that something had to be done with X, which I think has had a cascading effect across other platforms. I think this is the lens

through which he started these companies. And definitely a narrative violation from like the perception that Elon is just like a greedy guy or whatever. He is like, I really believe he started these companies because he felt like these are the most pressing problems facing humanity and he wanted to play a role in trying to make these things happen well. I think identifying all of these industries that are critical for humanity is definitely the main

motivations for the topics that we discussed in this podcast today. We talked about a lot of just frontier technologies. We covered a lot of ground. But I want to ask this one final question as we wrap things up here. A lot of the things that we discussed today are like kind of scary. Super intelligence, like space travel. There's just like a lot of kind of scary things. things out there, like human robots walking around the world. I think if you go and pick a movie out there that has human robots walking around the world, it's actually not a good movie. It's not a happy movie.

And so, maybe rightfully so, the average listener or average person out there is looking at all of the topics that we are talking about today. And they, like, have experienced fear as like an initial gut reaction. Maybe you could assuade that reaction or maybe give your take about why you're excited, why this is good, why people ought to be excited, and why people ought to invest their time understanding each of these verticals that we've talked about today,

because whether we are scared or not, they are coming. Well, space exploration, we should not be afraid. I mean, sure, like, the astronauts that go on early missions, they're very brave and things may happen to those individuals, but for humanity, I think that this is only a giant net positive and is a prerequisite to really understanding the universe we live in and making progress for answering questions, like, where do we come from? On the boring company, traffic sucks, like, no existential risk.

On the humanoid robots, I personally only see that as, like, upside. on superintelligence, I do think that's, that superintelligence is one that I, I'm scared, to be honest. And I am, I'm scared of it, like, not being developed properly. So, I mean, like, I'll give you an example. I'm Jewish. The, like, Jews are a very small minority in the world, less than 20 million Jews. We're always outnumbered. So things like Wikipedia, Jews are always going to be outnumbered. And when AI models use Wikipedia as a, like, a source of training data, it, like, that honestly scares me.

There's a lot of things on Wikipedia that have been, that are just not accurate. And especially when you have some controversial topic and one group is a minority, it's very easy to have bias on those topics. And, like, here, I, I, don't think there's anything that can stop AI progress. I think it's like human incentive. Like if America were to, if the West were to stop all AI research, China's not going to stop. You know, like the West stopped a lot of, like a lot of cloning research 20 years ago and China did not stop. You know, like COVID was almost certainly a lab leak. You know, like China was like pushing the

limits on on like virus evolution. And I would much, like, we're going to have superintelligence someday. And I think it will be much safer if there's multiple kind of competing superintelligence is, some of which hopefully are like good and developed, hopefully all. but like having some developed by people that I like and when you have the diversity of these things I think it helps a lot and they can keep each other in check and you know if they're all developing and they have roughly the same level performance it may like human we may give the point that humans can't even find the mistakes in the superintelligence but one superintelligence will be

able to find the mistake in another and you know that's actually very useful for keeping these things honest and pushing the development in a safe way. And I just, like, cat is out of the bag. It's going to happen. And but I think, I think, like, the, we do not want only one person to have this capability. I think I'm, you ask me to be positive, and I'm not being positive, but like nuclear weapon, like, when nuclear weapon research, when you, when you get to the point in science

where the jump from the science to a working product is not that far. call it like a trillion dollars in today's dollars. If it's valuable enough, like a government will make that jump. And, you know, like nuclear weapons are an example. And I'm really glad that the, you know, that America got nuclear weapons before the Nazis. And I, like, you know, then when multiple people have them, like, I think it was very important that we kept it to only nation states having these tools, because nation states have, like, a strong incentive to not use them. Terrorists don't have that strong of an incentive. Like, if you don't control

a large landmass, if you don't have a city that you're responsible for, et cetera, like, the mutually assertive destruction theory breaks down with, like, superintelligence is going to happen. I think it's, I think there's like a 95% chance, in my opinion, that it is very positive. and everything goes great, but in the 5% chance that it's not that great, I think it'd be very bad to only have one group have superintelligence. And so, and it is for sure going to happen. And so the biggest mistake we can make is like try to stop progress in the West. And I don't know, with all of that, humans are resilient.

We're going to figure it all out. It's all going to be fine. And, you know, I don't know what else to say. That's a nice place to leave it. I think that you've just laid out a very nice, pragmatic, optimistic outlook of the future. I think there are certainly some controversial things, and if people find them disagreeable, I think that's good. I would encourage everyone to go check out your X feed because I think at one point you had a chain of like 12 posts in a row that I favorited.

I think one of the things I admire is your ability to just break down things to very clear first principles, but doing so for ideas that are often controversial and not broadly accepted. So I think it's great to open up the conversation. I would encourage everyone to go check it out. And just thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. Last thing I'll say, I mean, other than thank you for having me.

Look, I'm going to be wrong all the time. I'm going to say things to disagree with. I like, I think we lost the ability in the West to have reasonable disagreements in the last decade or so. And I'm sure I'm wrong on a lot of stuff. I welcome the conversation and I hope others do the same. John, thanks for coming on today. Thank you guys.