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

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

(04:18) - AGI in 2035 (21:28) - SoftBank’s OpenAI Windfall (27:42) - Buffett Goes Quiet (40:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:25:49) - Casey Handmer is a physicist-engineer and entrepreneur who earned a PhD in theoretical physics from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory before founding Terraform Industries to build large-scale systems that convert sunlight and air into synthetic hydrocarbons. (02:08:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:10:21) - Growing Daniel, a tech industry commentator, discusses the importance of moral discernment in technology development, emphasizing that creators should strive to build products beneficial to society. He critiques the trend of funding ventures like gambling apps, arguing that such investments prioritize profit over societal well-being. Daniel also highlights the need for self-reflection among tech leaders, urging them to consider the ethical implications of their innovations. (02:32:11) - JD Ross, co-founder of Opendoor and WithCoverage, discusses his transition from real estate to the insurance industry, emphasizing the importance of aligning business incentives with customer needs. He highlights the value of offering return policies in home buying to build trust and ensure product quality, and shares insights on integrating AI into business operations to enhance efficiency and customer experience. (02:46:58) - Scott Shapiro, a former product leader at Facebook and Google, joined Coinbase in 2019 to lead the core consumer app product team, aiming to make cryptocurrency more accessible. In the conversation, he discusses Coinbase's launch of a new platform for individual investors to purchase digital tokens before they are listed on its exchange, with Monad being the first to sell its digital coin on this platform. He emphasizes the platform's focus on retail investors, the improved regulatory environment, and the commitment to quality over quantity in token offerings. (02:55:18) - Laurence Allen, CEO of Terranova and a recent UC Berkeley graduate, discusses his company's innovative approach to combating land subsidence and flooding by using terraforming robots to inject wood chip slurry underground, effectively raising land levels. This method offers a cost-effective solution for areas like San Rafael, California, which face significant flood risks due to subsidence. Allen also highlights Terranova's recent $7 million seed funding led by Congruent Ventures, aiming to expand their projects in flood prevention and wetland restoration. (03:09:39) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Tuesday, November 11th, 2025, we are live from the TBPN Ultramm, the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the Capital of Capital, Capital, ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place.

That is right. More importantly than Ramp, it is Veterans Day. It is. It is a holiday. Yes. It is an important holiday. Yes.

And we would like to say thank you to everyone that has served. Of course. Yes, thank you to everyone who served. Thank you, everyone. Missed opportunity to get the Secretary General back on the show. Yes, yes, I'm sure there are big events happening in D.C. And all over the armed forces community. We inadvertently did some Defense Tech day yesterday with Neros and Anderil.

That was fun, taking a little tour of both of those companies. And Defense Tech seems to be just cooking, like just on. a steady state. Yeah, steady state. And I don't know, just much less much less froth, much less, you know, calls for

is this the top of defense tech? It's more just like... It's possible we already passed the top. Of defense tech? Yeah. You know, well, I mean, there had been some rounds maybe earlier this year that felt a little bit frothy. Oh, okay.

But like the nearest round yesterday, like feels like they're, probably the best or one of the best teams. It's focused on this problem. DJI can make tens of millions of drones a year. We cannot. Somebody, ideally, multiple companies will work on that problem. And so it feels like just a fair bet in the context of our national security.

Totally. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we certainly haven't seen, there's just, like, way fewer top signals in DefenseTAC right now, it feels like. Like, there's no, like, oh, crazy SPAC going out that's, like, frothy, memes. around this stuff. It's just a lot. I mean, it's still like a long way

to deliver all the value there and really scale those companies. But overall, I think, like a lot of support. You know, I was kind of joking with Saur and like what's it like working in like a non-controversial industry. And you were like doing a double take.

But it is like a less controversial industry in my opinion than AI right now. In terms of... Than chatbots. just in terms of like in tech, AI is controversial because of the, uh, the adult content and the IP rights and all and the leverage and the debt and all that stuff.

And then outside of tech, you have energy prices and politicization. Is the AI woke or is it to right wing or left wing? Uh, is it going to be used to manipulate the election? Like, I think if you actually went, just random person on the street,

like, you know, pole of, uh, of popularity, like Palmer Lucky, who's for a long time been like a contrarian, a controversial figure. Yeah.

It feels like he would poll more popular than a Sam Altman or a, or an AI lab director, AI lab CEO, even though he's like building weapons, like the most controversial thing. I think part of it is like, how hard can you crush a Joe Rogan appearance? He did do well.

Yeah, yeah. So maybe that's it. But just in general, it feels like the idea of like, like the American populace is not frustrated directly over weapons production right now. A little bit, but not as much as people, as it used to be years ago. The idea of like working with the military is much, much less of a cornerstone issue, a hot debate than it was. than it was six years ago, eight years ago. And the conversation has moved on to job displacement, to energy production, to, you know, internet addiction, that type of stuff. Anyway, to Restream.com.

One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. I was noticing a pattern that everyone has 10-year AGI timelines right now. and it started, we started when Sam Altman put out that post like super intelligence is just a few thousand days away. Yeah. And at the time, it was kind of odd because,

like, when he wrote that post last year, everyone was like, AGI is one year away. AGI is two years away. It was like fast takeoff time. Like everyone was very excited. And then he came out and was like,

it's a few thousand days away. And if you do the numbers, I think Tyler has the clock. How long is a few thousand days? 3,650 days. How many years is that? 10 years. It's a decade.

It puts us squarely in 2035, right? And so Sam came out and, you know, and he was kind of in his blog post of the super intelligence age talking about, you know, maybe we're a decade away. Then Andre Carpathie goes on Dwar Keshe, just a couple months ago, a couple weeks ago.

So as AGI is a decade away. And then Dwar Keshe posts this, this probability density of when AGI will be achieved. There's a chance that America does it. There's a chance that China does it. And the median, the 50th percentile was exactly 2035.

Exactly 2035. Could have been any, could have been 2030. Could have been 2030. It could have been 2050. But it was 2035. Then you know that chart, that like very schizo chart that says periods when to make money? Have you seen this floating around on X?

And it's like it was created like, I guess about 100 years ago. People references it anytime it actually aligns to events because it basically has years in which panics have occurred, years of good times, high prices, and time to sell stocks, and years of hard times, low prices and a good time to buy stocks. And so it's basically like astrology for stock picking, right? And what is it saying right now? 2035 is they're predicting is when a panic will occur. Ooh, interesting. Well, that certainly aligns in all these AGI timelines.

There you go. The other one that we mentioned on the show yesterday was George Hatz, the founder of Kama, and generally regarded as like one of the sharpest hackers, computer scientists, AI developers. He was looking at the Tesla FSD data and projected that if the rate of improvement continues, you basically see a doubling in capability every year. You double it out. the if your if the benchmark is how many interventions happen per thousand vehicle miles traveled and you compare that to how many crashes happen when a human's at the wheel uh he says Tesla's about eight years away

um which puts him like squarely in the 2035 camp 2033 I guess in his case um and then I was looking at meter and this one will have to debate a lot more but meter has been tracking AI's ability to complete long tasks. So they've, so they've, they've, and it's growing exponentially. It used to be like six seconds. Now it's like two hours. And, you know, when you talk to, uh, anyone who's in the AI field, they'll tell you that the agents are getting more and more capable of handling longer, longer time

horizon tasks. Uh, the question is, I feel like humans don't have a time horizon. I feel like humans, they're just born and the goal is like survive, uh, be fruitful, multiply, right? Yeah. And so I feel like if you're tracking the meter data, you need to get out to like 30 years, like a full career, right? Like the prompt needs to be like, go make money. And then it just goes and becomes a lawyer and, you know, lives its full life and retires after 35 year run.

And of course, when you track out the doublings, one in 2035, the meter is projecting based on that log curve that, or that logs, that log graph, that, that, AI will be able to have a time horizon in the in the decades. And so you would you would have it something similar to what a human would have. And so my my read on the meter data is that, you know, AGI 2035 again. It's maybe the messiest, the least like definitive. And all of these predictions have different methodologies. Some of them are extremely quantitative. A lot of some of them I'm like really reading into. Some other people are just saying like it's a decade away. specifically. But what's interesting is that it just feels like 10 years is this consensus right now and there's much less diversity of opinion. There aren't that many people saying two years

anymore. There aren't that many people saying 50 years anymore. Everyone's kind of saying 10 years. And I just wonder like let's put aside like let's try and accurately predict when this thing happens and let's just analyze it from a psychological perspective. And like what does it mean when the tech community all has a consensus of something that's a decade. Like a decade away could just be what people say when they don't know. Like if you ask me when flying cars are going to happen, I'm going to say a decade. If you're going to say when quantum computing, oh, that'll be a decade. Oh, Mars, yeah, that's a decade. It's easy. It's like, it's optimistic. When I say a decade, I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but I'm saying like you're not going to be able to hold me to

my bad take because you're not going to be able to clip this in one year and be like he was wrong, right? Yeah, it is funny to quote, most people underestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they do it in 10 years. And in this situation, we're just like, yeah, we're estimating that we can achieve AGI in 10 years. So what? A year is actually, so it's effectively like inverted. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but the other weird thing that I was grappling with was like, when I personally feel like about AGI, like I'm convinced by these. Like, I feel like AGI is 10 years away. And I don't feel like I'm like coping or doing some sort of like mental logic jumps or something. It's just like if you actually forced me to put a prediction down, I probably would say about a decade. And I feel like I've been around there, been on the Kurzweil timelines. Maybe maybe I'm 2045, more than. like Kurzweil, but still like a decade, two decades, like, I feel like it's real. I feel like I do believe it's going to happen. I don't, I don't feel like I'm like AGI never. I'm not in that camp. And so then I go to, well, well, like, how should I actually be changing my behavior?

Like, if something big is coming in a decade, it feels like you should actually, should not just be acting normally. But it feels like there's some sort of preference falsification going on. Like, how many, everyone's saying a decade. How many people are actually acting like it's a decade? Like, what should you be doing in the intervening years? If it's a decade away, like, are you just supposed to, like, build technologies that are fun little dopamine rewards? Are you trying to, like, accumulate as much capital as possible before? I think, well, yeah, so when, I mean, who plans around 10 years at all, right?

People tend to go for things that they want today in some ways, right? So somebody, like, let's say they're in their 20s. They're like, I want to own a home by the time. by 2035. Yeah. They want that thing today. And so they, they, but they might understand, okay, it's going to take some time to get there. Yeah.

But actually making real changes in your life for this like impending scenario that's hard to predict entirely. Yeah. It's very, very difficult. And I don't know that, I don't know that any, you know, it was maybe more popular earlier this year to joke about, you know, uh, uh, what, you know, the golden retriever maxing. Right. Oh, yeah. We would talk about this, right?

But it feels like that dialogue has kind of changed. How so? Part of it goes back to the other like enduring meme. You know, you have one year to escape the permanent underclass. And then everyone woke up and like a few months ago and said, okay, maybe we actually have like a decade longer. At least a decade. Now everyone's still just focused on escape, whatever that means, whatever their number is. Yeah.

It's an odd time. I'm going to tell you about Privy, and then we'll get Tyler's reaction. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white-level wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Tyler, what do you think about my take? What do you think, what do you agree with? What do you disagree with?

I think it's definitely interesting that people seem to kind of align around this 10-year thing. I think there's also some sort of bias, right? If you think AI is coming in three years, you're probably not just going to be like writing blogs, maybe you're going to start a macro hedge fund. Maybe you're going to go work at one of the labs to really try to influence how it's going to happen if it's going to happen super quick. So I think there's some sense of that. And if you really don't believe AGI is coming at all, then you're also probably not going to be writing

blogs about AGI. You're just going to be like doing your normal job or whatever. So I think there's some like confirmation bias there. Ten years, exactly the time of a venture capital fund life cycle. Coincidence. Tyler's probably the most AGI. guide per pill person on the team. And so it's interesting that you're,

you kind of day to day acts like everyone else on the team. Yeah. Yeah. What's the biggest thing that you've done? What's your biggest revealed preference? That's hard to say. Maybe just hanging out on the show. Yeah, just hanging out podcasting instead of going to university.

He's just like, yeah, nothing matters. I guess. I mean, there's a little bit of that. Yeah. maybe aGI. It's just hard because like in the intervening years, there's clearly like, it's just incredibly like high leverage work to be done.

It's so easy to pull forward. Like, okay, well, like the robots are going to be able to do X. So maybe you shouldn't spend the next 10 years doing X. But if in fact X is very valuable, then the next 10 years you can capture a ton of value as you leverage more and more technology. right up into the point where you don't need to do it anymore because it's fully automated. Yeah, I think there's some sense of like, at least for me, it's like, okay, maybe I would be working at,

maybe I would have started some rapper company or something like that. But I'm more bullish on AI than I think most people are to where I think that stuff is generally not super kind of long-term oriented. So maybe, I think something, some sort of that kind of. Do you think we'll be podcasting in 2045? Yes. But I say yes because I think the podcast is to live. I agree.

I think it might be around way past EGI. I mean, I don't know. I think everybody wants to believe that. Like, I don't know. I have yet to see somebody from out to say. I don't know that mining is going to be around forever. I don't think people mine for the love of the game. I don't think people go and.

the coal mine and mine, and they would do it if they didn't get paid. But I think people do play chess for fun. Children yearn for the money. And I think people podcast for fun. Children yearn for the mind. I don't think they actually... It'll just be a real-life game of Minecraft. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Minecraft for sure. Playing games for sure. That's actually sort of where my take I did. But imagine you have an army of robots and you just get to use a computer to control them to mine for minerals. That sounds like it could be pretty fun and fulfilling. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. That sounds like a loophole. I was talking about actually like swinging an axe in a mine shaft. Yes, maybe there will one day be an AI agent for mining. We've actually talked to some folks who are doing AI for mining. If you're mining value in your code base, get on cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yeah, where I landed at the end of this was talking about, uh,

this clip of Alex Wang that's sort of going viral, people are dunking on it because he recommends the kids learn to vibe code and I just disagree with the haters. Like I think the haters are wrong on this one. And I was thinking about like, well, I have a kid. Like, would I teach him to vibe code? And I was playing with Legos last night.

I was assembling Legos. And from what I've done vibe coding and what I've done Legos, I'm like, this is going to be very fun and this is going to be an activity that we do together. and I'm super in agreement that I think learning to vibe code is good. What do you think, Tom? I think, like, the point of view of, like, the people hating were that, like,

oh, your 13-year-old should be, like, making B2B SaaS, which is, like, not, that's different than saying they should be vibe coding. Because vibe coding is just, like, it's, like, basically playing a video game or it's, like, making Minecraft mod or something. That's, like, seems totally fine. Yeah, some of the criticism was, like, you should just be doing really hard things. Okay. But then you have to ask is like, okay, should 13-year-olds like only be hand coding?

Like if you want to get them into maybe doing engineering work, is it, they be doing it with a pen and people? Like, what is the alternative? Or should they just be just doing math problems or studying physics? Yeah, I had some sort of advanced Lego thing, robotics thing that you could actually write software for and kind of make it drive in circles or you could program it to drive. drive in a figure eight. Yeah, and that was really fun as a kid. When I was 13, I was working on little iPhone apps. Yeah.

And knowing the vibe coding tools that are available today, I would have been able to make way more progress. I would have had a lot more fun. Yeah. It would have been like having an expert, like software engineer sitting next to me, kind of like paraprogramming, right? Yeah, yeah. And so I just, yeah, I'm on your side.

I think people generally just don't. like Alex because he's been wildly successful and people want to try to. He's basically the youngest, most successful person in the world, which invites a lot of criticism. Yeah. And also it's tough when you build a business that it's not like, I think when Evan Spiegel blew up with Snapchat,

he was very much loved because people were like, I like Snapchat. I got a date on Snapchat. I met my girlfriend on Snapchat. Or I use it all the time. Or I use it with my friends or my boys or whatever. Or like my group chats on Snapchat. So it's very easy to be like, yeah, he's rich, but I like the thing he made.

Whereas with Alex Wang, it's like, yeah, he's rich. And I have no idea what the thing he, I don't interact with it at all. And so it's a lot harder. But, yeah, I don't know. I feel like a generic call to action to young people to vibe code to be entrepreneurial is good. I mean, I've, you know, discovered entrepreneurship in some ways through Tim Ferriss, who had a similar sort of like the four-hour work week, was not some like deep understanding of how business and technology works. It was more just like, hey, you could set up a business. And like, it could be a really interesting life and it's very different than like becoming a lawyer or becoming a doctor.

Like when you're just like a blank slate kid, you're kind of offered a menu of options, which is like, do you want to? become a fireman, doctor, policeman, like, construction worker, and a businessman. And yeah, you hear business man,

but you don't really know what that means. And it's very different to be like, accountant. A businessman is an investment banker or a consultant if you stay on the track. And you're just like, I always ask for permission, right? I always go into the next thing.

I always have a boss. Entrepreneurship is this like sort of vague thing that's like, hidden and it's nice when it's served up. Yeah, and there's so many different flavors of it. Yeah, yeah. So I enjoy, I enjoy a little serving of entrepreneurial insight. What do you think, Tom? Fun fact, so in fifth grade in the yearbook, they asked like what you want to be. Yeah.

I put investor. Investor in fifth grade? Yeah. I didn't even really know what that meant. Are you sure you didn't put capital allocator? You put investor. I think that's what I meant, yeah. I mean, in fifth grade, they had a, it was like, bring in a mobile, create a mobile for someone that you respect.

And everyone in the class brought in like a picture of their dad. And I brought in a picture of Bill Gates because I was like, it made the computer. Like the computer's awesome. And everyone was like, what are you like doing, dude? Like stop deifying business people. I was like, I will never stop deifying business people. It's great. Ever since the fifth grade, I knew I wanted to get into asking.

management. Love it. I love it. Well, speaking of asset management, Masayoshi Sown is back in the news. SoftBank's big profits jump this quarter, came from opening eyes, increased valuation. That SoftBank lifted higher by buying shares from employees and selling them at a higher price. And so there is a question about, is this too circular? It's unclear if SoftBank was really the price setter on this deal, but just Dario is certainly... Just Dario is saying soft bank books a capital gain on an investment.

It hasn't paid for and recorded in its assets yet. So I guess the narrative here is... Gains on OpenAI shares by designating Vision Fund 2 to underwrite the second investment tranche at $500 billion value that SoftBank Group cannot pay and created a forward derivative contract worth $8 billion, all gains out of thin air. How is this legal? I don't know.

This doesn't seem that crazy. There's a scenario where you would do this if you were a company that invested in a fund. Yes. And it's called maybe some capital, but not all of it yet. And so you can show that there's a gain, even though you haven't paid, actually paid in the capital yet. Yes. But I think the way in which SoftBank is doing this. It doesn't seem illegal, but I think it's non-traditional.

Sophie over on X says SoftBank is selling its Nvidia stake. to fund companies whose main expense is buying from Nvidia. But don't VC firms run into this all the time? And there's always a question about like how they mark to market. And if you're marking to market an asset that you invest in twice. And that's why a lot of venture firms don't want to do, like it's a little bit iffy to lead back to backgrounds. because at a certain point your LPs are going to start having questions.

But it does happen, and it's not the end of the world. And as long as you get other buyers, didn't Founders fund do ramp back to back or something like that, right? Yeah. But then there was like a secondary transaction that came in pretty quickly and then eventually another firm came in. And so once the other firm comes in, that mark gets a lot stronger.

And then Ramps actually like mark themselves to market multiple times. I mean, yeah, this is, I don't know. The bit, the more important, the more important. I tried to slide off the camera to sneeze and the PTZ coffee. The more important thing here is that this is not the first time Mossa has exited NVIDIA. He exited in 2019 before the run-up. He was then Nvidia's largest shareholder. And he had a 5% stake in the company.

that he sold for 3.6 billion, and it would now be worth over 200 billion. So this was ultimately one of the bigger misses. How much did he wind up investing totally? Because he must have made money overall. How much has... I don't know. I don't know exactly when he actually bought back in.

Yeah, because if this was all from that initial slug, I feel like this five this five billion could be on a basis of like 500 mil or something it's still relatively small for the size of SoftBank but while that's cooking let me tell you about Figma, think bigger, build faster

Figma helps design and development teams build good products together Let's see SoftBank sells his entire stake in Nvidia for 5.83 billion Quantian says no, they expect one of us in the wreckage brother. Have we started the fire? Why? I don't understand how this links to what's happening here.

Who's in the fire? Like, how is this? How is this? I don't understand this. Do you understand this? I just like the line they expect one of us in the wreckage brother. Yeah, it's funny because it's from the dark night rises, right? But, but like selling Nvidia, selling your stake in Nvidia. Like, are people mad about this because they think Nvidia is going to rip further? Selling your stake in Nvidia. Yeah. To buy, to actually buy shares in a company that you've already marked a, you're showing a gain on in the last quarter. Yeah. So basically, SoftBank is booking profits. Sure. Open AI profits. They are then selling Nvidia shares to fund the original

investment in which they've already booked the profits on, and the number one driving force behind Nvidia's growth is Open AI. Yeah. Huh. Is that true? I mean, how big is Open AI as a customer of Nvidia? I mean, yeah, it's probably the biggest, but I mean, the rest of the hyperscale is still buying a ton of Nvidia, right?

I don't know. I mean, yeah, I would say, like, indirectly, they're a big customer. But, like, obviously, it's not like they're funding the data centers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so James Thorne says, today we will get the SoftBank completely sold out of Nvidia fear from Bears on mainstream media and Wall Street. Does anyone do objective research anymore? SoftBank initially bought its Nvidia stake through the Vision Fund in 2017, then accidentally

completely in January 19. They missed it. They lost patience, not the first time. And so, yeah, when did they buy this latest slug? That's the question. SoftBank sold 32 million shares of Invidia. in October also sold part of its stake in T-Mobile for $9 billion. It's not the first time they've cashed out of the chipmaker.

That's a funny way to put it. Despite the sales soft bank remains tied to Nvidia through its other ventures. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast and they don't stop there. Our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring and security reviews and vendor risk.

Warren Buffett says he's going quiet, the world's most famous investor. Warren's against corporate greed as he prepares to hand over the reins of Berkshire Hathaway. There are a bunch of interesting posts, but there's also a story in the Financial Times. I don't think it hit the paper edition yet.

But we can read through some of this. Paper edition, always lagging. It lags. So Warren Buffett has told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that he is going quiet, quote unquote, as the world's most famous investor draws a line under a career that has shaped corporate American Wall Street over the past six decades. As the British would say, I'm going quiet, sort of, Buffett wrote in a letter published Monday.

The 95-year-old will step back from day-to-day responsibilities at Berkshire at the end of this year when he retires from his role as chief executive. Craig Abel, of course, is coming in. Investors have long seen Buffett often called the Oracle of Omaha as a corporate folk hero, interspersing guidance on his portfolio company's performance with life and business advice, his Frank manager manner with shareholders, both his annual letters and his marathon question and answer sessions during the annual meetings in Omaha has been a hallmark of his tenure. Buffett's letter to shareholders on Monday took the same tone with warnings about corporate greed

interlaced with calls for kindness. He noted, for instance, that requirements for executive compensation disclosures backfired as business chiefs engaged in a race to earn more than rivals. What often bothers very wealthy CEOs, they are human after all, is that other CEOs are getting even richer, Buffett said. Envy and greed walk hand in hand. Interesting. Buffett added that Berkshire should try to avoid future CEOs who are looking to retire at 65 or who want to become, look at me rich or initiate a dynasty. Look at me rich. What an interesting turn of phrase. Yeah, it's very notable that Buffett has never been photographed doing a money spread, wearing Valenciaga, Rick Owens.

Does he have any Chrome Hearts? Probably no Chrome. No Chrome Heart. He's never been photographed with Chrome Hearts. With Chrome Hearts. It is cool. He's going to continue to do his thanks, a letter every Thanksgiving. I love that. I thought that was Thanksgiving, of course, one of the most underrated holiday. Yeah, so he took the pledge to give away his wealth. And so it's going to be a pretty big changing of the guard. And that's going to have a pretty significant. The thing I'm looking forward to seeing is how many, what the attendance will be like in the shareholder meeting next year.

Like, is the Buffett? Is the Buffet or is it its own community? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My expectation is that they will retain a huge amount of people because there's people that have been going every single year for a long time. It's just like a kind of a meetup for people that have probably, you know, that have spent probably decades, at least some of them decades, you know, visiting and being a part of it. Yeah, I also wonder, like, to what degree can Greg Abel, like, actually pick up the torch? Because there's that interesting stat that, like, if you go back 30 years ago when Buffett was 65, he was, I don't think he was close to the richest man in the world.

He, he compounded a ton in his third, 30-year run. Like, from 65 to 95, he had a particularly good run that made, that took him from, like, pretty rich to one of the richest people in the world. And so it would be very interesting to see, like, Greg Abel, what, if he really goes on the run for 30 years, and is just executing, executing, executing. It's very rare. We just don't see that many business executives or that many people broadly where that's like the highlight of the career

is 65 to 95. It's exciting. Do you think that he can be fearful when others are greedy? They're kind of acting like it right now, right? Yeah. I don't think it's quite half a trillion. I think it's more like under 400 billion of cash.

But they will be getting, they will be getting calls, quite a lot of calls at some point. For sure. And we'll see how they play it. Yeah. Before we react to some of the reactions on the timeline, let me tell me at graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

So Howard Anglin is taking shots at Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett's talking about his final letter. And Howard says, Buffett has commissioned no plays, no poems, no symphonies, no symphonies, no operas, no ballets, funded no paintings or sculptures that will outlive him, endowed no theaters, choirs, orchestras, built no monuments, monasteries. Is this true at all? I feel like he has to have, I feel like Warren Buffett has to have given away enough money to endow at least one theater. Like, how do you not just get hit up by your local theater in Omaha once and say, sure, I'll send a check? Like, I would be shocked if he's never done anything. And also,

Also, he's committed to giving away half of his wealth. So, like, some of the money is going to wind up with the opera, I imagine, just because it's going to go out and get diffused amongst all the different charity efforts. It's not going to all go into one thing. So Howard agrees with him on this. He says, he's right. The greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, which is what he is known for.

But beyond that, it's fortune cookie level advice. It's not wrong, but that's about it. his partner Charlie Munger's contribution to architecture was to fund factory like college dorms in which a majority of the apartments don't have windows. Isn't that UCSB? Where is that? Yeah. Have you been to that dorm?

Yeah. Did you live there? I'm trying to figure out which... We need to pull up a photo of the Charlie Munger dorm. The Charlie Munger Dorm at UCSB. It's Munger Hall. Munger Dorm, UCSB.

It is a wide. picture. It's so funny. And it's like... So they abandoned, they... Oh, he didn't do it. He made the donation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some reference to it on the campus, but they abandoned the plans to build a windowless dorm. It's so, so Soviet. It's extremely Soviet. I don't know why they wanted...

I thought there were fake windows and they were like TVs, essentially, but they would show like outdoor scenes. It should be a vertical TV windows that you can just put Sora on and just, watch AI. He's like you were complaining about the cost of housing. I gave you housing and now you're complaining it doesn't have windows. Yeah, you give a mouse a cookie with these people. It is so funny. Apparently, it's also just so funny. Why are you so involved in this project? Like, I thought he was a bigger donor to Stanford first. And then also why, like, like, I feel like, if I, if I donate money somewhere, I'm like, uh, okay, it's gone.

and you enjoy it and it's it's on you like you are the one that takes care of it to be in the weeds to the level of like deciding where the windows go is a wild move like I thought you had other stuff to do I would just be yeah I feel like if I was in this position I would just be too busy he does have other buildings on campus okay that has a monger residence okay um that do have windows so I don't know I mean also like is is it safe to take the other side of this and just say that, like, he was about to create the greatest lock-in of all the pot. I mean, what if he was basically saying, like, college students spend very little time in their actual dorms?

Yep. Because they're out and about in the world. They're studying their library. They're out of vends. Totally. They're really just using the dorm to sleep. Why don't we create common areas that have windows and outdoor area, but then you go in your pot.

Yeah. Just go in your pot. Almost like a cave. Yeah. It's like a cave. Because UCSB, the complaint from a housing standpoint is that, like, nobody has, like, nobody, everyone chairs a room almost all the way through everyone shares the room almost all four years.

Oh, interesting. So you never move off campus. Yeah, and it's like, it's like one square mile that people really live. And yeah, there's super limited housing. And so I think Munger was coming at this, like probably like very pragmatically. And it's like, hey, you get, you're giving up windows. You're going to get your pod. But in exchange, you get your own private space. Yeah. People call it Dormzilla and they canceled it. Do I call it Dormsilla? I forgot about that. Do we find a picture of Dormzilla? I mean the actual designs, I saw it for a second.

It's so funny. Why can't we do a real examination of the rules that state every bedroom must have a window? This is Eric Adams floated a similar idea to Munger calling for stripping legislation that promises each city citizen window access this past March. You don't need no window where you're sleeping. It should be dark, he said. Wow, that's actually directly in the quote. That's a direct quote. That's from Munger.

No, this is from Eric Adams, the New York, New York. Oh, okay, I was like that sounds, that doesn't sound like that really. It is a crazy, crazy thing. I put a picture of the floor plan in the chat team, if you guys can pull this up. They should have called it the Munger bug then. 14,000, the cave, the Munger Cave. I don't know. It's pretty, it's pretty funny.

It's also, it's also just, I mean, Maybe UCSB. When I think of UCSB, I think of like, you know, it's this beautiful, like, so just amazing, like near the beach, beautiful sunlight. Like, you definitely don't want to be in a cave. It's like I feel like I kind of get the Soviet cave, the Soviet, like the Soviet, like the Soviet block era, like, you know, big buildings because it's like you don't want to go. Dormzilla is so good. I love it. He was like,

this is what I need to do. It's just like, also, just like, can't you just give like a little bit more money and get the windows? The windows aren't that expensive, right? It's such a wild, such a wild thing.

Anyway, uh, it's so, so funny. So, um, I don't know. Tyler,

did you figure out if Buffett has ever commissioned one play, poem, symphony, opera, ballet, painting, sculpture, theater, choir, orchestra, monument, home, museum, church, monastery, shantery. So just at UCSB, to give him credit, he has the Charles Munger physics residence,

which is a beautiful, stunning building. With windows. With many windows. There we go. And so, yeah, he decided to window max on this one. Yeah, he's taking a barrel strategy. Some of the buildings have lots of windows. But obviously, that's Munger.

That's Munger. Yeah, yeah, what did we learn about Bufth? So I think basically all of his donations, he does do a lot of donations, but they're all, basically he just gives stocked people. So he's never like saying, I want this museum to be built in this way. I think he just gives it to a, you know, endowment or institution or some charity. And they, like, do what they want. And is that because he wants them to, like, like, kind of try to 10x it and 10x it again?

Yeah, he wants bag holders. Yeah, but, like, I don't think he has very strong opinions on, like, should kids have windows or? But can you find an example of when he gave stock to an organization? Because if that organization went and commissioned an opera, I'm putting this in the truth zone. And I'm thinking that he did, in fact, oh, the Munger Research Center in Pasadena does have many windows. Credit where it's due. Thank you, Taylor. You can't commit to the Munger Cave, then you are really committed to delivery.

He's given a lot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Okay, that's kind of sort of like circular thing. It doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, let's move on from Warren Buffett. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst, connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required. We have a clip from Scott Besson on, what is this? Newsweek. ABC Newsweek. ABC Newsweek. ABC this week. I'm learning. The $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms. Let's play the clip. You know, it could, the $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms and lots of ways, George. You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president's agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions that, you know, are being financed.

in the tax bill. Tyler, do you feel like this delivers? How is that going to help the day trading community? Yeah, I was planning on doing rampant speculation with this $2,000. What am I going to do now? You're actually, you're basically fully, you've already committed the funds, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I've already placed a ton of parlayes. Yes. So, like, what am I supposed to do now? I don't know. I can't pay my parlay bill with a tax decrease on auto loan. Yeah, you're not looking for passive. income. You're looking for massive income. Bro, I'm looking for massive income.

I'm looking for generative media on a platform for developers. I'm looking for fall. The world's best generated image, video, and audio models all in one place develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs, non-demand clusters. Dumer says they should put a button on the IRS website that allows you to

either receive the $200 stimmy check or if you press the button you have a 50-50 chance of getting either $4,000 or zero. I really think a lot of people would press that button. Absolutely, absolutely wild. Certified bangers.

X now has an account called at bangers, and it is an account that highlights the best bangers. They're testing something new, certified bangers. We want to recognize the very best post that move the timeline, ranked by authentic interactions. If your post is featured, you will get a certified bangor badge on your profile for the month. Here are the top five bangers for October.

Very cool concept. Very similar to a project that Jordy sort of incubated about 12 months ago, almost a year ago. January. It was during the fires. I remember they were ripping. It was called Bangor Archive, and Jordy would go and screenshot a post that had done very, very well and resurface it. And the findings were shocking. Do you want to break down what you learned from that project?

If you take any posts that had gotten like a minimum of 3,000 likes and you just screenshoted it and then posted the screenshot and said, banger, it would immediately get usually more likes than the original posts. It was crazy. There were some posts that had, I screenshot of them, they had like maybe 20,000 likes and then it posted on there to get like 150,000 likes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like millions of views.

And some of it is like there's a timelessness. And there's just like a high quality content is high. quality content. There's certain sentences that just are always funny. They're just always funny. Some of them get funnier. Some of them, some of them did fall off. Some of them would flop, even though they were a brigger previously. There were a bunch of interesting findings from the from the bangor archive project. Including at least one person that was that got mad, very mad. They were like, you could have just reposted it. Exactly. And the whole, but the issue is it doesn't doesn't archive it then because if they delete it, then it doesn't stay.

But they want the right to delete. So I understand where they're coming from. Bangers on X is not. Bobby in the chat says, don't care about a, Donald Boat says, don't care about a badge. They should come to your house and tattoo it on your body. Yeah, having a badge for a month is. Yeah. I don't know.

It's cool. I think it's interesting because. It's also, I mean, so looking at the post that they have here, they're just kind of random. Yes. So we were debating this. So first off, I think what is interesting about this is that it's not a new functionality in the X app. Like there are plenty of ways to surface popular posts, mainly in the Discover page on the explore page with the little window glass. So you search there. Before you search, you see for you. You see trending topics. You see who to follow business news. There's a whole bunch of things that are going on. that are, like, it's basically like new UI, new projects. Like they could have created, like, a separate tab or something like that. They didn't do that. They just created an actual account on X that's native,

and then they created an organization, and they just give you the organization tag if you post a banger, which is, it's just a very interesting use of the X primitives, like the code that's already there. Like, clearly, this did not require software engineering to do, which is just, just, It's just an interesting way to, like, create some new content on the time. Zumer says, did you guys seriously not include this bangor?

Zuma is going to be so excited about it. We honestly need to get Zumer on the show. I invited him. Because he's got some truly wild take. He has, he's got to put him into audio video format. He's been on a roller coaster for sure. But, yes, so we were debating, is the, is the bangers account going to be teapot tech Twitter, venture capital related stuff.

Will you see Naval in there? Will you see Mark Andresa growing Daniel, Rune posts, these posts that go super viral, but within tech, or will it be more broad? Will we see something from basketball Twitter or something from, you know, all sorts of different, you know, sub-communities? And it was just an interesting way to check the pulse

because I feel like we are in a little corner of X, but obviously there are folks that use X and they never interact with tech Twitter really. They're over in some other they're talking about basketball or they're talking about football or they're talking about the Oscars or they're in film Twitter or they're there's so many different little

sub pockets. Well the result was that they went broad. A lot of the tech folks think it's slop but some of these were kind of interesting. The first one that they highlight is from 0x45 and it says can y'all please tell me the lower

behind your profile picture, pictures. And it got 285 million views. So people really enjoyed quote tweeting this. It got 39 hours. The challenge there is that in itself is not a banger. It just got a lot of reach. Yes. Because people were quoting it.

That's right. It has zero value as an individual post. Well, it starts a conversation. It creates more content. Like, it is sort of a viral seed of content in this weird way. in a way that there are special words in that post that lead it to generating more content than an average post.

If you just posted, like, how'd you pick your profile picture? Not a banger. Yeah. The lore, it specifically worked, and it obviously did get a lot of attention. But I agree with you that this is not something that sparks thought, I suppose, or like laughter. I don't know.

What is the lore? Tyler, what's the lore behind your profile picture? I think it was my Halloween costume. I was dressed up as Julius Caesar last year. That's fine. I thought that's just how you dress back during your studies. Yeah, that's not exactly like deep lore, but... Okay, what's the lore behind your picture? It's just a picture of you. Wasn't it like a stock exchange or something? Yeah, there's not really deep lore, but I mean, I could tell a whole story about it, how it was.

was at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO. And it was also the day Charlie Kirk passed away or was assassinated, which was horrible. So there's a lot of lore there. I don't know. But it doesn't have the same like deep lore as I don't know what people expect. Do you have any lore behind your... Now I'm curious. Who had the biggest quote tweet of this?

Did anyone have a really, really great view post engagements? Quotes. no one yeah i'm not seeing anything that was like wild a lot of people did uh did um did actually engage with this cold healing says their their profile picture is their apartment in peoria had a total ivy colored ivy covered window that i really liked one day in midspring i took all the furniture out of my bedroom to take this photo huh i mean the criticism here the most common criticism has been, congratulations. You brought Reddit gold to X.

It does seem a little bit like gold. It is even gold colored. How a mathematician sees the world. I saw this going viral. I didn't realize this was this viral. 200 million views. What is the, what is this saying? Tyler, did you see this?

Do you know why this went so viral? Just because it's, is it funny specifically? I don't. It's just like they just drew a bunch of lines and like random math equations. Yeah, like is this actually how anyone sees? No, it was like everyone was quote tweeting it like how a podcaster sees the world. Yeah, I think people were just spinning off of it on different ways of, so it just became a good meme template. Yeah, that makes sense. What was the other one?

When your AI girlfriend was on AWS US East 1, 60 million views, that really shows you how big the, like the tech community is or like the AWS, like, bald-knowers. I think this one is closer to what we would describe as, like, a normal, a banger. Totally, totally. I mean, NECAP Girl, one of the first posts we reacted to on this show. Great, great poster, absolutely a banger. I'm shocked that 60 million people have the context to enjoy a post about AWS U.S. East One, but I guess it is a dominant technology that lots of people interact with.

So they must know. or maybe there's enough context to enjoy it. Well, in other news... Yes, what else? There is a JP Morgan AI Cappex report and their Max Winebox says is a great way to put AI R.Y into perspective to drive a 10% return on our AI

on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require 650 billion of annual revenue in perpetuity, which equates to $34.72.72 a month from every current iPhone user in perspective. Ross Hendrick says the AI math ain't math and two ways to fix it. 20x the revenue in the next five years or slash data center, CAPEX. I'll take the latter on 100 to 1 odds. So what does a CAPX pullback look like? there was another post here. I thought it was solid. Hari Raghavan says annual U.S. spend on software is

400 billion. Professional services is 2.8 trillion. Logistics labor is 1 trillion. Health care admin one trillion. Education labor, one trillion. That's 6 trillion. Globally is probably 3x. Every market is up for grabs. All of them. If you don't get that, you aren't ready for what's coming. 650 billion is a joke. So again, I think, understand the concern, but when you put it in terms of every, basically every iPhone user needs to spend $34 a month on AI. Yeah, yeah. No, I know, I know, but it's like. If you're using Uber on your phone and Uber is spending a dollar per user on AI inference just for fraud detection, like that counts, right? It's like, how much are you spending on cloud computing? Like, cloud computing is a huge market, but you don't think about it as like, oh, yeah, everyone spends.

My household cloud budget. Exactly. It's like, no, there are some customers, some companies that spend billions and billions of dollars on cloud hosting. And then you interact with services all over the place. Yeah. And the broad cloud computing market is just bigger than the AI market right now and will be for a long time. when you look at the AI CAPX numbers, they're all smaller than just the traditional

CAPX numbers. Like the actual just building of a normal data center is still higher than building of an AI data center. And that's because they're actually monetizing cloud computing very effectively. Because everyone needs a database for something or other or a web hosting platform,

something like that. Everyone needs turbo puffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector in full-tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Where else did you want to skip a head a little bit or you want to go back to the AI CapEx build out? It is very odd to put it in those terms. I remember someone putting Bitcoin in the same terms to me when Bitcoin was at like 10K or something.

And he was like, look, the math is like in order to have like a stable price at like the 100K price targets that people are talking about, you would have to have, you know, billions and billions flowing in every day and stuff. And it's like, and somehow that just wound up happening. And I remember being very convinced by this by saying like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Like, how could it possibly become an investment vehicle that is constantly seeing so much demand that it can justify such a huge, such a huge price? And yet, like, it just did because it just worked its way into like every single person's pension fund. And like every single person's

ETFs like have a little bit of Bitcoin in them. And like, oh yeah. And you stayed long even if you thought that that scenario was crazy because you were you were like, well, I should have some exposure if it's at all within the realm of possibility. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There were more reasons to like stay long than then actually dip out. The most interesting point from the semi-analysis segment

yesterday was this idea. Do you pick up on when he mentioned the Tyler's standing up Tyler's rocking the standing desk today Give us a review How is it feeling? You haven't been standing the whole time

You've been sitting down. You need a standing desk. I like to move around, yeah. I like to stand up, sit down. Yeah. Well, we need to get you one of the taller taller chairs. But there was

in the semi-analysis interview yesterday, our guest was talking about this idea of putting an H-100 index on the stock market. That was like something he kind of alluded to. And I feel like that would be pretty, pretty crazy.

I don't even know how mechanically that would work, but like if all of a sudden... Just treating it like a commodity. Yeah, but actually taking something from... Currently, it lives on the balance sheets of neoc clouds and hypers, and actually taking a product and just like making it a commodity that you can just invest in directly is not really like, I don't think it's very simple. I think it actually is a complex process, but it certainly would potentially generate a ton more liquidity. Like,

there would just be a lot more investment dollars flowing in if, if there was like a way to like directly get in on the AI trade by just investing in like the underlying assets. AIA Kappex trade is betting on AI. And then we need other people betting on the AI Kappex. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean like... Derivative bets. John, so you're saying we're going higher. I mean, that's certainly what semi-analysis is saying, and it's certainly, it just feels like the, it was foolish to, it was, it is foolish or it was foolish to sound the alarm bells around the idea of like debt being used at all. It's like, debt is fine.

Debt is good. The question is just like, are we actually over levered? There's not like, so when I look at like, oh, meta has like four billion of debt for this one little side project thing. I'm like, that's still a very stable business. Like that's not like, oh, they're super indebted. Like they go, oh, how are they going to pay their debts? Like, there's just a wild continuum on like how much leverage is in the system, what that leads to in terms of like risk. We're now, we're at a turning point where we might be going really heavy levered.

we might be bringing in, you know, more ETF money. I mean, I don't even know if there's a neocloud in the S&P 500 yet. Like, that is an interesting breakpoint. Because once you're in the S&P 500, you, like, there is way more liquidity because there are funds, ETFs that just buy the S&P 500. And so once you're in the S&P 500, you sort of have like price support. You have extra investors that are like lining up and they're like, I'm riding with you no matter what, as long as you're in the S&P 500.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's notable that Oracle is fully round-tripped from before the Open AI announcement. So leading up to the Open AI announcement, they were at $241 a share. They're now at $235 a share. And so the market is no longer giving them credit for the opening I deal. That is interesting. Yeah. Well, NABUS is down 10% in the last five days. Corweave is down 25% in the last five days.

And Iron is down 17% in the last five days. So jitters, to say the least. Microsoft can't power all of its AI chips as CEO, Sotanedella. This is from Zero Hedge. I don't know if you want to read through a little bit of this. Yeah, the thing that was notable here is Corwieve on their earnings call yesterday. It was for VEG2. Correve was saying that they aren't power constrained, that that's not their problem.

What are they constrained by? I mean, they had a weaker forecast, which is part of why it traded, it's traded down dramatically today. But again, they grew revenue 2X and they still traded down pretty dramatically. So there's more data center news from Joe Wisenthal. But first, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities. you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you, get started at

AI. A.I. Studio slash build. Joe Wisenthal is exerting a Bloomberg News article that says two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in NVIDIA's hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity in Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial intelligence chips is based. digital realty trust applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting

energization stack infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Al Capital, has a nearby 48 megawatt project that's also vacant. While the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley power struggles to upgrade its capacity. 48 megawatts, what are we doing here? That seems like that's, that's child. The Data Center for Ants? That should be child's play. But they're not able to do it.

What's going on? Byron Dieter was responding to Elon Musk's post saying Elon was agreeing that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of foundational model providers. Byron said, I don't buy it at all. No chance that four companies deliver all software value in the future, especially as a software, Tam, is growing 10x to include a labor, component. Yeah, I think we'll have to see. Obviously, the labs are

extremely ambitious, but I tend to side more with Byron here that as long as the labs don't have, as long as the labs are saying, like, you can access our best intelligence. VRAPI, it feels like there's going to be

durable competition while you have open source models lagging but not lagging by very much at all. Yeah, my current way to think about this is that the labs are new hyperscalers as you've put it before

which means that they will compete in a lot of different categories and there will be matchups and ultimately it will depend on the quality of the teams. So the way I think about like browser base versus AWS's competitor is like, well, if Paul at browser base goes up against the AWS project manager and works harder and is more creative and Marshall's capital and does the right deals and partners with the one password team, for example, he can create a

sustainable business. Sometimes that might be a duopoly. Sometimes that might be total victory. and a lot of it depends on the nature of the market that they're going after. Is it possible that in five years, Open AI just gets completely destroyed on AI vertical video, but AI vertical video is a category wins and that there's actually a different startup that cracks it and makes it great and grows it huge? I think absolutely that's possibility. It just matters on like there's a matchup. that happens in every single category.

And I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to say that the foundation model labs will win every category by default, or they'll lose every category by default. It's like Google happened to win in email and maps, but they lost in chat, and they lost in social networking, and in RSS feeds.

They won in some places, they lost in others. And that's just the nature of the, competitions, it's like if there's a particular team in place at one company and then there's a startup that's, you know, better than that team, then the startup wins. If the team inside the company is better than the startup, you get Paul Bukite at Google and he's building Gmail. I'm sure there were a lot of email founders out there that were trying to compete with Paul Buckeight, but Paul Bukite smoked them. And Gmail is what it is today. And so I still lean on like, who are the actual folks working on the project?

are the best people inside the organization or outside the organization? Yeah. And that's how it actually is. Over on the App Store charts, chat chabit is still number one. Threads is number two. Shout out Connor Hayes.

Number three is go wish, your digital wish list. Create wishes and get inspired. Number four is Google Gemini. Number five is Sora. So Sora is sliding down the charts, but still in the top five. We'll have to look if Fubo can overtake Sora.

That would be that would be a win for organic media. I am a little lost. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in Chachapit. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Do you want to...

Did you go down? Jay Boltard 1 says, calm down people, Moss's son is a male. Kathy Wood. Him selling Nvidia today means NVIDIA has plenty of upside left. It is. I mean, it just comes down to he will take,

he's selling NVIDIA, he's going to give that money to Open AI, and then Open AI is going to give it to NVIDIA. Yeah. Sold. We will see. Casey Hammer, who's coming on the show in 20 minutes, says that remember we could automate

99.99% of air traffic control if it wasn't deliberately being used as a government funding canary. So we will have to ask him. He had another post earlier this week. Government funding canary or funded canary? He said funding canary. The canary in the coal mine?

What is it? What is it? Yeah, we have to ask him about this. I saw his other post, which was interesting. I realized the Doom graphics engine running on a pregnancy test CPU could handle all of North, American traffic control. I'm going to sit down for a bit. This needs to be in the bangers.

This, get this man, the bangers tag. This is such a good post. There's an article, I was curious, there's an article here from The Verge that says digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC. That's insane. A lot of computer to read an old-fashioned P-strip. Yeah, that's what it does. You know that, right? Like, when you see those digital tests, It's literally just like basically pointing a camera at a test strip and being like, did it turn blue or not? Or did it turn red? No way. Yeah.

No, that's how it works. So basically they make a test strip and then it has a chemical in there. And when the person like peas on it, the human sample interacts with the chemicals and turns a color. And so normally you just look it and you're like, oh, it turned the color. Like it's pink. So that means one thing or it's blue. That means the other thing. but but they like to make it digital they just point a camera at it and say like what is it

looking at i'm pretty sure i might be wrong who knows this is probably fake news and it'll go viral on instagram as it always does in other news yon lacoon he's out he's out he's out he's out out at from meta he's going to launch his own startup tyler what's your reaction um i mean this is pretty big news i think people have kind of expected this for a while yeah basically since Alexander Wayne came in, because Alexander Wayne kind of, in some sense, took over as the chief AI person at meta, which was... Not enough room in this town for two AI...

Chief scientists. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not enough room in this town for two chief AI scientists. Yeah, and so, Jan is, like, very goaded AI researcher. He's been in the game for, like, super long. He did... I think probably his most famous paper is, like,

le net, which is like the original convolutional paper. Lenet? The net? Did he name it after himself? I think that's what people call it. I don't know what the actual paper is. That's awesome. It's like AlexNet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like not actually called Alex. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it was like the OG convolutional neural network paper, and then that kind of basically led into deep learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the main thing is, like, today he's like very much seen as being bearish on LMs. Sure.

He doesn't think they can reason. He doesn't think they can, like, do novel, tasks or whatever. So he's been like very outspoken about that. I think that's maybe part of the reason why he's, he just has kind of a different vision from from Zuck and Alexander Wang. But yeah, I mean, this is pretty big news. Do you think he will raise a private credit fund? He's like, data centers. I'm not longer interested in research and the science behind it all. I'm interested in finance. I mean, he has, I've afraid exactly, what it's called, but he has like another kind of path that he sees to AGI. He's still a professor at

NYU, which I think is where he does most of his research these days. So I think he'll probably just stay in academia. Does he have any active classes going on this semester? Because if he does, we should send you onto the campus to study, not just from the timeline, but in the classroom. and you can do a little on the ground reporting. Taylor in the chat says, Le Credit. Has he taken a formal victory lap on scaling laws not holding? Because from your perspective, it's a preemptive.

It would be a preemptive victory lap. Because I know Gary Marcus was sort of taking a victory lap with Richard Sutton after that Dorcasch podcast. And then Andre Carpath, he sort of like confirmed that, it might be a little bit harder to scale up the current paradigm. Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone is saying, like, scaling up is going to get easier, right? You just need bigger data centers.

You need to, like, spend way more money. I think, if, I don't think today you can just say that, like, pre-training is dead, though. That's, like, definitely not true. Isn't that sort of Yan Lecoon's take, though? Or Richard Sutton's take? I think, John Lacoon is generally against all LLMs.

He's not just saying that, like, LMs were, they were very promising and then they kind of fizzled out. I think he's kind of always been against LMs as a way to AGI. Yeah. I think it would definitely be preemptive to say that he was, like, correct, though. Yeah. Okay, I don't want to cut you off, Tyler, but this is more important. OTP in the chat says,

Buffett is low-key, a huge boxing fan, and I know at least one gym around his state that he has at least had a hand in funding. Oh. And I looked it up, and he's a huge fan of Terrence Crawford, the boxer, and he will go watch, he'll go, see the fights,

and he likes the cheap seats because he can see he has a better, he feels like he has a better angle. That's interesting. I like that. I did not know. So he is, he's a patron of combat. We're not ready to. to say he's a patron of the arts,

but in some way, this is Marshall. This is somewhat of a martial art. Never talk down on Warren Buffett. This guy's amazing. Loves McDonald's. Loves boxing, apparently. Loves allocating capital efficiently. You know, he stays in his lane.

It's great. Do we have an update from Brian Johnson? He came back from his trip. He was on psychedelics. I feel like I'm expecting him to fall in love with at least one fast food restaurant. I want him to flip around on at least one and say, okay, yeah, I'm an in and out guy now. He's been, he's been quiet. I do wonder if he'll update on anything or if he's just like so, so powered through that it just will not affect him at all.

He was like, he was kind of framing it as like, I'm, this is like a big deal. It seems like he got just super fine. So a very viral post of somebody saying, I don't think it's a good thing that billionaires can talk about taking Schedule 1 drugs publicly with no repercussions. It did seem that he was doing it. This seems like still such a gray area where you can get it prescribed by a doctor. But it's still Schedule 1. He posted an update. On his experience, he also talked about more about why.

He says there's potential, it's potentially a longevity therapy for psilocybin expands lifespan and mice. It can reduce inflation markers tied to aging. It can increase brain entropy, breaks rigid patterns, and boost long-term cognition and flexibility. Yeah, I don't know. I kind of agree with that, with that, uh, that person who is, uh, who is saying, like, they shouldn't be able to talk about it publicly. I feel like he should have a disclaimer or something because there's going to be, there's people, he's such a huge audience that there's going to be some people that just

look at what this is and just run straight into five years. Yeah. You had, uh, Tim Ferriss. Yeah. Who, to his credit, was like doing work on himself. Yeah. And would share what he was doing. Yeah.

But he would talk about doing things like Ibogaine, which is like a great, you know, super powerful psychedelic. And he wasn't directly saying, hey, I think you should go take this. But when hundreds of thousands of people like follow Tim for health advice, it sort of is like an indirect. It's somewhat of an, it's somewhat of an endorsement even if it's not directly. So. No, no. I mean, I 100% think some people will see this and be like, oh, looks like he had a good. experience. Let me jump straight to exactly his protocol, which is clearly not accessible for the

average person. He has been building up a tolerance to this particular chemical for probably a decade. And so it's going to hit him very differently than it will someone who's not in the same place. We were joking yesterday about like, oh, if he wanted to like really challenge himself, he would have been at like a crowded concert or something. And there are going to be people that see this post and wind up actually doing that and winding wind up in a very very rough spot um i feel like there should be more a little more disclaimers on this like hey i'm i'm running a crazy experiment on myself like do not try this at home he needs it's the it's the it's the you know you ever watch jackass back of the day remember it opened every every episode open with like don't do not these are

stunt professionals like they do this professionally like yes they just look like random guys but like behind the camera there's a huge team. They are stunt men. And even that was still like, was like, okay, kids were like, you know, trying to, try to jump their skateboards down too many stairs and getting hurt. But it wasn't like that bad. But there was still like, I do not try this at home. Yeah, I did see some people responding and saying, I took a similar dose to this and it ruined,

basically ruined my year. Yeah, it took me, you know, months and months to recover. Yeah. I would say stay off the psychedelics. stay on linear because linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product redmaps. That's where you want to be. You want to be locked in in linear. Yeah, I do. I do. I have, I have joked in the past. It's like, is, is, you know,

are psychedelics going to fix your life or just doing the tasks that you've been avoiding? Is that going to make you feel relief? You know, is that going to make you feel better about your life? that meme of like the anime ninja, if you're tired, do it tired. If you're sober, do it sober. Right? Just do it. John Kugan.

If you're sober, do it sober. Well, if you want to help make history, Angelist is launching a new product to fund the most creative, hardworking technical founders building the innovations that push humanity forward. Angelus is hiring a marketing lead to launch and scale this product.

Eric over at Angelist, a friend of ours, and the chief legal officer over there. Says you don't need prior experience running a marketing function, but you do need to be scrappy, data-driven, and comfortable in a startup environment. You'll own marketing strategy across a variety of channels to build awareness and drive growth. I know what this product is.

I'm very excited about it. But I unfortunately can't share. But if you reach out to Eric, if you DM him on X, and you're interested in the role, I'm sure he can share more. But excited, excited for this one to come online in the next couple months. I thought this was good. Somebody found a post from Sam Altman in 2016. Oh, I didn't realize this was old. I thought he just posted this. Oh, 2016, so almost 10 years ago. It says digital addiction, digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time. And Blade says,

Unc had this thought and immediately was like, how do I profit from this? The greatest to ever do it, DBAH. hilarious. Of course, ChatGBT would launch for many, many years. Yes. But in that same,

he was, when did he write the merge? That was like around the same time. But also, I don't know. To be fair, like, there are lots of things that you could, like,

if you're trying to like layer up, like the open AI is bad, like case, like you don't start with like, the products too, addictive. I don't think that's the claim. The claim is like it uses too much water or it like it like one-shots people or it does erotica or it's like AI slop. But very few people are saying like, oh yeah, people are on their phones too much and it's because of open AI now. People are like,

it's people are on their phones too much, but it's because of Instagram and it's because of like social media. Actually not the AI chat-hast. It's because of SORA. Well, I think it's a little bit too early to I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I don't think it's that. I don't think it's working that well. Certainly short, short form video. Have you ever been in, in, in, like, the gym or in a coffee shop and seen someone scrolling Sora, like, over in the shoulder? I haven't seen it. I meant I meant vertical video broadly. Totally, totally. Which is, I guess, I guess, like, a good take here, which is like, how do I profit from this? I got to make an AI version of it. That's, that's probably, like, more of what they were thinking. But, but in terms of, in terms of actually profiting on, on, on, like, digital. addiction, it doesn't seem like it's going very well. Yeah, 4-0 seems to be extremely addictive so much so that... For a very small amount of people, like, absolutely. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, and we don't know how many people. Yeah. You know what else is addictive? Doing your sales tax with numeral, putting your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I'm also addicted to the Financial Times. The Financial Times has coverage of

Sequoia Capital and what's going on with Rolloff Bota out. Both of these top lieutenants pushed Roloff out. That's what they say. Leadership duo prepared to chart a new course at Sequoia after ousting of Imperial Botha. Venture capital firms, limited partners hope Grady and Lynn can boost strategy and bring super intense period to close. They want to become less intense? That is very interesting. I would not think that. Okay, let's run through.

Let's try and understand the level of intensity at Sequoian now and potentially in the future. So from this article, we'd love seeing Andrew Reed there. The Financial Times, let's just say, they had to find a picture where he was pushing. It looked like he was pushing. They're like, you know, we're going to tell a story about someone being pushed out. we need a picture of one of the lieutenants pushing as much as close as we can get to that motion because that's the story we're trying to tell. Let's let's figure out what's actually going on. Sequoia Capital's roll-off, Bota, was ousted by top lieutenants who lost confidence in his ability

to keep Silicon Valley's most powerful venture firm ahead of its rivals. Boat to step down as managing partner of the group last Tuesday following an intervention from Alfred Lynn, Pat Grady, and Andrew Reed, said multiple people. with knowledge of the matter. The trio of senior partners had the blessing of the wider firm and Doug Leone, Sequoia's former managing partner, said the three of the people. Their move came on the back of concerns about Bota's management style and questions about Sequoia's artificial intelligence investment strategy and followed high-profile clashes between senior figures at the firm, the people said. Financial Times spoke to 10 people close to the firm. It's a leaky bucket over

there in Sequoia Capital. They got the financial times on speed dial, I guess. Including those. One of them was an LP. Yes. Also, it says people close to the firm,

not necessarily people that are actually at the firm. It's hilarious to be like, oh, sorry, I can't, I have to, I can't be on our, on our all hands today. I have a call. Oh, with who? I'm going to the dentist, actually.

I'm going to the dentist. Yes, I'm going to the dentist. You went to the dentist last week. Oh, yeah, I'm going again. You're going. I have another checkup. I just got to, we just got to give props for one second to Sean McWire. Yes.

Or there being an article about Sequoia and not being it. I mean, round of a point. Whoa, it's amazing. He's like, this is the first. Bring up. He's like, I'm not in the doghouse for once. Oh, thank goodness. I love it.

Yeah, props to Sean for staying out of the, dodging the bullets. You did it. They said it was impossible. Dodge and the bullets. Okay. So investors who have worked with both, uh, and institutions. that bankroll Secoia known as LPs. So the LPs are snitching.

The LPs are snitching. His ousting was motivated by a belief that a new generation of leaders would better serve Sequoia's LPs. So yeah, I mean, typically if there's a change in leadership, even a change in the GP structure at all, you would expect an email to go out to all the LPs. That's probably what they're leaking,

but then a lot of the LPs probably got on the phone with people, and then the Financial Times got on the phone with those people, with those LPs. One of those described the removal as a revolt against both those imperial style of leadership, following a period of upheaval at one of Silicon Valley's most successful and enduring firms. On an IQ level, he is off the charts. Off the charts. They didn't say which way he's off the charts.

Are they calling him zero IQ? Negative one. Negative one IQ? That would be terrible. No, they clearly mean he's very intelligent. He's 180, 200, 300, 300 IQ. Who knows? But the heart of the matter is that Roloff is one of these people

who always needs to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. Interesting, the person said. Adding that both his emotional intelligence did not match his intellect. Roloff is a legendary investor, a leader in human being, Sequoia's new leadership team told the FT. I mean, it's possible he was using too much Claude. And Claude kept telling him after every meeting he would dump in like the meeting notes and he'd be like, Claude. Am I goaded?

Am I goaded? You're definitely in the conversation. You're absolutely goaded. You're absolutely right. The reason Sequo has stayed Sequoia for 53 years is they've refused to cement themselves in hierarchy. Grady and Lynn will now run the firm while Reed and Grady will co-lead Sequio's funds investing in more mature startups. So Reed is going up to the... to the growth stage, Lynn and another partner, Luciana Lixandro, will co-lead the firm's early-stage investment

funds. So Alfred Lynn will be doing some seed stage investing, early stage. Bota, who's run its U.S. and European businesses since 2017 and took over the whole firm in 2022 will remain as an advisor. the 52-year-old grandson of Roloff Peak, Botha, the last foreign secretary under South Africa's apartheid regime, and later a member of Nelson Mandela's first government was hired by PayPal, to PayPal, by Elon Musk early in his career. He's led investments in Instagram, YouTube, MongoDB. Sequoia has returned more than 50 billion to its U.S. and European investors. Despite those successes, partners decided to land.

who is back to Airbnb, DoorDash and Open AI, and Grady, who's behind investments in Snowflake, Zoom and Service now, were better placed to lead Sequoia. Under both the... Sequoia has taken a more cautious approach to AI investment than some rivals. It invested a little more than 20 million in OpenAI in 2021 when the ChachyPT maker was valued at about $20 billion and has boosted that stake in subsequent rounds when OpenAI raised funds at a 260 billion valuation. Sequoia offered to invest one billion, but ultimately was given a stake a fraction of that. Ooh. So they didn't get their, they didn't get their one billion position,

which still would have been less than 1%. Sequoia also holds a stake in Musk's XAI, but is focused on early investments in AI application companies such as Harvey, Sierra, and Gleen, an approach also advocated by Grady. This is very interesting. Well, we have, have our first guest of the show, Casey Hammer, in the re-stream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Casey. How you doing? Happy Veterans Day. Thank you. It's good to be here. Great to be here. Is this a real background? What's going on here? I mean, it's a real photograph. It's a real photograph. What is it a photograph of? Sorry, there's a weird lag there. That's a photograph of some sample containers made last year of pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas made in America.

fossil carbon-free 100%. Yeah. Give us the update on Terraform. How's it going? What's the latest? Oh, Terraform's going great. Yeah, thanks. We're 23 strong now, and we're literally putting finishing touches on our first full-scale synthetic fuel system. So this is a machine that takes in sunlight and air and produces pipeline-grade natural gas. Also kicked off work on a methanol process, which is kind of the other half, or the flip side of the coin. So methanol is in the department of liquid fuel and natural gas is a department of gas use fuel. So between those two, we've pretty much covered everything that humans need. And it's just kind of a fairly mind-boggling

thing to think that in 100 years and 1,000 years, in 10,000 years, humans who need hydrocarbons for any purpose, whether that's flying rockets or jets or making paints and fertilizers or, you know, pigments or medicines or whatever, we'll do so using a solar synthetic process and that we're building the first one. Do you fit neatly into any of the current, the current market match? I was going to say like political, like trends or initiatives. Like, I mean, we had Isaiah Taylor on yesterday from Valar. He's part of this group.

Yeah, just raised. And there's like four companies that it feels like the administration is really trying to accelerate in nuclear. It feels like solar, you know, Elon's a solar maxi. there's tons of energy around solar generally. But are there specific programs or milestones that are, or just conversations that are happening on Capitol Hill, that you're like kind of drafting off of?

I mean, the genesis of Terraform, which actually four years ago yesterday, was a basically very suggestive spreadsheet. And very early on, I said, I don't really want to make this dependent on political, you know, various political whims. And so it hasn't been. But actually across the spectrum,

like we deal routinely with, you know, crunchy coastal liberal elites and heartland Americans and everyone in between. And I've never met anyone who says they'd like their fuel to be more expensive, please. So we're in the Department of Making more fuel, making it better, making it cheaper, making it locally, making it free of various geopolitical catastrophes.

And I think that actually, as I said, never met an American who disagrees. Yeah. What about the AI narrative? Is there, are you drafting off of that? or is it just a, like a separate industry that's growing? Or is there basically a way to lower your cost of capital by, you know, doing a deal with someone who wants to buy a bunch of synthetically produced natural gas?

Press release economy. Yeah. I should hire you guys as my PFM. I mean, I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And at a certain point, it's like if it's raining, make hay, right? Like, there's just a little bit of like, okay, maybe there's something. But I'm wondering how you're like, tussling with it. Like what's real? What would be over your skis to do? What's the actual application

of the technology? Like take me through the various intersections. Yeah, one of the really fun things I get to do as a CEO of this company is, you know, basically make spreadsheets and charts all day long and try and figure out how this stuff will go. And I've got a blog post. I like to have ideas and write them down two years ago saying that the way that this is going to go is we need solar power to power AI data centers beyond a significant leap beyond what we're able to do with natural gas. And people have paid attention to that. We've had significant inbound interest from most of the major players

at this point saying, can you help us figure out how to do solar plus battery, mostly or completely off-grid AI training data centers and inference data centers? And we say, sure, happy to help. And we've done quite well by that. It's actually a very, very strong market signal that maybe I'm in the wrong job and I should be an energy system design consultant rather than a CEO.

But tough luck to my stars, I am determined to figure out how to build a hardware company and manufacture stuff because you can never have enough factories. You can always have another factory. More factories is more better. As far as natural gas goes, yeah, I mean, I think that the primary constraint that the AI hypers are seeing right now is in the department of methane destruction. That is to say that the turbines that produce power, as opposed to the department of methane creation, which is us and then every driller between here and maybe

Charlotte or something like that. The United States at this point at least is, you know, once again, the great beneficiary of God's bounty when it comes to synthetic fuel, when it comes to fuel in general, actually. Synthetic fuel is a work in progress. Break down, can you say more about the very suggestive spreadsheet? Yeah, sure. Essentially, you look at a chart and you try and make a prediction for what oil will cost to produce in five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years. I mean, peak oil. It's an idea that's been around for a long long time. And of course, time oil drillers are very, very studios and hardworking people, and they figure out better ways of getting oil out and we've seen the fracking revolution. And I think that's just a wonderful

thing. I genuinely do think it's a wonderful thing. Yes, it has certain climate implications. But at the end of the day, the human, like human welfare benefits to cheap oil are, you know, a hundred times better than the climate problems caused by it. It's just a matter of fact that, like, we will run out sooner or later. And so oil is unlikely to get radically cheaper in the future. On the other hand, solar is getting something like 40% cheaper per doubling of cumulative production, and that takes about two years. So we're seeing like 20% cost reductions per year. And when you see something like that, it's a little bit like, you know, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the 1970s, looking at the arrival of integrated circuits and consumer-grade computing systems, like very, very primitive computers by today's standards and thinking, hmm, you know, this is a product that has already hit product market fit. it's already hitting this cycle of cost improvement.

There's going to be a big wave here. How do I ride that wave? How do I commodify that complement? How do I build value on top of this platform? And I'm thinking, what can I use these cheap solar panels for? You know, like there's already plenty of people out there building large utility scale solar arrays and plugging them into the grid. And the grid itself even then was kind of strained by that.

In particular, the kind of grid development bureaucracy was strained by that. What else can use this for? And I was like, well, off-grid stuff, obviously, behind the meter, built a giant solar array and then have a captive load attached to it for, you know, AI computing type stuff. That's an obvious one to do. And then, you know, fuel synthesis. Fuel synthesis was an idea I've been thinking about for probably 30 years at this point because we have to do it on Mars someday.

And I was saying, well, on Mars, it's enormously expensive due to energy cost, but energy cost on Earth is getting cheaper. I wonder when these lines cross, you know, if I'm able to surf that wave of cheaper solar and I can pass most of that value onto my customers by keeping my costs under control. then at what point should it be cheaper to synthesize fuel rather than dig it out of the ground and ship it halfway around the world? And the answer then, and I think the answer is basically the same now, was sometime this decade. You know, 2030 at the outside. Okay.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. A few people had. What are they doing about it? Not what I would do about it. Okay. Well, I guess I should probably stop, you know, kicking myself in the shins at NASA and go and start a company. And at least give it a go. find out what it's like.

See if building a hardware company is as fun as everyone makes it sound. And here we are. So, you know, say it's an info hazard to play around on spreadsheets too much. What happens to the price of land as solar energy production costs decline? That's a good question. Because ultimately the value of land under solar is the value of what people are willing to pay for that and things they do with that power. And so what we've seen, for example, is that the value of land under solar is something like

a 50, 100 times higher on a per acre basis or per revenue basis than your kind of average agriculture, even in a fairly developed agricultural state like the United States. And that's the same for synthetic fuel. The flip side, actually, and the thing that I worry about in terms of AI safety is that it's pretty clear to me that the economic utility of land that's being used as solar array to power and AI data center is over high. AI data center is over $100,000 an acre at present value. And that's just higher than almost any existing human use other than particularly dense and large cities, which makes me wonder, maybe not in 10 or 20 years, but in 30 or 40 years, whether the AIs will encroach upon our

agricultural land and make it harder for us to eat. Yeah, this runaway AI that just decides, it's in my best interest to blanket as much of the US or the world as I can with solar to, further myself. Yeah, I mean, it seems to create a strong economic forcing function, and maybe we can slow it down a few years with usual regulatory stuff. But I think that may be one of the reasons why Elon has been talking more about doing large-scale AI development in space. If you can convince the AIs, they're better off doing it in space where they don't have to

fight with humans, maybe they'll go there first instead of... I mean, there's plenty of land on Earth. There's more land on Earth that's not being farmed than there is land that is being farmed, but it's not inexhaustible. something like 100,000 terawatts lands on the oceans and 50,000 terawatts lands on parts of the earth that no one lives on or uses. And humans consume about 10 terawatts of energy.

So there's plenty to go around for now. Yeah. For now. That makes sense. I want to get into NASA government shutdown, a bunch of stuff. But before we get in. Let's touch the third rail. No, let's go even more schizo.

Tucker had a guest on the show yesterday. that was talking about chem trails. What's your take on chem trails? I'm a pilot, and I've flown around a fair bit, and I've never seen one. I think that, like, you know, playing around in kerosene's not very good for you. And we do see, like, healthy impacts from people who live too close to freeways and things like that. You know, there are definite health impacts from burning the longer chain hydrocarbons.

As far as chemtrails go, I must confess I'm not as deeply familiar with various conspiracy theories like that. Although I do think that NASA has been covering up life on Mars. So we'll see about that. Covering up life on Mars? Yeah, before we talk about life on Mars, the chemtrails thing is funny because you have to believe that tens of thousands of people are coordinating to do this large-scale operation. Not one of them has ever come out and said, hey, here's evidence that this massive operation. separation is happening without... There are aircraft which

would spray chemicals, right? Like, they call crop dusters. You have crop dusters. And they have a very particular look and feel. Of course. And then, of course, if you spend much time doing structural calculations and you look closely at, say,

a triple seven or something, it's pretty clear that... Sorry, my son's at work today, and he just wanted to see if you come in us. It's a family-friendly show. It's Veterans Day. Yeah, yeah, his face is not on the internet, though.

Nor is he a veteran of any wars. hopefully never will be. Crop dusters, aircraft. I fly to Australia every now and then, and you're like, actually the conspiracy theory that planes can't contain enough fuel makes more sense to me because it seems unlikely to me that you could actually keep a plane that big up in the air for 14 hours and cross an entire ocean, like halfway around the world.

Oh, yeah. Like, where are you putting all the chem trails you're spraying out? Like in the overhead, there's never any room in there. So I don't understand. Yeah, yeah, we've got plenty of space. That's much doesn't work out. Let's bring the fuel and the toxic chemicals or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there are levels to the conspiracy, because there is just the world of, like,

what if it's just like leaded gasoline where it's like sort of the chemicals are deranging people in a bad way because it's just pollution. Like, I don't think people really debate that like the possibility of pollution is happening. It's different when it's like, okay, yes, it's like specific chemical that does a specific thing and triggers a specific reaction from the population. I mean, there are little chemicals that can make you crazy. Most of them taste very good. Really?

Like what? Steveia. Diet Coke? No, I mean, like, quite literally, like, until the mention of GLP-1 agonists, like, something like a third to a half of Americans, we're going to die quite younger than they otherwise would because of, you know, weight-related heart disease and obesity. Why? Because sugar tastes good. Yeah, yeah.

Okay? That's true. That's a poison. It's actually poisoning you. It's actively degrading the quality of life. Ray Pete would disagree. But why are we covering up life on Mars? Yeah.

So to be fair, you know, you don't want to be the boy who cried wolf and shout, it's aliens, it's aliens, it's aliens. So what tends to happen in these scientific fields is it becomes very fashionable to be quite skeptical of things, as it should be. But at the same time, you know, evidence will accumulate over time. And so you'll have this kind of neat cottage industry of people who can explain away any evidence they see without necessarily updating their prior knowledge or prior assumptions about it. And I was trained at Caltech by the geologist.

I've forgotten his name. This is age. Okay, it's going to you. It'll come back to me eventually. Coach Wink, Joe Koshchvink, and a legend among men. And he was the guy who, when he got his sample of ALH 8401, a Martian meteorite that was found in Antarctica a while ago now, that he identified.

these cubo, like, hexerogto-hedral-magnotite crystals, that were in the meteorite. It's not controversial that they were found in the meteorite. And it's also never ever been demonstrated that they can be made by any known lab process other than culturing magnetotactic bacteria that use them for navigation, essentially. So, you know, the meteorites are full of magnetite.

Magnetite is a naturally occurring mineral, but there's a particular configuration of its crystalline form which we only know it can occur. We only know ways it can occur with biological precipitation. So, yeah, that's called a magnetoph fossil if you want to Google it at home. And I think it's about as strong as evidence you could possibly hope for finding without actually going there and kicking rocks yourself. Are you familiar with this thing, the great unconformity in the Grand Canyon?

Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've been there. Can you explain this to me? Somebody sent this to us. You've got to talk about this on the show. And I was just going to read the Wikipedia, but now we have someone who actually is familiar with it. Not an expert. I don't want to pop quiz you, but it would be cool.

No, I've been there. I've been there several times. It's amazing. I've taken my kids there. So if you go to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, there's a trail called the Bright Angel Trail. And if you're very, very fit and it's not too hot, you can walk down to it and back in a day. But I would recommend starting at midnight, right?

You get down to it in the early morning and then after day break, but then you get back up before it gets hot. Or take a couple of days, enjoy it. But there's also an exposure just northeast of Vegas at a place called Frenchman Mountain, which you can just drive right up to, although last time I was there was unfortunately covered in broken glass. Okay, great unconformity. So over time, you know, the oceans rise and fall due to climatic variations

and also land rises and falls due to geological stuff. And when land is above sea level, in general, it's eroding, and when it's below sea level, it's in general accumulating sediment. And so what you see in the Grand Canyon, that is to say that most of the Grand Canyon is a series of layers of carbonates, which means it's shallow oceans that are forming reefs and sand dunes and sandstones, which means it's, you know, a riverine kind of delta environment or something where the land is gradually sinking relative to the ocean, creating an accommodation space

in which new dirt and soil and rocks and stuff can come down and fall and be compacted and form these layers. And then what happens is if the ocean falls down or the land gets lifted up, then you see erosion. And what happens is that newly formed rock gets eroded away for a while and then it sinks again and then it starts to build up again. And so you get these like what are called little unconformities, which is where you've got a little period of missing time, a million years here, 100,000 years there, 10 years over here, and maybe 10 million years over there, where the land has been above sea level, and so no new rock has been forming, or if it has it since been eroded away. Okay, so this occurs at all scales, and it turns out that at the bottom of the Grand Canyon,

or very close to the bottom is the thing called the Great Unconformity, and it's kind of mind-boggling, because the rocks on one side of this, like this kind of the Vishnu Shist basement rock. It's this ancient rock that forms the core of our North American continent, at least in this place, It's ancient at crystal and it's 1.6 billion years old. It's like, what, 13% of the age of the universe. And then literally, like, one thumbs width away from that above it is the oldest sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon, which are 500 million years old. I think they're just after the, after the camera an explosion.

Okay, this is stretching my memory. There's a long time ago now. 535 million years ago. And it's just kind of crazy. So what happened in there? It's a missing billion years. Yeah. It's a missing billion years.

And so in that time, Rock formed, right? Sure. And probably entire mountain ranges formed. It takes 100 million years to form a mountain range and then eroded away to nothing. Sure. So like the Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian mountains were a mountain range taller than the Himalayas 130 million years ago. Pretty much eroded away to nothing.

So you could form and destroy a mountain range the size of the Appalachian mountains. In that time. Eight, nine, ten times in that time. Entire continents form and sink. Entire supercontinent, form and sink. probably not dinosaurs back then as far as we know. But there was definitely like lots of life in the oceans and some plants and stuff on land and some insects and things.

Actually insects, I think came later. Look, don't quote me on this. Check Wikipedia. Ask Grock. But it's all gone. It's all gone. At least, you know, and when you look at one of those geological timescales, you see a lot of recent rocks and not so much detail in the older rocks.

And that's just because as you go back in time, you get exponential destruction of the geological record. There is actually a corner of the Eastern Grand Canyon where what's called the Grand Canyon Supergroup, which is a series of layers that's inclined like this kind of pokes up. And that's the only place on Earth that we have rocks from that age. That's kind of an intermediate age rock. Yeah, it's just bizarre. So you can go there. Just outside Vegas.

Like skip the tables for half a day, drive out. Maybe they could put a casino at the Great Unconformity. I mean, on the Wikipedia page, the reason this is so interesting. It's because on the Wikipedia page it says there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the Great Unconformity among geosy. scientists. There are hypotheses that have been proposed. It is widely accepted that there was a combination of events which may have caused such an extreme phenomenon. One example is a large glaciation event which took place during the neo-protozoic around 720 million years ago.

And so there's like a whole bunch of theories, but it's just funny. How did they grind away so much rock? Yeah. Because essentially like where the rock is forming and being destroyed is very close to sea level, almost always. Right? Yeah. And so at some point, the rock that is on the underside of the great unconformity had to have been lifted up near sea level. And then it has to have sunk down a mile or two to form all the rocks above it, right? And now it's been lifted up again above sea level, because the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River is obviously above sea level, otherwise it wouldn't float to the ocean. So it's kind of crazy that this goes up and down. Yeah, I mean, that's geology for you. There's still work to be done. Maybe you'll figure it out one day.

Okay, let's talk about... But actually, we're in the process of forming a new great unconformity, right? Like the rocks below the great unconformity, the vision is just being eroded by the Grand Canyon as we speak. So if the Grand Canyon ever fills in and starts to, you know, build rocks again in the future, the grade unconformity will be below where it is now in that part of the world. Okay, well, let's talk about something we can all agree on, which is three-eye Atlas. What's going on with that? What? I don't know anything about this. You know, this is a comment.

Yeah, some people think they're saying it's a comet. A lot of celebrities are saying it's an alien ship, but what's the KC. Hanmer? Give us a breakdown on it. We haven't been following it. There's been enough happening in technology. Likewise, I've been focused mostly on the final details of fixing electrolyzer seals and things like that. I would say that these interstellar objects are super interesting, and I would like to get a close look at them. And I really wish that we had some, like, maybe Tom Mueller could build a series of spacecraft with like lots of onboard ISP that we park out near the moon or something. something. And then when one of these comes through, we press the button, and it immediately adjusts orbit and shoots off in that direction, and we get a nice flyby. We get a few photos.

That'd be super cool. We're seeing them about once a year at this point, and that's just because our telescopes have gotten better. As far as 3i Atlas goes, I have a cousin who routinely texts me updates on like, it's an alien ship for sure. I don't think it is. I think it's a comet. I think that actually some of the earlier ones will be iter than it. I think it's a very large comet, a very old comet. It seems to be a comet to me. But if you were sufficiently advanced alien race, would you not want to just attach yourself to a comet that was headed in the direction you wanted to go and just ride along with it? No.

No, I think I think... Too slow. Well, so I went, yeah, exactly. Well, who knows how long the aliens live. But I went to Caltech to study kind of warp drive to try and understand how to do that. And I didn't succeed, obviously. But someone might one day. But I think that if you've seen Avatar too, the spaceships that Jim Cameron puts there

for the humans to fly to Alpha Centauri are like kind of what I have in mind when I think like how would humans or aliens that are comprehensible and legible to humans travel, it would something like that, you know, enormously energetic, uh, relativistically, uh, accelerated, uh, very, very bright, very flashy, very obvious. Um, or maybe something like warp drive if we can never figure it out. Um, but I think, you know, a comment that takes 100,000 years to kind of wander its way from the nearest starter here, very boring. Very boring. Yeah, boring. Yeah. Uh, let's talk about moon or Mars? This was a, debate that we were having earlier.

Seems like the Jared Isaacman nomination was kind of reinvigorating some discussion over whether the U.S. should prioritize Mars over the moon. Elon has been pro-Mars for a very long time. Moon is kind of incidental. Other folks see Moon is like a key geopolitical race that we have to address right now and win. And then that gets you a ticket to the real, the real competition, which is Mars potentially. How are you thinking about the trade-offs

between resources spent going to the moon, resources spent going to Mars? So initially I was quite pro-Mars, and I wrote a couple of books about doing stuff on Mars and realized that its advantages are actually, like, both destinations are pretty difficult in their own way. They both have their challenges. And actually, I think what SpaceX correctly realized,

is that if you're going to do anything meaningful on either place, you have to develop a rocket system like Starship that can basically fire hose mass at pretty much any target in mind. It's not a fair fight kind of situation. And so once you have something like a Starship, doing something pretty cool on the moon is very straightforward. But if you're constantly trying to put together some mission

that's just made of little bits and pieces and small puny rockets and very expensive, slow-going contracts and stuff, you really struggle to do anything meaningful on either of them ever. So, yeah, I'm very much in favor of, you know, kind of incidentally on the way to Mars, setting up a couple of lunar research stations and putting a few thousand people there and running it like the space station is now, but for more than six people.

Yeah. And I think we could totally do that for like Antarctica program level budget with Starship. Yeah, my theory on it just as, you know, an outsider has always been fire hose mass at low Earth orbit, get Starlings going every day, tons of, I love those montages that are just showing Falcon 9s up and back every single day, do that in low Earth orbit, then do that for the moon. And same thing. Like dozens of flights to the moon and back every single day. And then, and then start, you know, weaving to Mars, because it feels like Mars is just a completely different set of tradeoffs and cadences based on when we,

we can actually launch. It's not every day. And so just getting the reps in of like humans, just even just a human or I don't know, maybe a robot at some point, like getting off of a, like landing a rocket on a celestial body and then getting out and jumping around. Like even if that's happening every single day, it's going to be, that's a lot of that has to transfer to Mars, I would imagine. What's the most underrated planet? Yep. Hmm. Underrated planet. What's a planet that you think about a lot? I spent a lot of time thinking about Mars.

Mars? Still underrated? Most people would put it their number two after Earth. Yeah, I had a little side project where I built the highest resolution top-o map of Mars using a bunch of NASA data that's kind of in the archives. Interesting. Not being directly funded. So I have a six-meter resolution global topography map for Mars. And I've been doing some like hydrology simulations and stuff with it to see what happens when we terraform.

It's, yeah, so it's kind of hard to appreciate, but like planets, even small planets like Mars are overwhelmingly big. Once you start dealing with these planetary scale data sets, it's like 200 terabytes. You know, I start asking my wife, can I please buy another hard drive? And she's like, you already spent $5,000 in hard drives this month. That you should sit down. Okay, but like planets are really, really big. And yet I have a, you know, almost photorealistic render of Mars to, you know, sub 100 meter resolution sitting on a spinning platter on my desk at home. It's pretty wild.

that we get to do that. I could never have dreamed of that when I was a kid. It's just unimaginable. Yeah. Air traffic control, should it be run by a pregnancy test? No, I don't think so. But it could be. So, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, like the shoulds, the normative discussion

is kind of beyond my pay grade, but the descriptive discussion of like whether it could is something that I think I can opine on. And yeah, I mean, fundamentally, what are graphics? system does on a computer is it's doing roughly a billion collision calculations a second. And that's a much more sophisticated graphics engine than Doom, but still it's something that you can buy in any PlayStation or something today. And ATC is just not that complicated. It has a bunch of edge cases, but it's not that complicated.

And it's also a system that, for justifiable reasons, is very, very conservative about adopting new technology. but at the same time, you know, the cost that we endure as a civilization to various air traffic control problems, and they're not only caused by government shutdowns, kind of undeniable. And there's also an efficiency aspect. You know, we could probably shave 5% of our fuel usage if we were able to have basically, whether optimal direct point-to-point flights for all aircraft that wanted them rather than usual ATC thing, which is, you know, you basically follow existing instrument-approved routes between, in many cases,

places on maps that were once radio navigation beacons but no longer exist. You mentioned giving the project to the Mag 7. I wonder, do you think that there's an opportunity for a startup to sort of do like the Anderol flipped model, build it with venture capital dollars, and then try and sell it to the government once you have a better system in place? And also, is the actual software and hardware like actually the problem? There was that Nathan Fielder, HBO special that was kind of like, it's maybe more about pilot communication and human training, human error when something goes

wrong. And it's not necessarily like a computer system and like a bad line of code. Yeah, I think you probably still want to have people sitting in control towers looking at radars. I'm not saying like the solution to our problem is to fire every last air traffic controller. Quite the opposite. But like if you think about what those air traffic controllers are doing a lot of the time, it's stuff that could be a few lines of code. Like it's one of these things we go. I don't know, a thousand corner cases, but 99.99% is just one case. It's just the standard like... Did these intersect? Incent routing. Well, just like you basically get a clearance to fly a certain route at a certain

time. And then, you know, all goes well, you'll never see another plane. But every now and then you've got to keep an eye on things. You've got to control the airspace. It's not a complicated puzzle. I mean, like Microsoft Flight Simulated 95 had a pretty good simulation of this. So it's the sort of thing that I think is well within our technical capabilities. Should we decide this is something that we actually want to do? Yeah, I guess to some degree you can forecast the entire flight path before the plane takes off and make sure that it does not intersect with any other flight paths at any point in time. Yeah, that's relatively straightforward.

I think some people on X were like, oh, you know, sure, we should just turn another monopoly to Starlink to do all this stuff. Actually, I don't think that's the case. I think that you could actually design a series of algorithms that would run essentially but also autonomously on every aircraft. And so you have like everything in aviation as these like multiple airs backups. So there's always always something checking the system. That, sorry, and a co-worker just brought in a new baby because I start this company and then all my employees

start having more children. I think I'm doing something right. That's fantastic. That's a great sign. Yeah. But yeah, so the idea there is like your onboard computer on board your aircraft, if you're flying a commercial 737 or something, should be like getting minute-by-minute updates on weather and tailwinds and headwinds and so on

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

are occurring because the system is not as good as it could be. So I think the way, I mean, it's way beyond my pay grade, but the way you would do this is you would basically commit to buying or purchasing a family of improved products that are interoperable, according to some pretty straightforward standard. You could base it on, you know, Australia and Europe has largely automated ATC at this point. And then you integrate this system. What is there already? Europe automated air traffic control before us.

Europe and Australia is a terrible place to be a pilot. Like in the United States, you can fly VFR. Like when I was a private pilot, I flew VFR. Visual flight rules under 18,000 feet. You can do basically anything you want. And I don't know if the ATC systems could handle that quite yet. But when I was flying, we didn't have ADSB rolled out very well. So basically you had to look out the window all the time and try and spot out the aircraft.

Yeah. It's pretty dicey in LA sometimes. Do you have a strong take on the AI KAPX build out? It feels like I just feel like your company and a lot of the, a lot of the companies kind of, of your vintage are very much aligned with like, do something really ambitious that as it scales, it compounds. And all of a sudden, like once it's working, you're marshalling. Like I do imagine when I think about your, the story of your business, I think about, you know, billions and billions of dollars flowing into more and more solar panels and just this crazy flywheel once the technology gets working.

We've talked about this in the past. It feels like that's kind of happening in the context of like token factories right now. But are there anything that has given you jitters to the structure or how things are playing out? or do you or do you see it as like as like one narrative is just like it's felt cool to watch big things get built and I'm wondering like how you're processing like the AI CapEx build out

all the crazy CapEx that's going on? I think the United States has always done well when they're able to take a difficult problem and transform it into a form that can be solved by pouring money on it and then pouring money on it. Let's give it up for pouring money. Yeah, and so if someone were to ask me, like, do you really think that every dollar being spent on hyper-scaling right now is being spent the best possible way it can? No, of course not.

Yeah. But is it nevertheless efficient from a perspective of competition to spend as quickly as they can to ramp this technology up right now? Yeah. I mean, there's obviously a there there. I use all the models every day. I'm a discerning customer, and I think that's quite transformational. I mean, they frustrate me as well, but like, the direction of improvement is very clearly going in one direction. And this is not a race where United States can afford to be anything but first.

And I think it's a real question to wonder, like, well, what does the UN Security Council look like in 15, 20 years when, you know, basically most of them today have their own nukes? And I think they all actually, UN Security Council, permanent members all have their own nukes these days. and in the future, most of them will not have their own AI sovereignty. Oh, do you think that the AI sovereignty projects are not going to bear fruit because they're underscoped or underscaled? Because I feel like a lot of countries would say,

like, you just answered the question. A lot of countries say, yeah, we're doing a one gigawatt data center. Like, we're good. We're checking the box. The United States is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in this direction right now. And how much is, in China, I guess, is serious about it? Do you think Russia is serious about it? It does not seem like you serious about it.

It does not see. Yeah, what about Australia? Russia's biggest clusters are like a thousand GPUs. Australia, we did here, is investing in quantum computing. Do you think that that's going to be relevant? No. Can you say more? This sent the market down.

I'll say it in Australia. Shambled. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. It's like basically the best solar resource on Earth. And it has, you know, it's a modern Western, the world democracy. with like rule of law and and incredible natural resources and 25 plus million well-educated wealthy people. And every time there's a new wave of technology, they go, oh, never mind, mate, we'll catch the next one.

They catch that. Trust me crazy. So that's why I'm here. But they have Kira. You ever surfed? You ever surfed there? It's one of the best point breaks of all time. Yeah, yeah.

The beach is doing comparable. I live in the San Gabriel Valley. I come to Santa Monica about once every two years. Under duress, I will add. And people say, oh, Santa Monica, it's the most amazing beach. And I'm like, yeah, maybe if you're like from, I don't know, like Canada or something. But I grew up on, I grew up on Kilkeh Beach in the Central Coast of New South Wales. It's, I wouldn't swap all of Santa Monica for like a single bucket of sand from that beach.

It's the best sand. It's absolutely incredible. Best sand on earth. You've been there? Yeah. You've surfed in Australia? All over Australia. I didn't realize that.

I didn't know that. Yeah. DPPN down under. Yeah, we need to do that. Marking calendars. Down under. I like... I love Australia.

Australia feels like just a very large... Foster. California. It feels like California as a continent. A violet crumble. That would get me going. I love some of the crumble. Last thing I was curious to get your take on,

this company, T1 Energy, went super viral last week because they're just making a massive amount of solar panels. Everyone got really excited because, including ourselves, saying, wait, we know how to build things. and turns out it was a Chinese company that was like a forced seller of their of their manufacturing facility. Do you think there's anything that we can learn from T1 Energy and what the original kind of builders of this facility did in terms of like just scaling that out? I haven't actually heard the story, so I'm not the right person to comment. Yeah, T1 Energy.

I mean, you would be interested in the story. It's an $800 million stock. They're making one gigawatt worth of solar a year, and people got really excited. That's tiny. Yeah, I mean, like globally, we're going to make 1.4 terawatts of solar this year and deploy about 700 gigawatts.

Yeah. So a couple years ago, I used to say it's about one megawatt per minute, but now it's closer to one megawatt every 40 seconds. 40 seconds. So, you know. We got to get those numbers up. Okay. And so is, are you?

Are you, like, are you, like, two billion modules this year? Like, would you encourage, would you encourage America or like the, like, the venture ecosystem or the government to like, to like try and bring, you know, manufacturing capacity back to America? Because when we've talked about this before, you've always said, like, hey, if China's going to be subsidizing and just buy as much as possible. And that makes sense, like economically. But over the long term, like, if you. you need to scale exponentially, there might be a case for reshoring. Do you think that that's a good idea? Yeah, I think controlling supply chain for solar technology is super important.

And just because China currently leads doesn't mean the US can't lead in the future. We've seen this in the past, right? The industry is extremely dynamic. You wouldn't have to try all that hard to, you know, if you had like a 5% edge over your competition, you could be the number one in five years, something like that, right? obviously factors in production in the United States. Why didn't you look into that or why aren't you vertically integrating? Is that just something that might happen in the future?

I mean, it might be the last thing we vertically integrate. It's not really a problem for venture or government, right? It's a problem for banks. Sure. Right? It's like, buy the machine from Germany, put it in a shed, put it in a giant building and start churning it up. It's pretty well understood how to do this scale.

It's not really a technology problem, technology development problem. But that's my bread and butter. My bread and butter is like doing weird, complicated stuff. Is the reason that it's in China mostly labor cost or environmental concerns or regulation or the cost of capital? Do you have an idea of like, like, I understand like the whole story of, yeah, the whole story of like why the iPhone landed there. Like I understand that story a little bit. I don't necessarily understand why solar panels went there specifically. Yeah, I mean, Australia invested a bit.

bunch of money into developing this technology. And then Germany spent a bunch of money on manufacturing it at a steep loss. And both them basically gave up at some point. And meanwhile, China looked around and said, hmm, we just had the Beijing Olympics. We're kind of a big deal now. And we'd like to do something about Taiwan sooner or later. But the last time anyone got Uppati in the eastern China Sea area, they did a lot of damage until the United States curbstomped them by choking their supplies of energy. And it turns out that either Germany nor Japan had had anywhere near sufficient supplies of the domestic energy sources. And once the combined bomber offensive and the submarine war took out their ability

to transport oil from where it was being made to where it was being used, basically both war if it's collapsed within months. So if you're China, you'd be like, hmm, where's my oil coming from? You know, 16, so 12 million barrels a day is coming from, coming from the Middle East. A long way away. Fire up via like Straits of Oman and Straits of Malacca, Straits of Malacca, which we don't control, can't control, don't have a deep. Water, Blue Water Navy, you know, via our historical and current geopolitical adversaries who

kind of allow the oil to pass by it because they're playing nice today. Maybe it's actually something we should spend, because the US, sorry, the Chinese political economy is much more kind of expansionary and it's spending. It's much more supply than driven rather than demand driven. So if we're going to spend a bunch of money on like, you know, more or less inflationary projects, may as well spend them on giant solar panel factories and they got really good at it. And, you know, or credit to them.

It's a bloody lot of hard work to do that, and they did it. And now basically we all benefit from that, you know, if we're willing to buy from them. But that doesn't mean it's something that's like intrinsically impossible for the United States to do. It's just a question of will. It's a question of who actually wants to go and do this scale. Always a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time.

After you create abundant energy, we're going to require that, or we're going to make a bid for you to become a, you know, invest more of your time in podcasting. Yes. Yes, we do enjoy this. That'll be hard to do at this point.

Yeah, you've been on a tear. Congratulations. You've been all over. Well, I know your secret. Sitting around talking about stuff is incredibly fun. It's so much fun. It really is.

Well, thanks for doing it with us today. Great to see you. Come by. You too. Talk soon. Happy Veterans Day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive backoffs, number one in ranking on G2.

We have a surprise guest joining us in just a few minutes. We'll see if he can join in the restream waiting room. He says he's down to join. In the meantime, let's go through some more post. Back in the timeline. There's some news in the Wall Street Journal. You see some of these images leaking from nanobanana 2? No. What is this? They are a little too photorealistic for my preference. Okay, what's going on here?

Oh, wow. Okay, so it's got Jeffrey Epstein and... With Diddy? Together. These are very accurate images. These seem remarkable third term. Yeah, is this... So this is from Roberto Nixon, who came on.

on our stream at Metacnect. He says, Wild Times, Nanobanana 2 apparently leaked a few hours today on some platforms and the limited results by a handful of users have been pretty insane. The model was apparently from an uncensored, slightly older checkpoint when it actually launches. It won't be this uncensored, of course,

but crazy to think what a handful of engineers at the Frontier Labs have access to and the chaos they could cause if they so wished. I wonder, yeah, it's so interesting where I would love to actually trace where these leaks came from, what the whole flow is, because it's possible that, like, it's possible that there's like some Photoshop in here as well.

Like, if you're in the business of creating a leak or a fake leak, you can, you can do all sorts of funny things. There was a, what was it? There was someone who, what did they do? They went and they filmed something normally and then they went into after effects and they made it look like they were on a green screen for it, and they made fake behind the scenes footage for their real footage. So it looked like they were, so they actually went surfing,

and then they made a CGI version behind the scenes. Just like that, there's that Apple trailer now for the introduction to Apple TV, and they say, we made it all practically, we did it all practically. Let me see, we need a, we need an, image for for our next guest because we are not doing video. We are just doing

audio. He is semi-non. But we have Growing Daniel in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Growing Daniel into the TV. There he is. Growing Daniel, how are you doing?

Doing really great. How are you guys doing? Fantastic. You're doing well. It's great to finally have you on the show. It only took, I don't know, 20 invites, but you've been busy

and you finally made it. It's an honor to be here. I didn't have anything to say before. I'm glad. Now you do. I'm glad. You're launching the moral discernment company of San Francisco. Getting into moral discernment.

Finally. I would love to know what that means. Is this a vibe shift on your part? Or do you feel like this is a continuation of your affinity for moral discernment? Walk me through how you evaluate, like, what is or is not a good startup idea or like a virtuous. Like, Trace Stevens says that good quest philosophy. Like, how, how do you think about judging the work of the technology industry that we see every day on display on X? I guess it's not really complicated to me. I mean, okay, so if you're selling like gambling,

then you're basically selling drugs to people. Like, and everyone knows that, right? I didn't think it'd be a big thing to say, but you should want to build things that are good for people. think that's exactly what the Pope was saying. If you are engaging in the act of creation, then you should try and create something that's actually good for people. And I think over the past 10 years, we've had this like really weird, I guess, school of moral philosophy that we all collectively call woke. It's been really dominant and it's had an extremely aggressive priest class that tries to get every, it tries to coerce everyone into bending the need it. And nowadays, that's not a very popular perspective, thankfully. I think that fever kind of

broke. But I don't think what replaces it is nothing. I don't think that's a good solution. I think everyone should want to help. Actually, you cannot criticize technology at all. If it's software, you cannot criticize it. We're banning, we're making it illegal to identify negative externalities of any technology product. And a lot of the stuff is even externalities. It's literally just you're selling drugs to people. It's in terms of the economic transition, right? Like, it's the core product. It's not like somebody got, you know, left fielded walking down the street by gambling. Yeah. It's funny. People used to be criticized, you know, three years ago, it was like, stop building enterprise SaaS. And people were like, okay, I'll build gambling apps. Okay, but on the

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

Do you think that there's a clear line, bright line. I don't want passive income, John. I need massive income. I mean, yes, sometimes there's just a interface with it. But is it, is it, I'll know it when I see it? I don't even think gambling's wrong, by the way. Sure.

It's, like, I think it's fine to get together with your friends and play poker on a Sunday or something. Like, that's totally fine. So as far as like gambling goes, I'm saying that if you're going to dedicate your life to building something, which is what you do when you start a company, it's not like you're just like, you know, doing something as a hobby. uh, then what I'm saying is that you should reflect morally. Yes.

If you get like, I don't think I'm not here to tell you what is right and wrong. Um, but the Pope's entire point was that you should think about that and try and do good things. And, uh, I didn't think anyone on earth. I guess one person for sure had a problem with that. Um, and so I, I don't have the moral guide book. Uh, there is a guidebook. I, uh, there is a guidebook. I own a copy. It's called the Bible. Yes. But I do not, I cannot, you know, extrapolate that to every modern situation. But I do encourage everyone who's building anything to think about what they're building.

What good is it? Is it actually helping people? And by the way, B2B SaaS doesn't get me up in the morning. But hey, that's on a software. That actually, you know, solves people's problems. That's a great thing to build, I think. I like that. I like that. I mean, so let's get into Steel Manning, the other side of this, because that's what's fun. It's okay to, it makes for good content. So it's okay to, it's okay to, you know, hit the casino, the craps table, like once every couple years, you know, on a vacation or something.

isn't that what Andresen's doing? Like, like, by total, by net asset value, by the actual deployment of the capital, like 99% of the dollars are going into honest B2B software, data bricks. It's going into things that feel virtuous. And then, yes, they do have speed run, which is an incubator. And yes, within speed run, there are some crazy, crazy companies. And I'll give you that. But as a percentage of the capital that Andres, Andrewsson, has allocated, we are in the, yeah, once a year he goes to Las Vegas. We're not in the,

he only funds gambling. So how do you react to that? I think that if you are, if you're going to Vegas, then you're, there's nothing, the, whether or not you're betting black or red is pretty, it's an extremely amoral situation. When you come out and you put $15 million into Cluelly, I think that is not an amoral situation. You made a decision there about what you want to find, what you want to see in the world. And so what I see if he wants, you know, and again, that's, you know, obviously A16D will do what it wants, right?

Like, they don't have to listen to me. But for a lot of people, I think the Cluelly investment was a real moment, at least for a lot of my founder friends. That was a moment where it was like, oh, okay, Like we're just literally going to fund whatever retarded thing now. No matter whether or not it's good. It's just more vibe, more, you know, bigger tweets come on and, you know, just try to keep this sense of excitement going.

And for what? For this cheating app? Like, this is stupid. Like, what are we doing? I didn't come out here to build cheating apps. I didn't come out here to build gambling apps that advertise that they can, you know, how people gamble under the age of 21. Like, these things do not seem, they don't seem, they don't seem immoral to me.

They seem actually immoral. And that's a decision they're making. And I would encourage them to not make that decision. Well, the good news is that it does feel like Cluelly has pivoted to just B2Sass, I guess. So maybe it's total victory for honest SaaS. I have one more, I guess, I have one more steel man that I like, Daniel, to toy with. get the helmet. I should get the helmet out. Although, I don't know. Can you see us or is, or can see you right now. Okay, good. So John's going to throw on the helmet, the helmet. Get locked in for the second. The helmet is the

the second steel man. Oh, I was really, I was really hoping it would be a crusader helmet. No, no. So this is the steel man helmet, which is, which is, for when you're steel manning a point. And so it's very hard to wear, but, um, as it should be. Yes. Heavy is the head that wears the steel man helmet. So the second steel man is, is while I agree with you that you should not mock the Pope, you should not try and dunk on the Pope, it's kind of rude. I would say that potentially it is okay to critique the Pope for trying to set regulatory frameworks around business. and I would cite the Wall Street Journal's post-mortem, like, obituary on the previous Pope and kind of look back on some of the stuff that the Pope had done that was maybe leaning too

heavily into some of the environmentalist trends and maybe caused too much of a shift that actually sort of hurt the quality of life in Europe and America. And it was not, it wound up being included. compatible with human flourishing. And so the Pope is maybe not always correct. And so there does need to be some level of dialogue between even Catholics and the Pope. John, did you just say the Pope isn't always correct? I'm saying I have the Steelman Hamlet on for a reason. Yeah, of course you could say that. Of course, that's a totally, you don't even have to wear the helmet. It's a totally reasonable take. Of course, the Pope's going to say

things that are incorrect. Especially, I think, on temporal issues, on political issues, the Pope does not just raise Supreme when we can't disagree with them. Yes. I do think that if the Pope makes a very, like, you know, anodyne and earnest post

about how we should care about the things that we're building and the effect it has on people, then you shouldn't mock them. Yes, yes. I think, especially, especially, I mean, if you're some, you know, loby, that's whatever, but if you're Mark and Drisand, come on, man. So I guess seeing it from him, I was like, that bothered me.

But no, absolutely. Obviously, I disagree with, you know, probably many things. The Pope believes on political issues. Sure. We do have a question from the chat. Why is the Pope above being mocked? I think we've touched on this. But is it just purely respect?

Do you think all people should avoid mocking the Pope or specifically Catholic, specifically religious people, specifically Americans? Is there any more nuance to who gets to mock? It sounds like Lobes, maybe. could mock the Pope if they're, you know, some sort of a non. I can't stop them. Silly. Even young, young, growing, there's a young growing, the future growing Daniel.

Would you have mocked the Pope two years ago? Probably. I think, I think my view is just, is not to interrupt, but I'm guessing you agree. Just like, it should be okay to expect, like, the technology industry broadly has so much power. It impacts our lives in so many different ways that, you know. people within the industry should criticize it, people outside the industry should criticize it, we should expect that people understand the weight of their work,

even if it's not in defense tech or national security related, et cetera. Like the work impacts our lives, and it impacts people that are outside the industry, and to basically, I don't even know. I mean, part of this is like, this was such a new meme format. I was trying to clock like, okay, what does he actually mean by this? This is like a, you know,

at applying it. Did you watch the full interview, the GQ, Sydney-Sweeney interview? It was very interesting because it was an interview for an event that GQ holds that's called Men of the Year. And it was an interview between two women. And so I think that they have like genericized the term, but they stuck with giving an award for men of the year.

And then they'd give it to whoever or something. something like I was very confusing branding for me. It's a man. But then also like there was a very weird, it felt like a little bit of a Roar Shock test actually watching the interview because when I actually went to watch the YouTube video, it feels like they're having a ton of fun with each other for like 10 minutes. And then they do get into that one question that's kind of sharp,

sharply worded. And she kind of dismisses and says like, look, I'm not going to answer that. Why would you even try to understand the source material, John? It's just a meme. I guess. I don't know. That was part of my, like, you know, Mark, Mark applied it in a bunch of different ways in a very short period of time, right? So it's, he was a little trigger happy with it.

I don't know. Oh, well. I think Mark got excited that he thought there was a new image that you could quote tweet someone with and it would just own them every time. And he wanted to go apply that in as many places as possible before the cool points ran out because people like Mark applying it and running down the cool clock. So he wanted to get as many of these out as possible. And that's what he was trying to do. And I don't think he understood the source material. But he paid the price.

It was definitely anybody out there that was thinking about mocking the Pope, I think is going to at least think twice. The Pope is like level 9,000. Have you been leveraging that prayer? We covered the prayer. I forget which church it's in exactly. but the prayer. Star of the sea?

Yeah. Have you leveraged that at all? Oh, I leverage that every week, absolutely. That seems like some serious alpha. That should have become the current thing. There should have been lines out the door. It's insane that it's available for a 50-cent candle. You can go and pray for St. Carlo to intercede for you.

Who is in heaven, by the way, hanging out with God. and he will intercede on your behalf for your technical problems. Incredible, incredible, star of the sea parish. Incredible. I could see VCs, you know, actually putting that in term sheets going forward. You need to take 50 cents. Use the patron state of capital allocation. If it's like I think I'm going into a down round.

I think my portfolio is about to tank. I need to pray. Prang for exits. What do you think tech is getting right right now? Anything? Oh, yeah. Oh, I think we're in a way better place. So I don't know.

I came out here in 2018. From then till 21, most of tech Twitter was crypto Twitter, and that sucked. And so now we're actually building tools that are useful. Many AI tools are actually legitimately useful, which is a radical change from when I was out here in those three, four years. So I think a lot of things are going really well in tech right now. I think that AI will continue to creep into every crevice of our capital structures and our processes throughout society. I think that's awesome. I think it's going to save people a bunch of time.

It's going to make people's lives much better. So, yeah, I think tech's doing really great overall right now. Why do you think there's so much darkness on the timeline? John and I were talking this morning. It feels like more infighting than ever. It feels like it ebbs and flows. but right now, yeah, it feels like there's a lot of infighting right now. Infighting, like what?

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

are in a little bit more of a defensive posture online. I was wondering, I don't know, do you feel that or do you or do you not feel that? I don't feel that. The only thing that I feel is weird lately and it's in San Francisco and in tech is that we attracted a lot of like kind of grifty signally people. And there's like people messaging me about how to like, you know, establish their image in San Francisco and stuff. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you doing?

Like literally, like if you like building things and come find some guys or whatever, it's to come find some people that like building and talk to them. And if you vibe, then you can work on something, right? Like, I don't know. It's how it always was. And so there's a lot of people that are like now moving in and trying to like, you know, get their head shots done. like they're moving to LA.

And you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to, I said earlier, I think it won't be the top until you have founders doing, pitching at Demo Day and Chrome Hearts and Rick Allen. And that happens, it's over. Sell everything. I hope the top comes before.

What is, what is the correct way to launch a new startup today? Is it, is it a 90-second vibre? I feel like a lot of stuff's played out, but like, is there anything that you think is, like, actually the correct way to do it? Um, I think first you should have a Twitter account with 175,000 followers. Oh, yeah. Yeah, step on for sure, post constantly. Don't watch until you do that. Yeah, post constantly.

No, I, uh, I don't know. It's different for everyone. Like, that's the thing is like, I don't know. I always hate like startup advice because it's like literally everything is different. Like literally, if it were automatable, then it was. would be. And so it's like, what is your situation? Like, I don't know. But you've got to figure out the way in which you're weird, you know, and work on that. That's usually your, uh, your comparative advantage. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Just, just, just the advice is like, avoid the templates,

basically. Do you get any inbound, do you get any, any, any, any, uh, anybody ever put it together? Or are you the least monetized account with $179,000? I got one. One customer. Shocking to me. Let's ring the gongs. Hell yeah. Congratulations on your one customer.

I mean, that's probably... It's great. It's one more than I thought I would get. We won't talk about my industry here, but I definitely work in an industry that is a Twitter industry. Yeah. And so I never expect... I really should have built. DevTools or something. I should have done something for sure. But yeah, so my Twitter is

not really related to my real life at all, but yeah, we did get one out of it. I think, I think at some point you could just, just all the people asking you for advice, you know, on personal branding, just say, fine, I made it, I made a course. It's $10,000. It's the key. The $10,000 course, it's effectively non-deluded funding for the company. You can do it as a joke. I don't think that would be good for, I don't think it would be good for the world.

That's true. I wouldn't actually make it good, and I feel like I'm just ripping people up. That moral discernment strikes again. I am the most, I'm the least, probably except no, I'm except Rune,

the least very monetized person on Twitter, which is pretty amazing. I see people at 20,000. I think you're saying, I am the most. That's so inspiring, brother. Yeah.

I will say we have an announcement from my real life. The council has met and we've decided. We are hiring an engineer. Wow. So, DM, Growing underscore, go on X, it's the Everything app. Which app X is. Yes, yes.

Go and find Growing underscore Daniel, and you can send him your LinkedIn or your, or your resume if you want to live in San Francisco and you can pass an FBI background check both those things have to happen and you are a goaded engineer then you can come work with growing Daniel

every every Annon every Annon poster was just to qualify It is never you're the most doxable person in the world Thank you for taking the time to come on No we will protect We protect the truth of growing Daniels We protect anons Thank you guys.

I appreciate it so much. Very exciting role. I'm going to message some people and say, hey, go join the moral discernment company of San Francisco. I respect it on so much. Like, I don't even save, like, full names in my phone or anything. The first time, the first time, Growing Daniel sends me his email for some reason. It's just his full, full name in his email. It's just first name, middle name, last day.

Like, dude, you didn't have to do it again. If I could do it again. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's great to see you. I love watching you build and have fun on the internet. You know how to do it. We both come a long way. I think we met up at.

Had a very L.A. meeting many years ago. Got together at Arawon. There you go. I don't remember what we got. But it's been fun to watch you build and entertain us all. Fantastic. See you guys. See you. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about some honest B-to-V software. Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have JD Ross from With Coverage in the Restrewayway. Co-founder of Open Door. Co-founder of Open Door. We're doing back-to-back, Open Door Week here.

How you doing, J-D? Good to see you. Great, good. What's happening? Oh, wow. I love the effect. Sometimes it's a little bit of a jump scare getting you into the Ultradome from the re-stream waiting room. You can see you're on display here. You got some news for us. What's up? I'd love to

ring the gong. First, why don't you introduce yourself? Why don't you give us a little bit of background? He says he likes one sound effects. You get that sound effect. You got the bald eagle. Let's hit the bald eagle. Let's have some of it. He's in Texas. There we go. How you doing? What do you working on these days? Yeah, I mean, I'm working on honest B-to-B software. I'm working on the honest software. I think, you know, you had Kaz on yesterday, by the way, talking about the importance of having like a leader, the right leader in a business, you know, he's really amazing. That is a hard business. Like open doors, I think we had like we had a core value called we eat basis points for breakfast. And like a basis point is a 100th of a percent. And so we were like

fighting for each edge of a percent to cut off the cost to make the business good back in the day. he's obviously a better operator than I am. So I'm working in the opposite business now. It's an insurance business where you have like 99% retention and 99% gross margins. Because I'm lazy and I don't want to fight anymore. And it's public coverage. And basically the background was a couple of years ago, you know, I was talking to my buddy Max, who's my co-founder. And I was like, look, in every company I started or been in, we've had.

had great legal counsel. I've liked my tax counsel. My insurance guy and everyone else I know is insurance guy is kind of an idiot. They don't really know what we do. They don't really know what it is for our business. Yeah. And so we're like, we can probably do this better. Let's just mess around for a bit and see what we can make happen. And it's now two years later. We have well over 500 clients, 10 million revenue profitable the whole way. There we go. That's great. What? Profitability. Not something you see. We're going to hit the gong for profitability.

Real quick, before we dive more into coverage, I wanted to ask you about Open Doors' new feature. Kaz was talking about introducing returns to home buying. I think you could make the case that it would just increase overall sales velocity if people knew, like, hey, I can buy this, and if I don't like it, I can return it. But when you talk about eating basis points for breakfast, like, you know, returns end up being like a huge, like, line item or expense for a lot of companies that sell physical goods. But what's your take? My view is you always want to have the right incentives in a business.

And returns is a good incentive in a business. Like, if you know that you can be returned, you are going to keep your quality bar high. You're going to make sure that you are selling with integrity, that there's a true value in the product. And if you can't return it, you're going to sell as cheap as you possibly can. This is lemon law. Lemon law in cars, right? It's like you don't want to sell lemons because you would be forced to buy the car back if there is a problem with it. Exactly.

And the same thing for a house. Right now, everyone's biggest fear when buying a house is, did I buy a lemon? Because it's every dollar I probably have. It's, you know, it's by like 8X, the largest purchase. just I'm going to make in my life versus like a car or anything afterwards. It's scary and you only do it a few times in your life. And so you're kind of trusting this person you met probably a month ago as your advisor who's very incentivized to get the deal done.

And so you want to be able to have that confidence point. And if you're like, hey, that's going to affect the bottom line. Well, only if we're selling bad product. I had a friend who bought a house who gets into it and like a year in discovers that like it has a bad foundation. And that sounds like a catastrophic loss of that house. It's not the part of the house. You want to have a bad issue.

Exactly. It's like if the chimney on the top potentially. Just pick up the whole house and we'll fix the foundation. Fixing the roof feels a way easier than the foundation. Yeah. Just get under there. Yeah. So what are your clients actually looking for on the insurance side?

I mean, we have a variety of insurances here. Is it all one deal? like does it get crazier as the as the company to get bigger and bigger and bigger. We had an experience getting insurance for TBPN that I couldn't tell you how many times they would come back for a new signature. And I was like, I've signed for this insurance like six times now. It's like, oh, there's another dock. You didn't do this one dock.

And I'm like, oh, well, didn't you know this dock was coming? In one dock. Put all the docks in one dock. You didn't know about this doc or the last one or the last one or the last one. I got to keep signing. So I think the way, first of all, the hardest part of our business by far is just getting the first call. Because it's nothing no one wants to care about. Unless you're talking about our insurance clients in construction where it's a huge deal for them. Most clients is just like just get the first call. Once we have that, they're like, oh, wait, this is much, much better. It's like ramp before, you know, versus any expense management system you had in the past.

No one was thinking about changing out the expense management system. But then, once you have a much better risk management system in our case, now your entire life is sort of a CFO or, you know, G.C. gets a lot easier because this whole thing that you know is very important and are very afraid of, but don't understand, is taking care of. And so our view is we replace the traditional broker with a tech platform. We pair them with an industry expert who's basically your fractional risk manager. And instead of commissions, we try to align the incentives with the fee.

so that our job is to save them money instead of making them spend more money year over year. And those three things, the platform, the plan, and the team driving savings has generally worked really well. And the types of insurance depends on who we're talking to, right? Like for a restaurant or a manufacturing company

or like a next generation defense manufacturer, it's workers' compensation typically. There's contractual risk. You're talking about fintech. It's like cyber insurance and errors and omissions and things like that. for tech companies, usually DNO and then benefits. And so our job is just like build a point solution at each stage of this.

Software has gotten so much easier to build than years ago, right? AI makes it see you can launch new features when you have the right foundation. It's not cracked and you don't have to return it a few years later. When you have the right foundation as a business, you can build these things much easier now than you could in the past. And our clients really, like, they get a lot of value from that. Yeah. Have you thought about buying existing insurance agencies? I've heard at least one company that portfolio company of a fund, I'm an LPN. It's just a hot trend right now with the AI thing

is like pull forward by rolling out or buying some legacy things. J.D, it'd be great if you could figure out a way for us to give you another $50 million. You're not like how profitable you are. This is a big problem for us. Yeah, literally, I think that's part of it. I think people are chasing opportunities with dollars before understanding the opportunities. Sure. Like, insurance is a very, like, acquisitive space, these brokerages, because it's been the only way to grow. I think we might be the only one I know of who's doing purely organic growth where you're saying, hey, you know that guy you golf with every weekend?

Forget him. Come on over to us and having that work. Yeah. And I think it's because the whole industry is broken. Like, everyone kind of feels fleeced by their guy. but no one in that space actually wants to innovate because it's the most

one, it's the most boring industry on Earth. No one wants to talk about this or think about it, even if it's your job, you generally don't want to think about it. And now with AI, it's finally like right for disruption on the platform side. But if you're acquiring brokerages, you have to convince this 50-year-old

golfer, whatever, to change their operations. Like, no way. I notice you don't have the word AI agents anywhere on your web, website. Is that intentional? We barely even had a website until like a month ago. But no, no, but it feels, but it feels intentional where there's like other people

building this business would say, would have, would be selling this as like, we're building AI agents for finding and insurance and risk management. But it feels like businesses don't really care. They're not used to using agents that are awesome yet. And so that's not really a selling point. I'm curious how you think about how software. is evolving and how you think about like integrating AI for the user as well as kind of back office and actually to deliver value. Definitely. I think right now the storyline for AI on the foundation model side is really obvious, right? It's just increasing general capabilities. And I think the AI software, pure kind of play where you're just saying, hey, we're selling AI

into businesses to make them more efficient, isn't working as well as people want. It's certain areas it's really going gangbusters like engineering, software engineering, others, and content generation, things like that. And others, it's just not performing as well. Our view is that it's much easier to build an AI native business than it is to build the software and sell it into people who don't know how to even adopt this stuff yet. Over time, I think maybe it'll get easier as the entry points make sense in each of these businesses, but it's very experimental right now. And so we're very, very focused on from the ground up, how do we build a business where it works from an AI-nated way, right? Like where our clients can just say, okay, I'm buying something I already understand.

And behind the scenes, yeah, when you request a certificate of insurance, an AI agent does that, right? It reads through this 200-page PDF and says, are you qualified to get this data or not? Okay, great, we're going to email your insurance carrier, blah, blah, blah, and it comes back and works. To the customer, it's just magic. They just get what they want. they don't need to know how. It's like explaining, you don't want to know where the sausage meat comes from. You just want to get your sausage.

Last question. Do you have any mattress companies that you're working with? We work with this incredible business called Eight Sleep. Let's go. That's my next ad read. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm going to translate it. Amazing setup.

Well, you're our new insurance correspondent. So anytime there's some hard-hitting insurance news. Just, just... Risk guy. Risk guy. Yeah, whatever's going on. Just call me in. Yeah.

If something, I mean, careful what you wish for. I mean, the big question, actually, is, uh, is, is those, like the, how, how, uh, who is it, Deutsche Bank is like creating insurance products around the AI data center leases to try and hedge the risk there. That's a fascinating story. But, uh, we'll have to jump into it another time because we're running late. But thank you so much for... Great to finally have you on and come back on anytime.

Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. How did you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 76. I still am away from my eight sleep. Oh, yes, yes. I got to move it over.

Well, I'm fighting against myself then. Let's get to Tyler's cam. Just check in with Tyler. Oh, what happened to you? Oh, oh, what happened to you? Oh, you can't see it. You can't see it. Where's your desk?

He backed down. He backed down. You can see that the microphone is moving upwards because he lost the strength to stand at his standing desk and put his standing desk down. I didn't lose the strength. You lost the strength. I like to move around. Sometimes I like to sit down.

Yeah. Okay. Well, you can sit down. No problem. No problem. Our next guest is Josie Zainer, who is building a literal unicorn using DNA editing to to- I will be right back. To modify horses.

Is this correct? I mean, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you. Hey, what's up, John? ago and yeah. I mean, we're gene editing animals. I think animals are kind of like the, you know, software of reality. Fantastic. Software of reality. What a turn of phrase. I love it. What is this actually mean? Is it theoretical? I know, especially nowadays with all these people

of, sorry, there's a little bit of a delay. No, it's not theoretical. Here's the thing. Yeah, I know. Okay. Where am I? I'm in my lab in Austin, Texas. Oh, fun. Doing. Is the delay still there? Can we do? Yes, it is. Why don't you give me an introduction on the company, kind of where you are,

and I'd love to know what your actual timeline is for building this actual literal unicorn. Is that going through? Yeah. So, you know, the company I run is called Embryocor, and we're working on gene editing animals. I'm kind of just like, I'm tired of people inventing. investing in AI note-taking apps. And I look at universities and how science isn't going forward. So I'm like, fuck it.

I'm going to build a startup company that people actually care about and like. And I'm going to science that I can invest my blood, sweat, and tears in. And to me, that's gene editing the future of life, you know? Amazing. I think we have some, is there anything we can do about the delay or should we we come back to this? I think we might need to have you back on the show another time. The delay is just a little crazy right now. But I'm glad we got to check in a little bit and talk about the story somewhat. I'm sorry we couldn't get it figured out. Somehow we can edit animals' DNA and yet

we can't get the Wi-Fi to work. It happens. But the chat is loving you. And they're very excited about this. But I'm sorry, I'm sorry that we ran into technical difficulties. but we will check in with you soon. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest after I tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields,

and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Scott Shapiro from Coinbase. Let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room into the TBP Ultradom. Scott, how are you doing? Great. How are you guys? We're doing fantastic,

recovering from some technical difficulties, but hopefully there haven't been any technical. difficulties in your life recently. Give us the update. What is the latest news in your world? Probably our token sales announcement from yesterday morning. I think that was in the Wall Street Journal, correct? Can you give me the full story? Guys got in the journal, the sacred text? I think so. Coinbase launches site for token sales. Blockchain startup Monad will be the first to sell its digital coin on the new platform. Coinbase Global is launching a new platform to allow individual investors to purchase digital

tokens before they are listed on its exchange. You tell me, is this fake news or is this the truth? That is probably the realist news in the whole journal yesterday. Let's go. We are for the first time bringing token sales to the full U.S. retail community since 2018. That's fantastic. Okay, so yeah, break down the different levels because I know you guys just acquired Echo. That serves a different use case, but what are the different types of offering? Yeah, you know, we're trying to go full life cycle when we think about asset issuers, right?

We just have a great exchange. It's been around for a long time for secondary trading. But we announced yesterday introduces primary issuance right before it starts trading on the secondary market. Echo and a related company, Sonar, were acquired by Coinbase a couple of weeks ago. Coincidental, we were playing at this token sales product working with Monette already. That is even further upstream, what Echo is doing kind of resales before. a token is even ready to be traded or used. Awesome.

So this new product you could compare to certain companies like Robin Hood and public will take an allocation in different IPOs and give an allocation to everyday investors, people that are non-investment banks or sort of established investment firms. Is that like a good comp? It's a fair comp. I say the two biggest differences, these are not IPOs. These are token sales. Purely crypto, no stock exchange involved.

Second difference is it is only distributed to retail investors on Coinbase. So there is not a little IPO allocation for retail and then a big allocation for institutions. This is 100% just focused on a sale to the retail community. And then post-sale, the real float that comes will be from these folks who bought tokens on Coinbase in that primary sale. That makes sense. what uh what why why was now the right time to bring something like this to market i know i mean if you look back through the history of crypto there was an era where these kind of offerings to retail were much more popular and then there was a lot of problem you know kind of like problems and regulatory gray

area from that uh time that uh is starting i feel like to be a bit more clarified but you know maybe you could talk about the timing yeah there's a couple things here one is just our ambitions have gotten much broader in terms of becoming what we call the everything exchange. So being able to offer every asset class at every stage of its development, and what I focus on is really making that tailor-made for the retail community all around the world. Second thing is the regulatory environment is much better. And so where a company like Coinbase was being not so favorably looked upon by the SEC a couple years ago, that regulatory environment has improved to the degree where we feel much more comfortable offering this type of product, not just to the U.S. community,

but in dozens of other countries around the world. And that's a really new thing for crypto. Yeah, it makes sense. What about what do you expect the volume of offerings to look like? Monad is going to be the first. Is this something that's happening on a weekly basis, you know, monthly basis? What are the plans there? What can you share? Probably more like monthly than weekly. We're really not trying to. to maximize volume. This is definitely a quality over quantity play. So it really depends on the types of issuers

and the depth of those teams' involvement and really their willingness to do this in a way like the Monad team has agreed to where they're not just going to turn around and sell all of the insider allocations right away, but they're looking to develop long-term incentives and hold themselves to a standard of longer-term lockups and longer-term investing schedules

that really puts control in the hands of the retail investors And you look at the past, a lot of these token sales on backwater types of markets have not done that. And so we think that if issuers are willing to do that, we'll engage with them. How does pricing work? Is it a function of supply and demand or is an issuer setting evaluation and a specific allocation amount? What can you say around that front? It's exactly the latter we describe. So the issuer sets the token price. they set the allocation to what goes into this primary sale.

We make sure that it's a team of high quality and that they're willing to be transparent about their unlocks investing schedules and that they're really committed for the long term. And then it's really up to the retail audience. They can invest as little as $100 or six figures paid in USC, of course, stable coins, to be involved in the sale.

If I'm doing, if I'm starting to sell tokens through this, through this process, are there like ad units around this? Like when we go to an IPO in New York, we'll often see taxi cabs will be wrapped with, we were at the Klarna IPO, for example. There were pink taxi cabs everywhere. At Figma, they really like went all out. There was like a DJ outside. There was a lot of celebration. big, like, you know, massive canvas that gets hoisted. And there's a lot of attention that comes to it.

And the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ too, to some extent, sort of offer effectively like marketing packages to celebrate the moment. Is that something that you'll have like an analogy to in the digital realm at some point? I love that idea. I worked in ads for a decade in Silicon Valley before coming to Coinbase, follow my cookup passions. Thank you. Honestly. Powers the modern American.

economy. Yeah, Cheryl Sandberg used to say it's the Lord's Work. It is the Lord's Work. Back in Facebook. Finally. We do not have that today. I think that's an interesting idea. This is something that if you go to the Coinbase app, you will see it pretty prominently. And right now, so the sale actually starts on the 17th. Right now is the time when people can come learn about it and get reminded so that we can notify them. But there's no paid media involved, and that's something that we might consider longer term. I think that'd be fun.

Has any details released on pricing? Yeah, the price is two and a half cents per token. The FDV, the fully diluted valuation, is $2.5 billion, so you can do the math on the number of tokens out there. The allocation to Coinbase is $187.5 million worth of Monad tokens. And again, that will represent the bulk of the float once it's tradable. So the actual market cap that's floating is going to be a small fraction of the total long-term fully diluted valuation. Fascinating.

That makes sense. Well, very interesting new product. And I'm sure, hopefully we can get the Monad team on as we get closer to then to learn about the protocol and what they're working on. Yeah, that would be awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, Scott.

Cheers. You know, if you do want to take out an ad, you got to go to ad quick.com. That's right. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quit combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We're cooking on some new billboards. We're cooking. We've heard your complaints. Not enough TBPN billboards. I haven't seen one in a while. The funny thing is we actually have been getting that complaint. Very silly. We have Lawrence Allen from Teranova in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultradone. Lawrence, how are you doing? Look at that. Look at that flag. Look at the suit. I think the flag, the suit, wow. Royal flush. Isaiah looked so dapper yesterday.

I figured I had to put a suit on. You look fantastic. Give us the news and then I want to go into what the business is doing. The Florida ceiling flag. Yeah, this is, it's amazing. Some of these flags are just too small, you know. It's like hard to even tell if they're real amount. I'll let you in on a secret.

If you want to win the game for the biggest flag, you got to put it outside. Go on the roof. Everyone's putting the flag inside the factory. If you hang the flag outside. the factory. Also, the world's biggest flag, they bring it out at like the half time of the Super Bowl every once in a while. There's one of them. It's like the huge, and you can get it for like 500K. Only 500K. It's not that much, right? If you got 7 million, I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of flags. It's a lot of money that's a lot of flag. Anyway, sorry. It's great to have you. Great time on the show.

Weirdest office ever. And the outside of the part that's my bedroom is painted rainbow. So I was thinking we'd just repaint an American flag. Okay. There you go. So you're sleeping in the office, too? Absolutely. You know, it's, I think it's becoming the standard. Where are you best?

We are not. We're in Berkeley. Berkeley, cool. The flag would be a little smaller in Gundo because the price is like 3.20 a square foot there. Oh, yeah. Great. Bringing American dynamism to Berkeley. Going on the offensive behind enemy lines.

Anyways, great to have you on the show. Congratulations on the launch yesterday. Breakdown. Maybe give some background on yourself, and then let's talk about the company. Sure. Yeah, I'm a recent Berkeley grad dropped out of Stanford grad school. I worked at SpaceX before, and I am CEO of Taranova. So, we just launched out of stealth.

We probably had the longest stealth mode you've seen, and we... How long? There are companies that have been stealth for like a decade. Longer than you've been alive. Maybe not the longest you've seen. Humane. Humane. Humane. Humane AI Pinsent and Stealth for like seven years. Yeah. How long?

I've been working on this since I was at SpaceX, which is like late 2021. So I was in school until under a year ago at Berkeley. I stay incorrect. It's serious stealth mode. Serious stealth mode. So we're officially out. We're proud to announce our $7 million seed round led by King Gruen. Great hit. Thank you.

Great hit. Congratulations. I was excited for that one. Outlander as well. Awesome. From Go ahead who funded Valor and also Ponderosa and Gotham's. Very, very cool. So what are you working on?

Yeah, we're building terraforming robots. So usually when you hear about terraforming, it's some in the sky stuff like what Augustus is working on at Rainmaker. Here we're talking about very physical on earth terraforming where we are lifting land physically out of flood zones. I think this launch video captures it very well. But we're basically injecting really, really large amounts of material underground to just directly lift land. So this would be really useful for you if you are currently in a coastal area. I think lots of places all over L.A., even parts of Gundo have this issue where you were just too low. Long Beach was called the sinking city for years. And the reason is because it just sunk about 10 or 20 feet due to subsidence. And from

that subsidence, you have flooding. So it's not just sea level rise. It's usually petroleum extraction or groundwater extraction or being built on fill. So cities all over the world are facing this issue. And there's just really not much you can do about it. You already have the infrastructure in place. What do you do? You know, there's no way to lift that infrastructure up. You can't put it on some little stilts like you can do a small, you know, single story house. You can put a giant sea wall in. Usually you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars for things like that. sometimes levy systems will work. But usually what's happening now is they're just demolishing the infrastructure, putting a ton of filter on it, waiting a year, year and a half for it to compact and

moving around dirt on the surface to make that happen. And then they're rebuilding that infrastructure. And so, you know, maybe that's fine if you have, you know, some inexpensive property, but we're talking highways. These are, you know, $8 billion projects for Highway 37, which is, you know, a few miles north of here. You're talking about mass displacements when you're doing this to whole cities. I'm from Santerfell. We are facing this problem. Santerfell has about 60,000 people, and they're facing a $500 to $900 million bill for the seawall system that they need. There's just no way they can afford that. And so we took a super first principles approach.

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

It compacts in about two hours to pretty much the full consolidation. And then you were just three feet higher or whatever you wanted to be at the end of the day. It's hard to wrap my head around how much wood chips you need to raise a city in height. But our shipping container is size to process 20 semi-truck loads of wood a day. So you're basically moving, semi-truckloads of wood chips through our system. We have a bunch of robots that run around the site that deliver that final fluid underground and then that processing unit that we call our arc. So the Prometheus system, that's the robot. We call it that because it's bringing something fundamentally new to the world is delivering that final injection pressure. And you're basically

just moving as much material as possible underground because really what you need is volume, not mass or something like you'd expect. These wood chips, what is the primary source? This is a waste product when people are getting trees removed from properties, manufacturing processes. Where does it actually come from? Lots of sources. If we are going to do the Sanofil project, for example,

there's a place called Marin Sanitary right across the street from the place that floods the most. They ship eight semi-truck loads a day of wood chips to be burnt in biomass energy plants, which are subsidized by the state because they're non-economic. And they would way prefer to, instead of polluting the air up in Stockton to just pump that right underground. So you can get it locally. You can also get it from sawmills. You can get it from fire trimmings all over the state. Obviously, we have huge fire issues here in California.

And so they're doing massive clearing of forest. And then they really just don't have anything to do with that wood. Okay. So goal is to save San Rafael or save them from this massive, you know, massive. infrastructure bill, how do you start small and prove that the company can, you know, execute on this type of operation? Are there specific sites that are, you know, much smaller scale where you can kind of start proving out the thesis? Yeah, so I just got this text from our team. They are all at our pilot site right now, doing some drilling, doing some pumping. You can see

We use like auger drill bits and, you know, big injection machines to do our pumping and have our shipping containers. So we are deployed. This works. We've been doing this for about a year. And we are looking for more commercial projects to do right now. So what site, what site are they on specifically? Is that like a testing ground? They're an undisclosed site near Sacramento that is primarily a testing ground, but they also have huge drainage and subsidence issues that we are fixing.

Fascinating. wild so so what are what's like the the dream customer right now yeah we would love to do strangely some wetland restoration projects and also some new home development projects so things that don't already have a lot of infrastructure in place are very ideal we've seen a customer willingness to pay slightly higher there because their risk appetite is a little more because there's there's not much to go wrong we feel ready to do some roadway projects as well so sorry sorry break that first one down It's basically like I have a bunch of land that's undeveloped. I'm thinking about putting a bunch of houses on it, but there's a problem because there's like a marsh in the middle of it and you can kind of get rid of the marsh.

Is that roughly correct? Not quite. So in the bay, it's usually you've diked or levied off an area. And then because it's organic, it's subsided. So there's an example. It's an 80 acre parcel right on the water in Santafell near the target. This has subsided two meters. And so because of that, if you were to break the die, it could be under sea level, of course.

And so they want to do two things. They want to put some wetland on that. To do that, you have to lift it so it can become tidal. And they also want to put about $100 million worth of homes on that property on the more upland section. And so that you would also need to lift it because that section is also too low. So both agreements are fixed by the same solution, which is ours, which is just directly lift it and make it so you can develop it and make it into higher quality wetland. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

How long until you have, you're getting death threats from conspiracy theories. Yeah, modifying the world, easy. Yeah, people, people, you know, obviously Augustus has been on the show. You're going to get blamed for earthquakes. That's what's going to happen. Like, there's going to be an earthquake. We actually think we're going to help with earthquakes as well. We haven't been publicly claiming this because we're still doing testing.

Yes, yes, yes. This is formed dramatically better. This underground looks very much like particle board. It doesn't look like woodshed. it's compact. And so this is better than normal Earth. This is very controllable. It's very physical.

Get ready to go on Info Wars, buddy, because I, no matter what the science says, you are going to get blamed for earthquakes. Because people are just going to be like, they were doing something. And then the earthquake happened. Yeah, well, you have Augustus as a model. Augustus, you know, was in the hot seat.

But he's done a great job. And I think there is a path for communicating with all constituents, not just tech, not just Twitter. I guess this has done a great job getting to, you know, AM radio listeners and random shows that do not break through in tech, Twitter. He's done a great job there. But yeah, communication across all the constituents has to be really important for this business. I think it's important to say this is not like a blue state solution. This is very much red and blue. Totally. We did this all over Florida. Of course, Miami faces some of the worst flooding issues.

And this is also not just a U.S. problem. This is something that's happening all over the world. Southeast Asia is particularly bad. You've had ministers from Indonesia, from Cambodia, come here. They're saying, like, I'm moving my entire capital city of Jakarta, help me. This is very much going to be the fundamental way that you solve large-scale flooding problems. And so I hope that conspiracy theorists don't come for us. We definitely are willing to show them what's happening.

This kind of looks like a black box underground. but actually we have systems where we can measure this to like a two millimeter level precision. And so you can have a very good idea of exactly what's happening. That's amazing. One more question just because I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale. How many, like, you know, truckloads or shipping containers worth of wood chips would you need to, let's say, raise a square mile, like call it like five feet? I will do that math for you right now.

So let's do acre to square mile. So basically you need 20 truckloads per acre foot, which is actually much better than fill because with fill your... An acre foot is an entire one foot, like picture an acre and then one foot. Okay. So one foot deep acre wide, long.

Yeah. Yeah. So you want... Interesting. We're doing. math on TV. Well, while he's doing the math, let me tell you about Wander, find your happy place, book of Wander with inspiring views. Hote Hurtughey, Men, he's dream of the dead,'s top-to-ecleaning,

and 24-7 concierge services vacation home, but better. And, you know, maybe in the future, your Wander will be on terraformed property. We might be increasing the number of vacation homes. Absolutely. So a square mile lifted by five feet is a lot, of course. You know that. This would actually be 64,000 truckloads. Let's go.

Let's go. However, as much of the sounds, there is way, way more than that. Just in California, we could absolutely source that much. Okay. We had been looked and it is very straightforward to source a thousand semi-truck loads a day in the Bay Area. So that would maybe be a two-month project if you were really about your statistics and maybe a two-year project if you didn't care quite as much. Okay.

Fantastic. Well, we're looking forward to it. Yeah, you're taking something that people want to get rid of and saying, we'll take it. Yeah. But thank you so much for taking the time to stop by the show. This is fun. The chat was mentioning you. How are you guys not talking about this? And we did sort of miss the announcement. But we're really happy to have you join and really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, John. I've been watching you since you're making YC videos instead of tech startup videos. That's amazing.

Well, thanks so much for supporting. Well, super exciting. Congrats to the whole team. Good luck. We'll tell you soon. Talk soon. Good chance, Jordan. Before we move on, let me tell you about Bezzle. Getbezzle.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. any watch. And in tariff news, Switzerland has been making

moves. Oh, yes. The luxury watch market might be in turmoil again. We might need to call a credit. Get them on the show again. And Switzerland are working on a deal with slash the 39% tariffs and try to get them to 15%. Rolex

got Trump a one-of-one desk watch block that has been photographed on Trump's desk. That might win him over. And, yeah, 101 Rolex and win a lot of people over.

That's pretty cool. Didn't Barack Obama get a Rolex as well, I believe? He got some sort of watch from his Secret Service agent. His Secret Service agent, he's probably an Omega. It might have been an Omega. Might have been a Speedmaster. But it became the watch that he wore.

He wasn't a watch guy. Then one of his Secret Service guys was like, you got to wear this watch and he did. Very cool. Did you see this post, Jeff Davies, in 2016. A lot of posts from 2016 these days. Jeff Davies in 2016 said Apple should buy NVIDIA

and lock up VR AI and autonomous car tech for the next decade. Look back 10 years from now and great use of cash. Apple would be a $10 trillion company. Basically. Wow. Wild. Looking also back,

this fireflies, is this AI no taker? someone was talking trash about AI notetakers today on the stream. I don't even remember who at this point. But so, Sheel Monaut says this is wild. It's about a screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Sam Udo Tong, who's the co-founder and CTO at Fireflies AI.

This is an AI note-taking startup. I think they're doing very well. I think they've raised money recently. And they say, came across this post on LinkedIn. Turns out the first version of Fireflies AI, the AI meeting assistant doesn't even have AI. It's just founder joining the calls, taking notes manually, and sending a summary back.

Sounds crazy. And that is exactly what Sam wrote on LinkedIn 10 hours ago when this screenshot was taken, said, we scaled flyer flies to a $1 billion valuation after six failures from our original crypto food idea, food delivery idea. It's hilarious. If you're working on a crypto food idea,

pivot to AI notetting. Get to a billion dollars, a billion dollar valuation. And so he says, this is the key segment. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as Fred from Fireflies.A.I. We'd sit there silently taking detailed notes and send them 10 minutes later after taking notes for a hundred plus meetings and falling asleep in many. We were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750 per month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point where we said, let's stop and automate everything. And so this is being put in, this is being put in like a dunk because they're saying like,

oh, this billion dollar AI note taking company doesn't use AI. It's like, yeah, this was in 2015 or 2016. Like I actually, I actually knew Sam at the time and I DM'd with him. I was a customer and I was completely fine with this because I was like, this is awesome. I get somebody to take my notes for me. It's basically like an outsource note taker. But it's being sort of like reframed as like, as like, this. this is how they would do stuff now?

And it's like, no, obviously it's been a decade almost since they did. I think if you're a customer and you didn't know, you have the right to be frustrated. Sure. You were just inviting a human and no, no. But hilariously scrappy. Hilariously scrappy.

But yes, they were. And as long as they were being transparent with the VCs at that time, that, yeah, we're just using a couple guys to do this. It's so crazy looking back on this conversation with Sam in my DMs. And he just says, like, hey, like, I'm working on, I needed notes from something. Like, can you send in and transcribe everything?

I'd been using REV, this manual transcription service that would take an audio file and just give you a text file back, but it was done by humans. And so here he says, you can add Fred at Fireflies to the calendar invite and Fred will join. Give it up for Fred. Let's give it up for Fred. I was like, I was like, hey, just got my first. transcript. Pretty solid. And he's like, how would you, how comparable would you say it is to Rev?

I said, lots of ums and us captured. I, I know the exact comparison in the day because I sent the recording to Rev earlier. So I was doing like A, B testing, actually seeing like what was useful, what wasn't. It was just funny, like actually seeing this company grow so much and having been an early adopter and then see people get the story wrong. So, you know what? If you're using Firefly, of course they're using Whisper. Why would they be using Human still?

It makes no sense. The technology is good. Tim Sweeney's land maxing. Oh, what do you do? And behind Fortnite has bought over 40,000 acres of U.S. wilderness, not to build to keep it forever wild. Forever wild. I love it.

Where else are you in the timeline? Are you deep in there? Mr. B says 2% of human time is now spent on YouTube. Well, thank you to everyone who's been spending at least... We spend way more than... We spend way more than that. Oh, yeah. Because we're doing like 15, easily 15 to 20 hours a week.

50 weeks a year. Yeah. And, you know, that's, we're getting, the goal should be to get into the double digits, right? Yeah, for sure. Somewhere around, somewhere around 7 or 8% now. Dean Ball had some support for your take yesterday. You said, I don't think you should just throw decal

at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology. That's not necessarily decelerationist. Dean Ball says it's heartening to see such eminently reasonable takes, making their way into prominent pro-tech new media. There's something very, well, we're actually neotrad media, to be clear. But he says there's something very old man about the terms of AI policy debates, and perhaps this is because it has been largely old people who have set them. When I hear certain arguments about how we need to let the innovators innovate,

and thus cannot bear the thought of resolving negative externalities from new technology, it just sounds retro to me, like an old man dimly remembering things he believes. Milton Friedman once said, whereas anyone with enough neuroplastatic, remaining to internalize a concept as alien as AGI can easily see that such simple frames do not work. Ron DeSantis says, we might have to see if we can get Pelosi to run Florida's pension fund. She's showing this is pretty incredible. Generated $133 million of profits and a 16,930% return. I don't believe that number. That's 16,000%.

I mean, I guess this is since 1987. She was probably making money and adding to it consistently over that time. What if she just invested like, she just invested once and then... I'm very skeptical of that second number. You don't believe she could just 10x it and just 10x that again and then 10xed that again? And then 16x that last time. It's possible, but it's like, I don't know. I would just imagine that you're adding to it every year,

and you can't just take the current net worth and divide it by the amount of money that she had when she started investing, right? Like, what is 133? Anyways, that is a good place to end the show. We will not be getting into the fifth hour today. So sorry to disappoint everyone. But tomorrow we have some fun guests.

We have Brian Halligan, of HubSpot coming on. Also, he's a partner over at Sequoia, and then Fayfay Lee from World Labs. So very excited for all of that. And we hope you have a wonderful Veterans Day at home, wherever you are. And we'll see tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Thank you.