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

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(02:30) - Trump Pardons Trevor Milton (15:26) - Coreweave IPO Winners and VCs (30:55) - Dwarkesh Patel (01:07:40) - Casey Handmer (01:31:55) - Nadia Asparouhova (01:47:21) - Ishan Mukherjee (02:00:59) - Augustus Doricko (02:30:02) - Mike Knoop

You're watching at TPPN. It is Friday, March 28th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We have a whole bunch of guests. Our Cash is joining. We got his book here. He sent me the PDF. I printed it out. Out of respect. Out of respect. But if he doesn't, if he doesn't come on the show, it's basically a manuscript. If he bails on us, you heard it here first. I'm going to tweet out the link to the PDF. Piracy is back, folks. Napster's being sold for $200. And I, it's a threat. Honestly, you could just upload it to chat GPT.

It's easier. No. People can just query it. It's a fantastic book. I highly recommend going and picking it up. Stripe Press never misses. The folks over at Stripe are fantastic. We have another Stripe Press author coming on the show.

We have a bunch of incredible thinkers and founders and investors lined up. A little bit of an AI focused day, a little bit of focus on geoengineering today. Casey Hanmer and Augusta Dorigo will be coming in talking about solar and also cloud seating. Augustus has been accused of being a part of the deep state. He's breaking his silence. And he's breaking his silence. Yes, with us. So we should have some fun with that, obviously.

But it is kind of getting to a serious point with his drama where like I think that the tone needs to shift. And hopefully we can be part of that. But first, let's start with a great post by Delian. advocating that Trump should unparton Trevor Milton because of how bad his video is. Yeah, nothing else. It's just the video was just so bad. And so we're going to go through. Trevor Milton is the founder of Nicola, a electric vehicle company that Zero Emissions trucks went to prison over a fraud case and we'll break it all down.

Delian says, my God, can you be more narcissistic? Maybe take some responsibility for your fraudulent behavior. Yeah, it's not a good signal if Trump pardons you but doesn't post about it. Oh, yeah. Because if he was going to get positive attention from doing it, you'd think he would, you know, even if he knew he's going to get some negative attention, but I don't think anybody, it's hard for me to see, you know, prison is a sad thing. Yep.

But it's hard for me to see sort of whatever the argument is around freeing Trevor, given what seems to be, Pretty clear cut. Pretty clear cut. Totally. But let's read the Wall Street Journal article on it and get some facts and then we'll make and then we'll give you our take. So Trump pardoned Nicola founder Trevor Milton. Milton was convicted of fraud in 2022 for statements about zero emission trucks.

Milton said in a video posted to social media Thursday that he received a call from Trump who spoke about how much of an injustice this all was done by the same offices that harassed and prosecuted him. The greatest comeback story in America is about to happen, added Milton. The White House on Friday confirmed that the pardon had been granted. A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Milton in 2022 on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, which is kind of always the framework for these, anything that, anything that goes wrong in business.

It's all either securities fraud or wire fraud because you're making statements that lead to someone buying or selling a security that are false. During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Milton as a conman who duped investors, including in podcasts and on social media about the company's sales and the capabilities of its vehicles. In one instance, prosecutor said he created a video of what appeared to be a truck driving normally. This is the famous video of the truck going down the hill. But really, it was an inoperable prototype rolling down a hill. And that video always got me because I just feel like such a skill issue there. like can't you just build one prototype truck?

Can't you retrofit a truck? Even if it was a flat road. I mean, there are kids that are like engine swapping meados right now and you can't like engine swap a truck and put an electric power train in there. Like it doesn't seem that hard to get something functional. The hard part is actually the scaled manufacturing. Like that's what Tesla is good at. And that's why Tesla's so impressive.

Like the first Tesla was impressive too. They kind of, but even with the first Tesla, it was built on the Lotus Elise. And they just chopped it up and extended it and stuff. It was very much like, the criticism was like, that's just a lotus alice with an electric power train. And it was impressive. And it's great for all the investors that saw that. But it was never misrepresented. Elon was never like, oh, yeah, this design, like you might think it looks like a lotus al lease.

But really, we designed it. No, he just said like, yeah, we use the body from a lotus lease. We paid them. They're happy. We're happy. And that's why the Tesla Roadster, the first one, looks like a lotus lease. Yeah. It's fine.

And that's not fraud. That's just actually doing the important parts of your business and outsourcing the ones that aren't important. Calder in the chat says put him back in jail and don't let him out until he's built a truck. Yes, this is our thesis. Yes, I want to see, I want to see breakthrough biology writing from Elizabeth Holmes. I want to, I want to see a truly trustless ZK proof network hacked together by SBF in prison. He's moving prisons by the way, not a full story, but just an interesting fact. His morning routine now includes getting woken up at 3 a.m. Yeah, the real, by the guards.

The real sort of, you know, crypto protocol is one that you could build and launch from within jail, right? It's just pure code. You sort of get it on to one of the library computers and then it's just out in the world. I mean, SBF was telling that story of like, I'm the Jane Street guy. I'm this genius. I'm this like amazing, like, you know, hacker. And it's like, okay, show us. Show us.

Build, build the chain. Build something better. Build the chain. Write some code. What's the code, Rust? that they all use or something? I forget. I don't know.

It's a hard programming language. Programming for crypto is not easy. And so if he could drop some amazing code, some decentralized network or something, he would win a lot of fans back instead of just being like, ah, it was, you know, always, it's all talk. Yeah, and here's something.

Campaign finance records show that Milton and his wife donated more than 1.8 million to a Trump fundraising committee in October. Wait, like from prison? I guess. You can do anything for prison. That's what we've learned. Going to prison, you can do podcasts.

You can tweet apparently. You can make political donations. Like, what can't you do in prison? Yeah, you would think that from within prison, there should be some guardrails around sort of this type of thing. But, yeah. Oh, I mean, also Milton's lawyer is Brad Bondi, who's the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

And so clearly cozyed up to the Trump administration as things got worse for him. unclear if he was connected to the Trump administration before all of this happened. But if you're running a fraud, probably pays to, you know, start making his friends in Washington. Also, if you're not running a fraud, probably need a lobbying group anyway. The lesson is have friends in Washington. Yeah, I guess no matter what. Yeah. And so Milton maintained his innocence and he said he acted in good faith, accusing prosecutors of cherry-picking his public statements to build their

their case. And of course, there is an argument that this company could have been successful and was just kind of faking it till you make it. But there's always this question of like, when is too fake? When are you faking it too much? And there's always this like fine line. I think, I think it's a decent amount of faking is actually acceptable. Like it's fine to put up a CGI render of what you want to build and just say, hey, this is my goal. It's not here today. But it's so, it's so different. for it to be CGI or even a hype video versus a demo. Totally. Demos, faked demos are wrong.

But even Google has gotten in trouble for fake demos. And this is why there's any time you see these hard tech companies that won't be named on X creating what they, they sort of blur the line between hype video and demo. Yep. And I believe that that is wrong, right? Totally. You've got to kind of like draw the line around. Is this an advertising for a, you? future state or is this the current state? Yep. And the reason for that is if you're putting

something out that you're sort of positioning as a demo, but it's not real and then you're using that to raise money, that's wrong. Yeah, yeah. I do, it is interesting. Like Google had an AI demo where you could just take a user camera to kind of communicate with Gemini and use voice. And it was a very cool demo, but people dug into it and found out that part of it was sped up. And so they had done some light editing. So it wasn't a completely an edited video and they hadn't disclosed that, but they hadn't said that it wasn't edited. And so it was more just like a bad day in PR world, but you could imagine that if the stock had sold off a lot, there could be a security fraud case. But we'd still be like 25 steps away

from the founder CEO is in jail. The Nicola case is like much more, you know, like just way, way more red flags. And so Milton is 42 years old. He founded Nicola in his basement in 2015. He took it public in 2020 at a valuation of $3.3 billion. He resigned from the company later that year after a short seller's report alleged he made misrepresentations about the status of the company's vehicles and the production of hydrogen fuel needed to run them. So it wasn't even an electric vehicle. It was hydrogen. I remember. Nicola, whose market value briefly eclipsed that of automaker Ford before the fraud case against Milton filed for bankruptcy last month. Everybody, everybody has, they put Ford squarely and

their targets. Right. Adcock clearly wanted to raise it a bigger valuation to Ford. Otherwise, why would you price the round? Sure. You know, exactly. Just write about their market.

A million dollars above it or whatever. But Ford is Lindy. I think we're going to be driving Ford GTs in the year 3000. They're just not, they're not going away. Yeah. It's too great of a company. Henry,

lokey goaded. 100% I was about to say. Many people said, why don't you just attach a motor to the horse? Yes. Yeah. Robotic. Why don't you make robotic horses? Yeah.

Yeah. Teleoperated horses. He said, we have to wait a while until, you know, robotics can get there. But for now we're going to make cars. But hopefully the horse makes a comeback. Hopefully, you know, all this humanoid buzz with, with figure and Tesla Optimus, we know we want the robotic horse first. Yeah. I want to be galloping to work, the self-driving horse.

The horses are self-driving. You can literally train a horse to, hey, go home, and you can just be a kick him on the butt, and he'll just take you home. Yep. Who needs a waymo? Yeah. Who needs a waymo? That's right.

Let's bring horses back. Milton had sold roughly $400 million of stock in Nicola. Wow, that's a lot of secondary. De-listed his shares from the NASDAQ a few days ago. Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors asked the judge from Milton's criminal case to order him to pay back nearly $661 million to shareholders. The SEC sued Milton in federal court in July of 2021, alleging he, committed civil securities fraud.

That case, which is on hold during the criminal proceedings, remains active. The court records show the SEC declined to comment. So this is interesting. Like he got 400 million. They're going to ask him to pay back 661 million. But in the meantime, he's spending that money and making campaign donations. What happens? I mean, he will just be personally bankrupt, right?

So he can, so basically he has 400 million that he can just spend. and he can just give away and if there's no way to claw back like if he buys a house and then he goes into bankruptcy they'll force him to sell the house and then the house will go to the shareholders or the proceeds from the house

but if he donates it he's out now he's also he's he's probably got another 30 years of his career in hard tech I could easily see him running something back come back I mean I'd love to see it

I we've always maintained that it's always sad when people go to jail and we always believe in restorative justice and he certainly hope that he gets back on the mechanical horse. Yeah, the video to Delian's point, it just makes it feel like, you know, maybe he doesn't, maybe he doesn't actually feel bad at all. Yeah.

You know. It's odd. Odd. Anyway, Trump issued a raft of pardon since taking office and has pledged to crack down on what he has described as the weaponization of the justice system. Trump was twice indicted by the Justice Department after his first term and separately convicted of falsifying records in the state court of New York. Both federal cases have been dismissed, and Trump is appealing the state conviction. Earlier this week, Trump also pardoned Devin Archer,

the former Hunter Biden business partner who gave congressional testimony about their business dealings. Milton, Archer, and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whom Trump also pardoned, were all prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. The Justice Department has also asked a judge to drop a bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. So oddly, like, you know, a couple of Democrats getting pardoned, a couple of Republicans getting pardoned, a couple of seems like apolitical people who have maybe just, you know, asked politely, getting pardoned. I think the future, if stuff gets really, really political, will just be your, when you get

sentenced, you're in prison when your party's out of the office. And then so you get pardoned as soon as your guy gets into the White House. house and then you get unpardoned on day one of the new administration. And you're just in and out of person every four years. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's the future. Yeah.

And you're just donating to your team while you're in, you know, while the person's in prison to try to make sure like your team wins. Otherwise it could be an eight-year stay. Schrodinger's prisoner both in and out of the clink. Dark. But, you know, a lot of people made money. A lot of people lost money on Nicola. If you were buying puts, probably did pretty well.

Yeah, those short sellers. The short sellers. Yeah. Yeah, they probably did really well, actually. We should actually have them on. I wonder, do you think it was Hindenberg that did it? I wonder who did the actual Nicola shortseller report. But anyway, if you're interested in going long, going short,

you got to do it on public investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Folks. Go to public.com, sign up. The best in the business. And there's going to be a new stock that you can trade on public. Wait, before that.

now. Nicola in 2020 had some coverage from Hindenberg research, not the firm that you want to get coverage from. Nope. How to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto

OEM in America. That doesn't sound good. So anyways. Sounds a little rough actually. Hindenberg's kind of retired now. Yeah. Anyways. Out of the game.

Out of the game. But maybe there'll be a new viral short seller. that emerges soon. I think it's Screlly. Yeah, he's doing it. Yeah, he's been doing it. He's really doing it.

Yeah, makes sense. He actually realized you don't need to do a report. Yeah, you just need to post. Yeah, just post. Just post. But yeah, he's been, he's been good. Anyway, new stock coming to the market. Everyone's talking about Coreweave's IPO,

and we're going to go through the information's report on the winners in the Correwee IPO and why VC's missed out. We had Tane on the show, He had a great quote. He said, Corweave is the Web 3 to AI pivot done right. So it was originally a crypto mining company and now it's an AI data center. Potentially the best to ever do it. The best to ever do it.

Truly, truly. And it looks like it's going to be a fantastic outcome. It looks like it's going to price right around 40 up from five cents a share in 2019. Not too bad. And so we'll take you through who invested, when they invested, and how much money they made. Let's kick it off with the information reporting from Corey Weinberg. He says, Corweave's IPO, which started trading today, had a rocky path to the market, but delivered a windfall to Magnitar Capital.

The investor's big, the investor bet big on the AI data center startup, but presciently protected itself from the risk of big losses. And if you want to pull up what Corrieve is doing on public, I'd love to know, like, how is it trading right now? Because this is the IPO day. Today is the IPO day. I didn't even see. Boom. We got IPO news, folks. I'm pulling it up right now.

And I'm going to need some soundboard from you. I'm going to need some public.com data from you. I'm going to need a lot of stuff. It's so crazy. I didn't actually realize that it was trading. Yeah. There's always this trickle of like the S-1 comes out. And then there's gossip articles.

Will they go out? Will they not go out? Will they scrap it? Well, they went out. It started trading today. It had a rocky path to market, but delivered a windfall to Magnitar Capital, the investor bet big on the AI data center startup.

But they also protected themselves from big risk, risk of big losses, it seems like they sold at a certain point in the secondary market. So Magnetar invested when Corweave when others wouldn't touch it. And that helped it get favorable terms that turned 850 million in equity into 4.3 billion, folks. Let's hear it based on the $40 per share IPO price. That's a good return. And they weren't exposed to significant risk.

Magnetar is the biggest of a handful of winners in the offering, which priced Thursday night at a lower price than expected. So Corweave has been long been controversial. It borrowed billions to build data centers that serve the huge demands of artificial intelligence. That debt really scared off Silicon Valley's big venture firms, and none of them will be celebrating one of the biggest tech listings in recent years. A lot of VCs have a blind spot said Nick Carter, former guest of the show, a venture capitalist focused on crypto startups. And he made an early investment personally in Corweave. We had him on to talk about that.

We'll have to reshare that clip today. The conventional wisdom as a VC is you don't want to invest in capital-intensive businesses. This is something that we've seen again and again. They're harder to underwrite. And they did quite the party round. Oh, yeah. If you look at some of the friends and family, there's a Russian poker player, an Italian music producer. I love it.

A New York-based plastic surgeon and a Sesame Street voice actor. That's exactly what you want to see. Which is kind of what you want to optimize for in the early stages. You never know. one day you might need some as a founder. The founder might need some plastic surgery. The next day you need a voice actor. People talk about this day.

It's a diversity of thought. Exactly. You want diversity of thought around the table. Yeah, the next day you might say you might be down to your last hundred grand. You need to take it to Vegas. Yep. Multiply it. You got your Russian poker player.

If you can get them into the country, that's helpful. You need to make a jingle. Yeah, the jingle, the Italian music producer. The big one, the big one that's surprising me. Do you want to sing a core weave jingle in Italian's voice? What's their tagline? Corweave, big data centers, highly leveraged. Yeah, I don't know if this is accurate,

but their debt to equity ratio right now is 800, over 811X. Let's go. We love leverage. That doesn't seem possible. I don't know if it's right, but. When Corweave started, investors were betting on more of the caniness of its founders, Michael Entrator, Brian Venturo,

Brannan McBee, then on their business plan, the first business of Corweb, Ethereum mining became worthless after Ethereum holders essentially cut miners out of the process in the fall of 2020. That, of course, was the merge when Ethereum went to proof of stake as opposed to proof of work. I had mentally written off the investment, Carter said. I thought they were going out of business. Instead, the founders repurposed chips and computing equipment they used to mine Ethereum into other uses like graphics rendering and AI.

And of course, Crusoe Energy also did something similar. They were using peaker plants and oil and gas extraction, just the extra energy that's sitting stranded on the grid. You can't use it to power homes. You drop a bunch of server farm right where the energy is super cheap or maybe even free. And then you start mining crypto. And then over time, you start training AI models. So let's go into Magnetar Capital. Magnetar, which turned a $50 million loan to Corweave four years ago into a multi-billion dollar stake is set to be the largest beneficiary from the IPO.

So it sounds like It sounds like they were They know what they're doing Yeah they knew I mean Absolutely insane Former Citadel Traders Founded in 2005

Magdatar's core reef's largest investor And has continued to back the company Through its most recent private fundraising Yeah Its name is mentioned 157 times In the company's IPO Perspectus More than twice as often as the CEO

I mean you look at this chart It's like So this is a goal A convertible note in 2020 At $2 a share They did the series B at $5.5.5.5.5.5 and $58 a share. And then they also came in the series C, $38.95 a share. And then they did a tender offer at 47 a share.

And so they have done just again and again and again been involved in this business. So this was cool. So the managing partner of Magnitar, David Snyderman, says, sometimes the stars just align. I think we were the first firm to get comfortable lending against that asset called high performance compute. She's referring to Corrieve's inventory of high-end chips produced by NVIDIA to power AI products.

Some of Magnetar's investments came in the form of loans that turned into equity. This is the convertible note facility. Yeah, if it was a convertible note, it's sort of, it's not sort of confusing to just say this was. I think they did all of the above. Yeah. I think they did do just straight up debt with warrants on top. And they converted those because it went well. well. It also vacuumed up shares from executives selling privately in secondary offerings,

but it forged an agreement preventing founders from selling more than 20% of their shares in the year following the company's IPO. Remember, Tane was telling us that there was a lot of secondary action by the founding team. I think they had sold hundreds of millions of dollars. And so they've created this agreement that, hey, the founders won't sell more than 20% of their stakes, but because the company's so big, it's still like a huge amount of money and a huge amount of liquidity in, you know, a frothy AI market. Like, this is a, this is an important IPO because if it does well and it becomes a really strong business, I just incredibly bullish for the entire industry. But at the same time, like, there is a lot of debt. It's an early stage company.

Like, they've only been in business for a couple of years. Yeah. And so I just hope that the angel investor, that's the Sesame Street voice actor, was able to get some liquidity. I think they probably did fantastically. I mean, Nick Carter did great. So why, why would the Sesame Street actor not do, not do well. I wonder if they were able to prevent a lot of dilution just by being able to fund a lot of this growth through the debt off. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it seems like it was kind of 50-50 because they did take a lot of dilution from the penny warrants, right? That's why Magnetars mentioned so many times in the IPF perspectives, but, you know, probably less than if they were just trying to, hey, we need 50 million dollars to buy a bunch of chips and build a data center. And,

We have no revenue, and so it's a $10 million pre-money, and we're going to give up 80% of the business or something. Like, what is the alternative if you're not doing debt at this scale? As Corrieve grew, Magnetar lent another $730 million, collateralized against Magnetars, oh, oops, where am I? Magnetar Capital. Collateralized against Corweev's contracts to sell computing power to Microsoft and Nvidia.

Correve has paid $66 million in interest so far on those loans. so less than 10% and these mature by the end of the decade. Magnetar was the second biggest investor in Corweaves fundraising last year, putting in another 350 million document show. Magnetar and tech investment firm, Co2, were able to hedge their bets. They got a put which allowed them to sell back their stakes to Corweath if the stock fell two years after the IPO. That could become an important investment term because investors in the round paid 3895 a share,

meaning they stand to lose money on the deal if Corwee's stock goes dead. down much after the $40 a share IPO. Of course, they might not exercise that immediately. They might wait it out, but see where the stock is in a year or two, but they do have that put option for a while. If investors were to exercise the right, it would mostly, it would be very costly for Corweave. The company said in its filing, spokesperson for Co2 and Magnitar declined to comment. They're not talking because they're in a quiet period, of course. Several funds are underwater on their investments. Corweave in Corwee at the IPO price, investment firms Jane Street, Fidelity, Macquarie, Black Rock, Newberger, Berman, and others bought $650 million

in stock last November from early investors. Moment of Silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by public.com. They bought it 47 a share, 15% above the IPO price. Magnetar best known for winning bets on dodgy mortgage loans before the financial crisis. These are former Citadel guys, after all, they know what they're doing, is now deep in the AI investing frenzy. to write one of the largest checks to OpenAI, also a CoreWeave customer in OpenAI's $10 billion

funding round this month, Bloomberg reported. Magnetar launched a VC arm to leverage its relationship with Corvieve by investing in new AI startups in exchange for access to the Nvidia chips CorWeve owns, and Corweave put 50 million in that. And we've talked about these like VC funds attached to startups before. You said, you know, maybe it doesn't make sense for perplexity, but in Corweave's case, it's like they have the underlying data center, you know, they have something that's like very complimentary to an AI company, an AI app, an application layer company. And so maybe it makes a little bit more sense in this case. And if you're building an AI application company and training or inference is one of your

most large expense line items, maybe it's great to actually have that relationship really tight and take some equity. I think it makes, you know, once you're maybe past the $10 billion stage, or at least a billion dollars of revenue, do your VC fund. Yeah, like it seems like Corrie has product market fit, right? It's a pretty basic business. They build a data center and then they sell access to that data center. And they're doing great.

And interestingly, Dylan Patel just put out on semi-analysis, the GPU cloud cluster max rating system, how to rent GPUs in the US. I'm going to try and refresh this. But I believe he gave CoreWeep a very strong rating. It actually rated a few. Let me see if I can go to semi-analysis. You want to keep reading?

The article's mostly over. I can cover a little bit from Vidia. Yeah. So semi-analysis rated every single Neo-Cloud. Corweave, Crusoe, Together AI, Oracle, Azure, AWS, Lambda, Google Cloud. And interestingly, Corweave got the highest ranking. They are the only semi-analysis, they're the only one that won the semi-analysis platinum tier.

In the gold tier was Crusoe, Together AI, Nebius, Leptin, AI, Oracle, and Azure. but AWS got silver and Google Cloud got bronze, which is something that most people wouldn't expect from a hyperscaler. But we've seen with Google Cloud, they just had to buy, they had to shell out $32 billion for upping their security. And even though they are known as the greatest hyperscaler in many ways, there's a little bit of like maybe they were behind the ball on specifically running AI workloads in the cloud for other companies.

Whereas CoreWeave built their cloud specifically with AI in mind for the last few years, kind of had a fresh start, maybe Greenfield project and did very well and earning high marks from Dylan Patel over at semi-analysis. Anyway, there's another interesting line in here about Les Wexner. He's in here. He owns 3% of CoreWeave. He invested $1 million through a trust, and that's worth something like $800 million. dollars now of course. Lex Wexner

couldn't happen to a nicer guy. A controversial figure. He's been linked to Jeffrey Epstein and he also in here he used to own Victoria's Secret. And so again not your traditional AI data center investor but someone who got on the cap table early and rode that stake in a really huge way. It was roughly a 700X.

Banger. Bangor. never thought we'd be hitting the size gong for size of size size size is size though size of size and vizda is also in the deal probably Silicon Valley's biggest winner from the offering yeah it's good to see them get a win to be on finally finally yeah jensen needed it they've been sitting on the sidelines been a rough yeah they really did need like an AI narrative for them they needed like something to really hump the stock so they're of course the dominant chipmaker they have made a crucial supporting role

as one of Corvieve's largest investors. It owns about 3% of the company fully diluted after having bought about $100 million worth of shares in the series B in early 2023, which was, you know, that chat GPT moment was just taking off and scaling laws were just kind of becoming popularly known. It's so strange that NVIDIA and Lex Wexner

have the same ownership. That is crazy. Correve. Yes. Narrative violation. So Indy owns about $700 million at the IPO price. The secret Jeffrey Epstein guy has the same ownership levels as Nvidia. One of the greatest companies of all time.

In Corweave, one of the highest profile. I mean, it really is like just a bizarre company. Like they're doing amazing stuff. You can see from Dylan Patel's analysis, like the product that they've created is clearly top notch. I believe that Dylan Patel is very objective in his analysis and he's not because of the nature of his business. There are some lists in this industry that you can more or less pay to get on.

Yes, but I don't believe that Dylan Patel says. Exactly. Well, it's 1130. Oh, it is. And we have a special guest. We do. And I believe they are in the waiting room. Let's bring them in.

What's up, guys? Hey, how you doing? There he is. What's going on? See you guys. It's great to have you. Good to see you. I heard you've been doing space repetition to practice for interviews.

So I've been doing it. It says your name is Dwarkesh Patel. You have a podcast and you interviewed somebody named Mark who owns a website. called Facebook.com. Can you tell me about that? Yeah. In fact, I made an entire Anki deck just for you guys. Really? No way. We're honored. How's the book launch been going? How's the press tour? How are you doing

today? It's been going good. The people have all kinds of a book called The Scaling Era and it compiles the interviews I've been doing about AI. And, you know, know people like as you mentioned mark and demis and dario the heads of the AI last but also researchers and engineers and philosophers and economist about uh and it's been really interesting because AI is one of those topics where there's so many fractal questions you could ask about what is its impact going to be how are you going to train it how do you even think about a super intelligence so um been dealing with a lot of different kinds of questions uh which has made it interesting

that's great uh how contentious was the was the sort of book process did you know you wanted to go with with Stripe, I imagine you could have had your pick of the litter in terms of legacy publishers that promised you all sorts of things, but you happen to own, you know, sort of your own distribution, so maybe it was just about picking the right sort of underlying partner for it. It honestly was never a matter of picking a publisher. The main question was whether I should do a book in the first place. And so some folks that Stripe Press reached out. And if I was going to do a book, it would be with them because, as you know, their reputation

perceives them. And so then there was just like deciding, do I want to do the book or not. And I think retrospect it was the right call. I think I'm really delighted with how it turned out. I want to talk about acceleration. Are you feeling the acceleration? Like, mathematically, we are not accelerating GDP yet. Although technically we are today.

I think GDP ticked up just a little bit, which means we're technically accelerating. It must be your podcast. Yes, hopefully. Yeah, hopefully we're responsible. But, you know, energy use is not, is not accelerating. even some of the benchmarks are kind of saturating. We're not seeing acceleration curves. We're seeing solid growth.

But at the same time, it feels like we're on the precipice of acceleration. But what does it mean to feel the acceleration for you? I think it's a really good question because we have these models which we think are smart. And as you say, we haven't seen them. Even automate the things which we, like when we're having a conversation, we'll be like, oh, the call center workers, they should be really worried. And they still have got their jobs, right? So what's going on?

As you know, people have been talking about what we need to make the models cheaper. When Deep Sea came out, they were like, oh, it's going to be Jevin's Paradox. And we'll be using them way more and that they're cheaper. I think the real bottleneck is just we've got to make them smarter. They're already so cheap. It's like two cents per a million tokens or something, ridiculous. I think the real bottleneck for me using them more is not their price, but them being more useful, being able to take over more parts of the economy.

Yeah. Do you think that intelligence is all we need? Andre Carpathie was talking about the importance of agency. I talked to other people about maybe it's all like what makes humans effective. It's not just intelligence. It's also agency. It's also coordination, friendliness, networking. Tyler Cowens talked about like, do we even need to map the different parts of like the skill tree that humans have, like charisma, wisdom?

Like underrated is like these, like the, AIs are getting more intelligent, but they're already, like, maxed out on wisdom, right? But do we need to think about a different taxonomy here? Or do we just need to max out intelligence and everything else will come? No, I think you're absolutely right. I think you need a lot more skills. There has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough, we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is. And in fact, in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a beginning.

So the big example here is when Deep Blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess. People thought that this was like a big breakthrough in intelligence in general because we thought that what chess required was the general intelligence. And you might have heard this concept of AI complete problems where if you solve this problem, then you've solved intelligence. So people said that about self-driving. The touring test was supposed to be to AI complete. We've gone through all of these sub-components of intelligence and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to it. The thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se, although that's a part of it. I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this global hive mind where the reason we can make iPhones and we can make buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency.

It's the fact that there's so much specialization. There's so much capital deepening. People are just like doing things, trying different ideas. AIs need to be smarter in order to do that. They need to have more agency in order to do that. But once they can, if you have millions of EIs running around trying different things, that's when we get the real acceleration and you'll feel it in your blood. When you say millions of AIs, you've said that you think there will be billions of AIs running around.

Like, what does that actually mean? Like, how can we quanta... Are we just talking like chat GPT DAUs? Are we talking about individual threads? Because you can inference multiple threads on a single chip. That's right. How are you thinking it when you think, it sounds more concrete when you say there will be billions of AIs,

but is that really just like there will be a hive mind that is equivalent to billions of people? Are we talking about like one or maybe each model is like one entity, but then there's sub threads? How do you think about like that concept of like billions of AIs? Honestly, I don't think anybody knows. I think it'll just like depend on how the tech tree shapes out. Sure.

I have heard like these wild ideas in some of these interviews where one person at J.I. Khocher mentioned, this idea of the blob. And the blob is right now, you know, it's really hard for, if you have an institution or organization company, it's really hard for the person at the center to have that much awareness of what's happening in the company to control it to any great extent. Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain as any other Chinese person or any other person in general. And in the future, you can imagine that, look, the thing at the center just has way more compute and it's not clear whether you think about it is like more copies of AI

Xi Jinping or AI Sundar Pichai or something but you you could just have this like huge blob that's constantly you're you it's like learning more things it's like writing every single press release the company releases it's reading every single pull request it's answering every single customer response that I don't know if that at all helped answer the question yeah it's just it's a very weird question of like how this will actually play out will, like, do we need to recreate the concept of like an individual brain and then copy paste it a billion times? Or do we just need one really big brain? It's unclear to me. I don't know. Jordy, what do you got? How did you feel on Wednesday, this sort of like Ghibli moment? A lot of

people were saying, oh, I can't even go on X. It's just all slop. And my takeaway was this is not slop. This is beautiful. This is like actually the most beautiful the timeline has ever looked. powerful thing about that moment. It was the first time that you, like, I felt that the entire world could get consistently perfect outputs without any sort of like prompt engineering and basically just one-shotting these outputs in this sort of very scaled way. Are you, are you, are you, um, so to me, I get very excited about it because it's like having any human be able to create beautiful images out of text is fantastic. And I think we should be excited about that. But how did you kind of react to some people saying, like, you know, oh, this is bad or like, I'm going to log off forever, right?

You saw people that were just like, okay, like, I'm going to delete my account and just leave X now. It's over. How many times have those people said that? Exactly. I think that's a very zero. Some people were saying things like, oh, you're like eating up the, like this, you know, fossil fuel, which is like our affection for Ghibli somehow by making these things. I think it's just a very zero-sum view of the world. where there can be a limited amount of beauty,

there can be a limited amount of joy. I just don't think that. And can I be honest? Like the thing I was really feeling when all these givly images were coming out, I became more of, I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future. Where like, look, you're getting a glimpse

just from these like early images of how cool and beautiful the things AI makes or helps us make will be. Just imagine this scaled up like 100 X,000 X, integrated into all our senses, maybe even into our minds, integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth. Yeah, I'm just like the future could be really beautiful. I agree.

Yeah, I'm wearing like a VR goggles and it's making everyone beautiful. It's really rose-colored glasses, right? Yeah. Yeah. To begin with. Yeah. How do you feel so Manus AI is apparently doing like a road show in the United States right now, sort of raising from American VCs potentially?

I saw some people pushing back on the timeline saying like, you know, bad look to any American VC that does that. How do you feel, you know, and the criticism would be like, you know, we're in this sort of AI, you know, Cold War, American, you know, venture capital dollars shouldn't be sort of funding companies that are potentially competing with U.S. AI labs or application layer companies. What's your sort of broad take on this sort of like cross-border investment in AI? Yeah, I was in China a few months earlier, and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture capital system their felt and the tech ecosystem generally. Because after the 2021 crackdowns, people are just like really pulled back. And it sounds like after the deep seek moment, that sort of change, at least in the AI, at least in AI because now the state, you know, the city funds and whatever are more willing to pitch in. Yeah. How should people react to this? I'm up to minds because one, I do believe that there is, like, there could be an intelligence explosion. You really want to be ahead of that and you don't want to help them get ahead on that.

So I think like the expert controls and whatever are wise. As for just, manna seems like in the middle ground here where I wouldn't want to just generally try to harm China by terrifying batteries or cars or something. This is an application of AI and it's complementary to American AI Foundation. because they're using the Claude model, right? So I honestly, I don't have a strong thing. What do you guys think? I don't, I don't, I'm exactly in the same position as you. I don't have a, you know, if American, you know, I did find it a little bit weird

that some American venture capitalists were just like cheering on deep seek, just like, you know, blanket statement like, you know, open source is good, this is good when it felt like the way the launch was like rolled out and announced was done in a way to potentially sort of harm American financial markets. But my take has been that just on a pure investment finance level, like investing in a Chinese company just can be difficult to get your money back at a certain point because the money just gets kind of stranded there. And then depending on who's in charge of America at the time, it could be very onerous

to bring that money back. But I want to stay on China real quick. I thought, I mean, fantastic piece. I don't even know what you call a video essay essay. but one of the things that really stuck out to me as a creator like yourself was the was the lack of a Chinese Joe Rogan basically and and I was wondering like have you have you thought about that more have you unpacked that more like you would almost expect that even if all the crazy censorship is true why is there no power law winner and there's a Joe Rogan who just spouts propaganda

constantly like what is going on that's driving the lack of these like long tail like you know, like country renowned, country famous people. Yeah, I feel like you guys might actually have a good perspective on this because somebody might have said, why doesn't tech have their like Jirogan equivalent and you guys started your podcast network? And I think somebody could have said before you guys started your podcast network, why doesn't something like this exist already? Honestly, I don't speak Chinese and I don't, this is their secondhand stuff I heard in China.

I feel reluctant to make grand conclusions about Chinese culture based on, like, why don't they have a Joe Rogan? And it's because, like, this is Chinese culture is like this or something. The sense I got was that they are more concerned, like, whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume, is often more focused on practical matters. And if you listen to Joe Rogan, it's very much like, let's just shoot the shit about whatever. I get the sense that it's like that is just not that interesting, at least the people I met. Yeah, yeah, it's less practical stuff. I wonder if there's also an effect where just some of the first social networks probably accelerated more quickly to these highly diffuse algorithmic driven TikTok feeds that allow for

smaller microcelebrities essentially, whereas in America we've been building up this celebrity culture for so long that we have this more of a power law dynamic. I don't know. I don't really have a thesis on it. That's that that's super built out. But it is fascinating. Yeah, that's interesting. Have you been there? I was there once on a layover, but Jordi did live there for a while. In 2016, I worked at a, I went to Fudan. It was a little hedge fund called High Flyer. Yeah, no big deal. No, I just studied abroad there. So I was there for a semester and I worked out of China Accelerator, which is like a startup, accelerator. So a very, very interesting experience that I don't. I mean, the scale is crazy. I was in

Guangzhou, even just for a day. And the scale of the buildings there, it's just, it really is remarkable. Like, you need to see it in person. Because the pictures kind of compress everything. You don't really understand until you're there. The one, the one thing that I found that was weirdly fascinating is I would, I, for some reason, I don't know if there's an iPhone camera at that time, but I found it very difficult to get high quality images because it was so polluted. that like something about like your own eyes would be able to kind of like you know I don't know I was ignore it but I would take a picture and I'm like that's not what it looks like and I realized every time that it was just like certain areas were so heavily polluted that

the iPhone camera would just kind of bug out but it's like you're a question for you uh you know something from this week that I thought was funny was that sort of like we were all kind of like holding our breath for the next like chat gbt moment and then it was also you know chat GPT with their image generation product. Do you think we should be holding our breath for sort of another company to sort of experience this sort of moment like that where it's just full, you know, complete takeover of the mind share, right? Because mind chair is just so important right now. The sort of benchmarks come out and everybody in our corner of the internet is like hyper-fixated on it. But the average consumer, you know, one of the things I thought was fascinating is, you know,

John and I had a couple Ghibli posts each that sort of broke containment. And a lot of people were quoting it and saying, all right, like, tell me what this app is, everybody. Like, what's the joke? Like, they still didn't know, like, chat, GPT or anything like that. But I think it would be amazing for the industry if another company could have, you know, a moment that big. Do you see something like that happening, you know, this year?

Or have we sort of reached a level? Yeah, like the agent stuff, like flight booking. You could see that, like, there's some application that would go real broad. Is there any like next milestone that you're waiting for? If somebody did get a reliable agent to work, I think that would just be like that would have a similar break the internet in a way that you personally could use. And you could just like log in and I think it'll probably be one of the foundational lab companies. People have been for years trying to build agents and they just haven't worked. And it makes it it makes me think that that's a fundamental limitation of the current models.

and so it'll just be the company that is building a future model that is geared towards computer use and so forth. That is what I'd expect to be. I mean, I was thinking the other day, remember when Sam got fired and people were posting on Twitter, oh, there's something, what did I see? What did I see? QSTAR, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's why he got fired.

But it is notable that in retrospect, if you were following the QSTAR rumors, you actually would have been in a good position to anticipate, you know, there would be this reasoning breakthrough. That's kind of what they were talking about at the time. Similarly, GPD 4.5 and Grog 3 being not that much better. If you were following Twitter and six months ago, you would have seen, oh, pre-training might plateau, but we'll have to go with inference scaling or something.

So maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's going to happen. I mean, I remember the time I was just like, these idiots on Twitter are just like, they don't know what they're talking about. at the second rumor mill. And in the rest of them, like, eh, kind of like, I mean, you know,

you like take it with a grain of solve, but they kind of had the big picture. There's like no secrets. Yeah, there was always this funny dynamic where people were criticizing Sam for launching chat GPT without telling the board,

but then at the same time, people were criticizing Sam for like being non-technical and not driving the product forward. And I was like, no matter what you think of Sam, like those two things cannot be true simultaneously. Like, you have to pick aside here.

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

And I'm wondering, like, what is your P stagnation? Like, just your probability that something happens. Maybe people freak out. Maybe there's just, you know, one world government or something. But we actually see AI stall for a significant amount of time, like 50 years. There's no intelligence explosion purely for stagnation reasons. Do you think that's a possibility? Like 10, 20%.

Oh. I think there is a dynamic I talked about earlier. where we can't in the past we have underestimated how much it takes to make a coherent intelligence that has agency and so forth right that could be part of it another is that there is no intelligence explosion so sorry I mean the the most important thing here is look we can keep increasing compute that we're putting into these systems for maybe the next five ten years because computers is growing at this ridiculous rate where in in three years we're gonna have ten X the amount of

global AI compute that we have right now. But at some point, right now we're spending 2% of GDP on compute and data centers and stuff like that. You can't just keep like 10xing that forever. So if somehow this whole deep learning paradigm is wrong and we just like totally miss the boat somehow, that negative it happening. That's how I give it at 10, 20%. Otherwise, if we do get AGI, I'm of the opinion that we're not, it would just be so hard to contain it. Like, it's an incredibly powerful technology.

Even if there's no intelligence explosion, even if it doesn't help you make an ASI or something, just AGI alone is like, would just make the economy explode and all kinds of crazy shit. I mean, on the, like, there's a little bit of a force of deceleration, like the GDP question, but also just,

I've had this idea that, like, no matter how intelligent you are, you can't break the laws of physics, at a certain point, you need to, like, get the sand out of the ground and turn it into silicon and, like, at a certain point, just moving the sand around fast enough, even at light speed, you're not 10xing every two years. And so it feels like there could be a slowing down, even as we're having the robots do basically everything. It's like the robots are still maxed out by physics.

I don't know. I was thinking about this in the morning, actually. And the intuition I was thinking about is, so, Since 1750s, we've had 2% economic growth in the world. Before that, it was like a tenth of that, right? 0.2%. If you were around in the 1500s or 1,000 and somebody said there'd be like 2% growth, I think you might, given your reference class, have been like,

look, it just takes a long time to learn how to artificially select crops and how to build like new structures and aqueducts and whatever. That is a process that takes a while. So why do you think you're just going to be going through, like, increasing that 2-3% a year. And in Rochester, it is like a really weird. You look like the last 100 years of history. We're discovering all this new things in physics and chemistry and so forth.

The last 50 years we're like, we start with a transistor and now we're talking on this magical screen. And that was just like physics didn't bottleneck that. I think like you get another 10x and I don't see any in principle reason why at the next X-10-X physics is like just would not allow the robots to move fast enough. Yeah, I mean, certainly on the GDP question. I think the energy question is like maybe a little bit murkier, but then there's probably other ways to optimize and still get those GDP lifts,

even with energy growing at like a more reasonable, less explosive rate. So I think I agree with you there. I'm sure you've talked about this in other interviews and with some of the individuals that are sort of leading initiatives at these companies. but what's your sort of broad take on Apple's position and how they've been approaching everything in AI? You know, it's sort of like I've seen, you know, they've sort of led with like Gen Moji almost as much as they've led with like, you know, everything, all the potential of what you would want out of sort of AI assistant. But do you think these, you know, companies like Apple and Google sort of like figure out product development and like proper distribution? of these products is I feel like that's been the big critique.

It's just like they have every every possible advantage, such talented, you know, team members and it has to be so frustrating. And it should be a sustaining advantage or sustaining innovation. If you're looking at the innovator's dilemma framework and yet it feels like it might wind up being disruptive. I don't know. Yeah. They're not AGI filled enough, you know.

Like if you treat it like another feature, well, I mean, even if you're like another feature, it's like mysterious why Siri doesn't work on my phone. But it's like more people basically. And if you take that seriously, you're not just going to be like, oh, and the 25th department in our complex is about at making Siri better at speaking or something. It's like this is the future. Yeah.

And then that's is that the, that then becomes like the gigabole case for safe super intelligence, meaning like none of the features or like consumer applications really matter at all today and you shouldn't even release them and you should just sort of accelerate towards the end goal that enables all the other goals. That's an interesting point. I think maybe somewhere in between where like if you didn't release chat GPT, you wouldn't have been able to just like know that this is a feature people really wanted and that they

would get a lot of use of as compared to the other things people were using GPT 3.5 to do. And I wonder if other things that, other like features of AGI will be similar where if you don't, if you don't deploy it to a bunch of engineers on cursor, you just like won't know what it would actually make something a good coding bot. The counter argument to this, and I think what the SSI people would say is that they actually are deploying, but they're deploying towards the one thing they care about, which is accelerating AI research. And they don't need to do that externally. They can just do that internally. And so the basic question is, can you get this like closed loop?

where you build the AIs, which are helping you accelerate AI research, dot, dot, dot, super intelligence. I'm like 50-50 on that question. But that other 50% is like a big deal. Yeah, you mentioned AGI-pilled. Is there a difference between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled? And why do OpenAI co-founders seem incapable of starting anything but a foundation model company?

Yeah. I always wondered, like, I just want one of them to be like, yeah, actually, I'm starting a travel company. But it seems to be like they're traveling a lot after their jester gone. They only know one thing. They're all one-trick ponies. I mean, I love them all, but it's just funny that none of them started anything else. It's the only thing that matters, maybe.

Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think some people, I wouldn't even put it as ESI, because even you don't believe in this, like, godlike intelligence that's going to control the world. I'm not sure I believe it either. I think there's AGI pill and there's, like, transformative AI pill, where you say, look, even if they're just like humans, if they have the advantages

that AIs will just intrinsically have because of the fact that they're digital, which is the fact that they can be copied with all of their knowledge, right? So think of the most skilled engineer in your company like Jeff D. Norelius Setskever. You can copy that person with all their task of knowledge and everything.

You can merge different copies. You can scale and distill AGIs. Those advantages alone and the fact that there will be billions of copies as we increased the amount of compute in the world, that alone is enough for transformation in the sense of going from, you know, like what we were like before the Industrial Revolution to the Industrial Revolution pace of growth. And so I think somebody can be age-guile in the sense to say like, yeah, I expect like human-level intelligence to emerge in the next 10 years. But they still don't take that seriously as in like, okay, well, what does that imply about what is happening through the economy?

Does that just mean like, oh, you've got a smart personal assistant or does it mean like, no, we're in a very different growth regime? Last question. Two last questions, I guess. Go for it. One question. So are there any people in the book that you feel like in the fullness of time are sort of very under under hyped or not getting enough attention? People that are unsung heroes that maybe don't post a lot on X today.

But when we look back, you know, 15 years from now, we'll be like, you know, those were the people that we're doing. Because there's this weird phenomenon right now where it's like if you're just loud on the internet, like you just like, you know, you get you suck mindshare. and attention and maybe there's somebody like a building over that's doing more impactful work or really at the forefront that isn't posting at all because they're actually on to something. That's a really good question. I think a lot of the people I've interviewed have subsequently, or at the same time, like, are well known, right? So even if you're not a lab CEO, if you're like a Leopold or you're Sholto or Trenton, people

know who you want. are on Twitter as well. The person who I think might be underrated still is an interview I did that we only released in the book. So we have two interviews that we kept for the book. One of them is Ajaya Kotra. And she is somebody who has been doing this really interesting, like since the 2010s, these really interesting analyses of how much compute did evolution spend in total in order to, like, over the billions of years evolution has been going. Like how do we model that as a computational like path-finding exercise and using that as an upper bound

on how long it will take to build AGI and then like how much computer does the human brain use, how much how much time to we spend learning as kids and how much compute is that in total compared to how long it takes to train these models. What does that teach us about

how much better these models could get given this overhang? That has informed I think a lot of, oh shit, sorry, this is the wrong answer. Although a GI is excellent and she's also underrated. The one who is also super super underrated is Carl Scholler,

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

And he just says all these galaxy brain takes. Like one of them was you looked at the research on what changed between chimpanzee brains and human brains. And he's like, oh, there's a bunch of structural similarities. It's just that the human brain is bigger. So this lends credence to the scaling hypothesis. All kinds of galaxy brain stuff. I have one more question. And then we'll let you go.

By the way, X is down. I think you broke it or we broke it together. I think we broke it. But yeah, we're still live on YouTube. Yeah. But how do you think about more on like the business side? Because I've just, I think everybody's been fascinated with your journey. When you started your podcast, everybody would have said like there's enough podcasts.

Like we don't need, you know, we just don't need more of them. That clearly is not true. There's plenty of white space. And your growth is proof of that. But how do you think about value capture and what you're doing? Because I'm sure you've had people come to you and say, like, like, hey, look, like, you know, just, just come, keep doing the show, but we're going to give you $50 million of sort of like shares and you don't have to go.

Nobody is coming to be with that. Well, they should, I think. Yeah. But yeah, like, how do you think about kind of, I think there's this general fear in the tech community right now where it's like, this is the last two to three years where you can like, you know, accumulate wealth and then like it's over. And I don't believe that that's true. But how do you sort of balance like, you know, you're doing something.

you love all day long, which is just like talking to interesting people and like thinking about the future and you know, humanity's potential and technology and all this stuff. But, you know, how do you balance, how do you balance all that, that fear and, you know, wanting to capture value from your work, but also wanting to not be conflicted, right? And being able to just be sort of this independent actor. Yep. I actually am very curious about the answer for you guys because even though you're the sort of the network you're starting now it like just it started with a much bigger bang than my podcast are starting out with so i i assume you actually got a bunch of these kinds of offers right as you're like oh this is like new and exciting well yeah we care we care a lot

about you know being like switzerland but specifically from like the investor the investor side right like long term we want to have any sort of investor be able to come on the show and talk about what they're doing that's right and i would imagine the same thing for you like you don't want to be like you know so tied in or have to one foundation model, you know, company that you can't talk about the incredible things that someone else is doing, right? Yeah, yeah. I have had like different podcast networks or whatever reach out to me in the past and I've seriously considered them. In one case, I was like close to saying yes. And in retrospect, it was like, this was many, many years ago before like the podcast had grown that much at all. And it was like, we'll give you

we'll edit the show for you and we'll produce it for you. And all we ask is 50% of the revenue you earn through the future. And you're 50% of your lifetime earnings. 50% of your lifetime earnings. But I had a couple of friends who I was like, they're like, dude, it's like working. Just do it yourself. And I'm glad. Because also another thing that might have influenced your decision as well is talent is so key.

talent in the sense of I think it really matters to have one or in this case in your case two people who are like we care this is our vision and we are going to instill it rather than this is an institution where I'm the face of it but secondly what I was going for

is like talent as your editors your other people on your team for me I've just been super delighted with the people I get to work with there and it just like the care and attention to detail they have just would not be replicated with here's a team of editors at this podcast network it's like instead of the people

what I've sought out and I love working with and I give them detailed feedback and they give me detailed feedback and you know yeah that that's that's also what makes it special yeah onto the specifics around do you think the the general techno you know techno capitalist fear of you know like you know basically like I think a lot of you know 22 year olds right now are coming in to their sort of careers and they're saying like well everybody's going to be paperclipped and a few years, like you've got to sort of like create value and capture it now so that you're okay in this sort of like AGI future. I do feel like that's maybe sort of common fear throughout history, right, where there's like people have this sort of pending sense of doom sometimes.

But do you think that's like, you know, what would you say to somebody that that had that sense? I think like, I think the way to model out the next few years from a career trajectory is you'll just have 100 extra leverage. But you want to be in a position where you can use that leverage. There's a common thing, and I'm sure you experience this now as well, is that as you advance in your career, before you're like, I've got a bunch of time, but I don't know what to work on. And after you're further along, you're like, I have no time, but there's like a thousand different ideas I have for things that would be super valuable or I think would go really well or something. So that I think what you should do is just get to a point where in whatever

you think is interesting or care about. You're at the frontier and can see what the problem space actually looks like. If you care about AI, I would really recommend moving to SF. And then just start working on problems and, you know, use the leverage that AI gives you. And if we end up getting paperclipped, it's like, look, what's the point of like, you personally, what's the point of that you, like, not doing anything worrying about that? In the 80% of world or 90% of worlds where we don't get paper clipped, you will get to say you you worked on something really cool at a time that was really important in the history of humanity.

That's great. Well said. Thanks for coming on. This is fantastic. This is fun, guys. We got to have you back. This is really, really awesome. It's making a regular thing.

And super bullish on you guys. I mean, like, you were like a, well, your previous thing is a couple of months in, but this is like a couple weeks out and you're already killing it. That's awesome. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming on. And for the record, we're not building a network. Yeah.

It's actually a head fake. It's a head fake. It's just a show. It's just a show forever. That's a show with a funny name. We'll never come to you and say, give us half for editing. editing, you know. You want at least 75%. Yeah. Great having you on. Great having you on. I'm excited to get, you know, everybody to get access to the book. Yeah, yeah, go get the book. I printed it out.

We have a manuscript. You can buy the actual thing. Yeah. So thank you for doing that. Strypress. The scaling era is here. Cheers. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Bye. See yeah. Bye. And we got Casey Hanmer coming in. We kept him waiting. Sorry about that. Casey. Hopefully you're still here. with us because we want to hear about Terraform. We want to, have you seen his office? No. He builds from a castle in Burbank.

It's like, amazing. Some guy built these crazy castles. It's a fascinating company. Boom. Hey, Casey, how you doing? Hello. Very well. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you great. Are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else? Where are you? I'm in the castle. I'm behind a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples. we made last year. But yeah, I mean,

the castle windowless wall is right by me here. Very cool. Can you give me just a little bit of intro, explanation of the company? And then, I mean,

I do want to hear the story of like how the castle got built again because it's a funny story. Sure. Well, let's start with Terraform. So three and a half years ago,

I rage quit my job at NASA JPL and incorporated terraform industries to build cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. And we've been at that three and a half years now, we've made a lot of progress. It's super exciting. The castle itself

was built in the 80s by the bandy family who built many of the industrial buildings in Burbank, and they worked with a general contractor who was down to do crazy stuff. And it turns out, if you're building from Zinderblocks, you can make him any shape you like. So that's how we got a castle. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Can we start with this, this quote tweet that went mega viral this week. you said, I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now. Don't at me. It's a video of Elon Musk landing a rocket and I think Elon quote tweeted you and said, just read the instructions. But can you give us some more context on like unpack that? Like what exactly is the outside context problem? What's going on? Yeah, it's a bit of a geeky, deep cut. So the outside context problem is a concept popularized in Ian Banks's culture novel series, in particular the novel accession, which primarily deals with the culture coming in contact

with kind of a previously unknown alien. I mean, the whole books are full of aliens, but this is like an alien alien, alien intelligence. Modality is very reactive. and so their usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming force. And then just read the instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in an X novel. So in this novel there's millions and millions of fully sentient, very, very large spacecraft that fly around basically looking after humanity. The deeper point is I think Elon's a very interesting person. I think he's obviously very underestimated, has been throughout his entire career for whatever reason.

And I think, you know, convention, sorry. Sorry to interrupt, but is he underestimated in our corner of the internet or just sort of broadly? Do you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon fanboy? I think even then. Yeah. And I think, you know, conventional wisdom a year ago was like, oh, is getting involved in politics who's going to shoot his feet off. And I think he genuinely took a big risk backing Donald Trump for the election.

You know, if Kamala had won, I doubt it would have gone very well for him. But, you know, now there's a person who a year ago we're hearing all these op-heads like, oh, he doesn't understand politics. You know, he's still hearing. He doesn't understand politics. He's taking a huge risk. He should just focus on Mars. What is he talking about, et cetera?

He's now in the White House, like literally running the IT modernization process. of the entire federal government, which is code for he has root access to the entire government. And I think ultimately, I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for the United States. You know, obviously there's going to be some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way. That's always been clear from the outset. I wrote a blog post about this last year saying, you know, why do we need a Department of of Government efficiency?

But I think overall we should probably regard ourselves as extremely lucky that someone of Elon's caliber has taken interest in fixing the process. is it affect all of us, not just, you know, finding, finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies or, like, you know, skirt around certain regulatory issues, such as just the normal, normal way that you deal with these things. But, you know, I'm, I think the conversation needs to be had here. And my general complaint is that the, is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the Doge process are not constructive because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on. And I think, you know, this is a process that would be improved by constructive

and high-quality criticism and suggestions. better ideas flying into the system. I think that's always always the case. But there's an outside context problem because most of the people who are jumping up and down about the various alleged outrages that they're just committing do not understand what's going on. It's beyond their context, which is not a huge surprise, but it is a major problem. It's interesting. Particularly for their interests. I wrote a post about this as well in the context of California. California, I live there. I love it. It's a great. It's a great, state, but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now. And that's a real problem

for the future of the progressive movement. You know, like San Francisco needs to be a shining city on a hill. Yeah, I agree. I have a sort of a random question, but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it. Do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep tech or hard tech investors after years of SaaS and sort of web three? And now it's sort of the hot thing. I mean, even you started your company in 2021, even then, you know, it wasn't, you know, there's sort of the meme, right, which is, you know, deep tech would have loved zero interest rates, right? But like, there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being, you know, there were plenty, but there was not as many as

there are now. Do you have advice to just sort of venture capitalists broadly about how you're evaluating, you know, if a, you know, bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible like how do you actually you know how how how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that because like it just seems like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed but like they're doing like very real work uh and you know very likely will have a dramatic impact question yeah thanks for that um i mean one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about acquiring the necessary expertise

to make better than random judgments when it comes to potential deep tech startups. But the reality is it's extremely capital intensive. It operates on a different set of both physical and legal laws than SAS. And that actually makes it significantly less efficient, I think, in terms of the health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem in this case.

But instead you can look at like, well, what are the contemporary and historical cases where major innovations were successfully brought at scale into the market? And in almost all cases, it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing, you know, capital relationships and projects and in particular, a large team of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value. And then you take that team and you throw the one a new kind of problem and a new kind of problem and so on. And the most salient example in the recent past is the Elon industrial complex where, you know, Elon has this family of companies that are doing things that everyone else, you know, really struggles to even kind of wrap their heads around in most cases.

And but, you know, history is replete with examples. And I recently have kind of gone very deep on Henry Kaiser, who founded more than 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam, built 1,500 ships in World War II, you know, stuff that we regard is impossible today. Like, oh, how can we fix the American shipbuilding? He just stood up a shipyard from scratch in like less than two months in 1941. They didn't have computers back then. It's just insane stuff.

So, yeah, there are historical examples that's happening. And I think one way of thinking about it is that capital allocation in hard tech is a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money. And probably the optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already proved their worth. Speaking of organizations is, you said you rage quit NASA. Is NASA's best work behind them? Or if, you know, now that Elon has route access, you know, could we see, you know,

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

be running a space program competing with China. Like China's program managers in their space program, they fear the consequences of failure. And NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference. Can you talk a little bit about stagnation? You know, what happened in 1970? There's a whole bunch of different theories.

Is it a culture issue? Do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset? I've always been tracking energy. That's the point where the energy growth kind of broke from 2.7% per year to 2%. It feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear. Maybe it's this Doge stuff that's going on. Will it be political? But how important is unsstagnating on the energy side to kick everything into gear? And what are the stack ranked priorities for actually seeing increased human flourishing, economic growth, energy, all the all the proxy

metrics that are important. Well, you hit on the most important aspect there, which is we can measure this, right? At the end of the day, we either have total factor productivity growth or we don't. And if we do, then our children will have a better life than us, no matter what. And if we don't, then they won't, no matter what. It doesn't matter how innovative we get about, you know, social programs and redistributive spending and like various sneaky forms of communism. At the end of the day, we're either growing the economy or we're not.

And I think that, you know, what the hell happened in 1971 is over to determined in some ways. You know, Henry Kaiser died in 1967, you know, various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so and so on occurred. We had the passage of NEPA and SICRA in the early 70s as well. You know, all of these things, I think, well-intentioned or kind of contingent at the time, but since then we've, I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moore's Law and improved computing capacity, we would have been in much more dire straits as far as economic stagnation

goes. But I'm also extremely optimistic that we're going to turn this around. First of all, because we seem to have gained the ability to talk about stagnation, first of all, and to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding, for example, the fertility rate. And the second thing is that, you know,

obviously AI will help. But we've also got this incredible technology in solar power, which is allowing us to convert, in a sense, we're going back to the land, converting sunlight into energy about 100 times more efficiently than plants do. And electricity is quite a bit more useful than coal. So I'm just very,

optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem, you know, this decade. We might take a good crack at the permitting problem, at least in the West, this decade as well. And I think those two things combined, plus, you know, some intelligent AIs will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve. Can you talk more about solar? Why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear? There's a lot of chatter and both. Everyone loves both right now. But why, why is solar what you've chosen to kind of make your life's work here. Yeah, at least for now. I mean, to be clear, I'm not bigoted against nuclear power.

I'm not worried about nuclear radiation. I taught nuclear physics at Caltech for a while. It's a fabulous technology. But again, like we can theorize about it. We can look at history. And history shows us that nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted by various navies for operating, you know, clandestine, you know, underwater vessels that need air independent power supplies or nuclear aircraft carriers that need the ability to outrun,

said submarines. But other than that, you know, even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power their surface fleet. And I think if you want to honestly understand this, you need to kind of dive into why that is the case. At the end of the day, nuclear reactors are steam engines, and steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton cycle, and there are certain irreducible costs associated with, you know, steam turbines and so on that just drive the cost up. And that's, even if NRC didn't exist tomorrow, right?

Even if, even if you could buy enriched uranium on Amazon.com, it would still be the case that just the steamension component of it is going to cost no less than coal. Solar, on the other hand, is fascinating because sunlight rains down on the earth every day for free. There's a fusion reactor up in the sky. Due to some weird quantum effects and, again, silicon trickery, it is possible to convert that into high-grade energy in the form of electricity with, you know, layer of a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper, a considerably thinner than a sheet of paper, that silicon is enormously abundant on the earth. We've gotten really quite good

at making it. There are factories worldwide now churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down. If anything, production is increasing 30 to 40 percent per year, which is just bananas. It's a sort of growth rate you'd like to see for any technology. And the reason this is occurring is because there's a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off, right? So we don't have to theorize about, well, what is it going to take to, you know, first of a kind, second of a kind, hundredth of a kind, you know, start getting those economies of scaled down in solar that's already happening. It's a commoditized product. It has no moving parts. You don't need any special, you know, skills or labor to install and operate it.

It's even easier to do them planting corn. It's put it on the ground and it spits out power, which in our discussion about 1971, you know, electrical power is basically wealth. It's a, it's a free money printer you can put on the ground. And this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated about the various tariffs and solar panels. I think if China, our geopolitical adversary, is attempting to harm us by giving us solar panels subsidized at their taxpayers' expense, we should do the textbook thing that you do

when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even worse. And I don't know, pave Nevada with them or something. Like, we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track. But, yeah, basically that's the key. You know, some batteries on the side and the problem is solved. Yeah, speaking of like,

Paving Nevada. What does your, what does the future of Earth look like in 20, 50 years? Is it solar panels all over in space? Is it solar panels all over the earth? Is this, is it going to feel cyberpunkky or will there still be trees around at all? Am I just in a matrix pod and but a, but my total factor productivity is going up so I'm happy. What does the long term future look like for you or in your mind? I think it's a bit hard to say. I'm quite optimistic. You'd have to be to start a hardware company. And I think really what the future looks like comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build. Yeah. Right. Like if you want a great future, go and build it. In terms of energy, we can,

we can give every man, woman and child on earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in United States, which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year, with something like 6% of Earth surface under solar, which is, it's a, it's much, much less than we currently use for grazing. or for row crops or for forestry. It's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities. But it's quite a bit less than agriculture. That's enough for everyone.

If you like the scenario, the previous call you were talking to Duquesh about like getting paper clipped. We're not going to get paper clipped. What's going to happen is the net present value of land for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season. But for solar it's about, you know, $100,000 or $200,000 per year. Now if that's powering an AI,

artificial super intelligence data center, which is a thousand times more economic productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain, which has to sleep eight hours a day and browse Twitter, then obviously, economically speaking, farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to starve to death. And that's the true AI doom scenario.

So again, that's something we should be aware of and something we should figure out how to forestall. We will obviously have a lot of solar in space, but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space. I don't think people are going to beaming power down from space to the Earth any time, anytime soon. Is that just because the economics don't work out? I've seen a couple of these companies. They're using mirrors or lasers.

Yeah, the mirror one is interesting, actually, because it kind of exploits the fact that if you're a solar array owner, you have no other way of getting more power, other than paying someone to reflect some more down to you, which is super cool. Don't get me wrong. As far as solar cost goes, the Starlink constellation is solar powered. It's in orbit. It generates considerably more power than the space station does, collectively, obviously. Like maybe 100 times more power than the space station.

And most of that power is used to amplify radio signals and transmit them down to Earth where they're received by our antennas. And the revenue per watt of electricity used to transmit microwaves through Earth's atmosphere to the consumer because it's, you know, chopped up and turned into internet data, as opposed to just raw power, is about a billion times higher. Like, the revenue per watt is a billion times higher, with it being internet at a few hundred watts or whatever transmission power, than it being, you know, attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down for power plants

where we pay, you know, 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that. Now, Starlink is actually fabulously profitable, and I'm super proud of the team there. I think it's absolutely incredible what they've done. but there's no way in hell that the profit margin is 10 million percent. Right. So like, it's just not possible. So I don't think that space-based solar power is likely to be a thing. Do you think that the average seed stage deep tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough?

Because almost every sort of question we've asked you, you've had sort of economics sort of rationale behind your answer. And I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that, you know, there's sort of this like sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing. And then what's waiting for them is is potentially a product that like is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product. But then there's sort of, you can't actually get any value. Yeah, I've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model. And they did the thing, but it just didn't, it wasn't competitive on the grid at all.

Yeah, that's the nightmare scenario. No, I mean, like, at the end of the day, if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you, then go, give it a shot, right? You don't know, I don't know. Like, customers and consumers, they like weird things. We just don't know. Like, that's the fabulous thing about capitalism.

It just firehers options and potentials at the market to see what sticks. And if you think back to when we were children, there's no way we would have known that, like, the stable attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this. That's not how they worked back then. So for the younger listeners, just like quiver and fear. We didn't have cell phones when we were young. So you should give it a go. On the other hand, if you are trying to do a hardware tech thing at massive scale,

you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you. You cannot fight capitalism to get to massive scale. Forever. It's a lot of massive value. It's not a mystery. Yeah, exactly. Would you rather have that. them on your team or against you. And I just see this mistake time and time again, which is like,

well, this technology will work if we can bring about some like massive behavioral change in the entire market or something. Probably that's not going to happen. But if you can produce a product like an iPhone where when the new one comes out, hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by $1,000 of cash in their wallet. And they're just like, shut up and take my money. Then you've done the right thing, right? You're thrilling people. You're giving them something that they'll happily part with their hard-earned cash to receive. And yeah, I mean, it's not like this is a mystery. Build something people want.

I have one, too. Okay. We'll go fast. Yeah, the Scrolls project. Is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project? I think there's a certain kind of person who really likes to curate and organize information. And I think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical origins and past. and I think that's worthwhile.

You mentioned briefly the sort of AI doomsday scenario where the AI just realizes that it should blanket the Earth with solar panels and to feed itself. What else scares you in the world to end on a high note? I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans, it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 1930s. And so we've literally allowed billions of people to die, painfully, lonely in old days, when if we'd just had enough insight and enough effort,

we could have figured out how to stop that a long time ago. Wow. Interesting. Well, hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree. Well, unfortunately, we used all the GPUs to make Ghibli. Maybe next week we can put it towards, you know, extending human life stand. Thank you so much for joining this. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, yeah, what was that? I was going to say one last thing. Like, yeah, one of the major problems with Doge is that, we have these entitlements costs of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicaid and so on. Like 1% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis. These are all diseases of old age.

If we can just increase human lifespan by 10%, we cut that whole tranche, trillions of dollars of annual spending by 10% because 10% fuel people die every year. And they also get to not die. This seems blindingly obvious. And yet we spend less than 0.1% of our national health budget on anti-aging research. That's awesome.

That's wild. Wow. Well, we'll have to dig into that more. Thank you so much for stuff. We would love to have you back on. Maybe we'll come over and we'll do one in the castle at some point. Yeah, I'd love to. That'd be great.

Thank you so much. This is a fantastic conversation. Really enjoyed it. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon. What a brilliant, what a brilliant mind. Yes.

Scrolls enjoyer. You always get good stuff with the scrolls and joyers. The scroll guys. The scroll guys. We got to have the whole, maybe you should do a scrolls day. Scrolls day. But back away from scrolls, we're going back to books. We got Nadia Asperuhoff coming in the Temple of Technology.

She has just announced a new book called Antimimetics. She's a former Strait Press author in the Hall of Fame of Authors, in my opinion. If you publish on Strait Press, you're... If you can publish there, you can publish anywhere. That's what people have been saying. yeah it's really it's really the NFL of publishing yeah yeah like it's it's uh anyway but let's bring you super excited for this let's see thanks so much for joining we're having some fun uh yeah thanks for joining uh can you give us surprised that delian didn't join by the way yeah

because pavel was about to have his he was about to have this amazing you know this first do not said deli in the link he will just bomb i think he has this interview he does have the link Don't let him know that he can use the link because he'll just hop on. He's a great hype man. Anyway, would you mind just a brief introduction and give us a little high level of the book? Sure. I'm Nadia, a writer and researcher. I just published this new book called Antimimetics, why ideas resist spreading.

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

All this kind of forms this class of ideas that are antimimetic and don't spread super easily, even though they're interesting important ideas. So that's what I wanted to read about. How much of memetics is just actually compressing the idea down? I was thinking about how Lulu's Going Direct manifesto has this really pithy phrase going direct. Founder Mode. Same thing with the network state, kind of two words that really hits. Versus Leopold Oshenbrenner wrote a fantastic essay about AI called it situational awareness.

We don't see people using situational awareness as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going. Is it just a packaging problem? Or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an antimimetic property? Yeah, I think some of it is a packaging problem. Like ideas themselves have these innate qualities that are memetic or anti-imetic.

Some of it is just about like how the person perceiving it or receiving it is like how do they interact with that idea. So you can think of certain ideas that are spread really, really easily in certain networks but not in others. Conspiracy theories are a good example of this. So, yeah, I think it's a mix of both. It's partly about the idea. It's partly about the person that is, like, sharing it or receiving it.

Sure. Jordy? Well, one, I want to make this segment, like the most beautiful ad for your book. So I'd like to go, like, through a number of the ideas. I did want to, a book had been going viral and I got a copy of it. I wanted to get kind of your high-level take on it. It's funny. This was maybe released in 2021.

There is no antimimetics division. It sort of went viral a little bit last year, but then it is no longer like for sale or I guess you can buy it or the paperbacks or trading. Is that the great? Hundreds of dollars on eBay right now. Yeah. So I have one. I should probably, you know, just sell it and buy like 20 copies of your book. No, keep holding.

Keep holding. No, no. But I just thought the great irony of like, you know, they were maybe going after like, you know, something similar to what you've been researching it. But, but then it's not even available anymore. So it's like not. Not a not a dog fooding and immunetics. Do you have any sort of like, yeah, I'm curious. Like, and then more broadly like in researching this, like what what's the full breadth of what you were kind of like looking at, right?

Because I imagine you were researching and finding like forbidden PDFs and books in a bunch of different areas, right? Of like this sort of esoteric knowledge that humanity ignores for some reason. Yeah. I'll give a big plug for Quantum who wrote, there is no antimimetics division. And he actually coined the term anti-meamem like back in the day. And it originates from this fiction like horror, sci-fi kind of online wiki. And so yeah, he published that book. I think 2021, it's a horror science fiction book.

And it's about anti-meams as this sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are kind of like these black holes. They destroy everything they touch. They consume everything that comes in contact with. them but for whatever reason we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them. And so there's this intelligence unit that is trying to fight anti-means, but like can't even remember that they're doing it. Hence the title, there is an anti-mimetics division. Super cool book, highly recommend it and all of his writing, honestly. And that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic. I had never heard of the concept

of anti-meams before this. And yeah, I was reading that book kind of like depths of COVID, yeah, 2021 sad, dark times, but like also, you know, it's kind of, you know, it was kind of everyone was doing stuff in like group chats and they were doing stuff like clubhouse was a thing and I had been working at substack. And so I was thinking a lot just kind of about like how does this concept apply to the real world and like where did Antenean show up in the rest of our life. So it was definitely a direct inspiration for this book. But yeah, I want to just kind of like a nonfiction treatment of the concepts. Totally. It was not practical in any way. It was just sort of like you said a sci-fi horror exploration of it.

I feel like the best sci- Yeah. Can you talk about, like, I feel like we're in such a weird time. Like our generation was sort of like not born on the internet, but we sort of like gained consciousness on the internet. And the internet is something that just like circulates ideas, both like fact and fiction, like extremely rapidly. And so in many ways, like conspiracy theories and these like sort of forbidden potentially

truce or maybe it's fiction. you know, you don't know. They're sort of like, I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't, you know, like, the only conspiracy, like the only conspiracy theory, I believe is that there are just like many, many, many, many conspiracies going on and all sorts of things at all times, right? So can you talk about like, yeah, I think like what what can people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like process information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that or something that's factual or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just

mimetic and it doesn't want to be known or it doesn't want to be identified as as truth. Yeah. I thought about that a lot while I was writing this just because I think there's a lot of doom and gloom about kind of like where the internet is right now or like social media didn't turn out to be what we expected. And I really didn't want to write that kind of a book. Because it is partly about this transition from, you know, once upon a time, it was, you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about like getting,

you know, trolled, canceled, attacked, whatever. And a lot of people, I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of just, you know, wanted to tune out all of that. But I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other. It's not like, oh, you know, Twitter or whatever is over and we're just going to all like go back into our little caves and only talk to our friends. But like both these things actually feed off of each other. and all the things that get workshopped in the group chats kind of make their way back out into public channels and vice versa.

And I think like there's there are things about that that are good and bad. Maybe to your point just about, yeah, not being able to even tell what's real anymore, but like group chats aren't really like a safe haven from whatever is happening in public channels because they end up kind of like becoming these super incubators for crazy ideas. And so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshop. by like a small group of people. And so in some ways, they're kind of like mutating and making ideas even even crazier. But yeah, I mean, not to be like overly defeatist about it, but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it. And like where we decide to direct our attention, what we decide to focus on, that is what

your reality becomes. And so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore. But I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about, then life is not really so bad. So yeah, and like you, you compared like, you know, what's happening in sort of the the town square, like something like X and then what's happening in group chats, right? Like oftentimes like we're in this world where there's sort of this like fiction appearing on

the timeline and then the truth is like racing through group chats. And on a long enough time horizon, they intersect, right? Because like they almost like an idea, uh, can be like put out there and maybe people agree with it in the moment, but then eventually sort of what's happening in the sort of like private group chats, like actually does start spreading and sort of like breaking containment. And in many ways, it feels like that's happening faster than ever, right? Yeah, I wanted to ask a question about kind of like practicality here. I think a lot of founders and business folks think about can they align their company or

their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condescality? it down. Obviously, the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of like what Lulu does and it's helped her business as opposed to, in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy. Is it possible to do the opposite, to take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti-meam so that the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss? Interesting. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I do talk in the book about this idea of like obscurantism, which Nick Bostrom coin,

but the idea of like, can you make things boring or can you kind of hide them as a way of sort of suppressing them? So if you think about like suppressing ideas, people often think about like putting a hard, like a hard lock on it so that, you know, make it forbidden and make it password protected or whatever, but that often makes people more excited to figure out like what is actually going on under there. But if you make it really, really boring and really uninteresting and like or just like, or just like really difficult to parse, people kind of just lose interest and wander away. And that's definitely a, that would be like an anti-mimetic information warfare tactic, I guess.

I've seen this where I've seen people chirping at each other on X. And I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation. So you post, you know, I like SpaceX. And then I quote tweet you and you're like, SpaceX is terrible. But then if you quote tweet back with something that's just like an essay, I'll just be like, I'm tired, I'm out. And you kind of win by default. And I've also seen these attempts to take, you know,

a legitimate attack vector and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right. And so if you're being attacked by someone, you can say, oh, well, like, that's an idea from 4chan, or that's an idea that's from the communist manifesto. So we should disregard it and put it in the forbidden category, even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on. And so, I don't know. It's a fascinating topic. Can you talk about some of the differences between antimimetic ideas and anti-commercial ideas? And anti-commercial, I would put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where nobody makes money if people eat less, right?

Like it's sort of this idea that like there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting, which is like big breakfast was like, came in and they're like, you got to eat a big breakfast. And like there's a bunch of people that benefit from like the big breakfast. you know, you know, complex. And then if you start going around and saying like, hey, you know, you can just have coffee or water and like just eat lunch, like it's hard to monetize that, right? It's not like I can be like, hey, don't eat food and also like, you know, pay me to like teach you how to not eat food. And some people have done that. But like I feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are antimimetic and like just don't spread for one reason. And then stuff that's maybe like slightly more obvious, but it's just like not spreading because there's no like sort

of economic or commercial interest that's like trying to spread a certain idea. Yeah, that's super interesting. I had actually thought about that yet. Yeah, I think like there's still plenty of ideas that can spread memetically even without sort of like a commercial engine behind them. So yeah, folk wisdom, aphorisms, things like that. But you're right that having, especially I think in like the realm of like health related things. I'm just thinking about like a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that where people kind of have to like bumble around and like find their own answers to things and it's partly even if they're like, you know, chronic health issues

that tons of people are facing and dealing with those, no like clear answer to them. And I think sometimes when the answer is something that can't be, yeah, monetized or sold, then it's, if we think of it as just like another engine for driving the spread of information, if that engine is missing, then something kind of might languish and not reach everyone that it should. So yeah, that's super interesting. How do you think about Elon's positioning with XA or? around the sort of like truth seeking AI like is it possible that a you know properly trained LLM could be more inclined to spread ideas that he that are sort of

antimimetic within humans yet like the machine is just like you ask it a question it's like well obviously like this is like you know what you're dealing with whereas a human would tell you know you know some other you know answer that that maybe was like more correct in some ways hmm I think it could be really useful for like ideas that are anti-metic on an individual level. Like I know some people use AIs for this where it's like, tell me, based on the conversations we've been having, like tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize

and maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might kind of not be super honest. That could be useful. I still think it's like really hard to spread things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas through a network. So even if one person really believes it and, yeah, is totally bought into an idea of like how do you get it to actually spread from person to person. And yeah, it's a little bit harder to think about like how that that takes place.

Well, I'm super excited for the book. Congratulations. Yeah, we should do what like once we get a full copy here. Yeah. Like actually ordering we'd love, we'll do a deep dive on it. Yeah. And we're going to try to. Yeah, we'll have you back on and we'll help the audience figure out how to make money.

How to make money. Because that's the theme of the show. That's what's really going to get the book. Yeah. How do you? Oh, my competitive. No one's ever heard of them now all of a sudden. No one can remember them.

They just disappeared from the evening. They're gone. Because we put anti-ponetics to work in capitalism. Fantastic having you. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah. And congratulations. Two-time author now.

Fantastic. Incredible. We're going the opposite direction. We're going straight into the AISDR scandal that's going on. We're going back revisiting 11X. You might have heard about it earlier this week. 11X, there was a tech crunch article, said that maybe the ARR figures were inflated. Maybe they were using customer logos who had churned and they hadn't been removed from the website

quickly enough. We have the founder of Rocks on who is here to tell us all about SDR's AISDR technology agents and a whole lot more, but I'll let him introduce himself. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. great to have you here. How are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me on, John. Jordi. Nice to meet you. Sam connected us. So excited, excited to join your Ramp sponsor. Yes, this is a Ramp. Shout out to Sam. Seriously, like, I went to Ramp and I was like, okay, there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry, but there's probably something that's

working. Like, just tell me what you guys use and they were like, well, we use rocks and it's great. And so they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here. And I want to live. learn more about the product genuinely because it's not something that we're using yet. But in the future, we imagine that millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day, encouraging them to listen to the show, encouraging them to, you know, download, rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts. We want a really intense million AI Salesforce. And we're hoping you can help us with that. We want a swarm. We want a swarm. You want to swarm. The board. Amazing. But anyway, what do you actually do. Yeah, absolutely. So we're set pretty early. Most of it is all word of mouth is yet. So there's

a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a sales and the marketing team. So we build the first enterprise ready agentic CRM. So it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you. So rocks in the system like in RAM gets installed. It unifies all your customer data in one place, keeps it in RAM's environment. And then feeds a swarm of agents. And our agents, And our agents are designed to supercharge the max premiums, the sound of the world. Like, how do you supercharge the highest compensated frontline kind of winners or killers are going to market? I love it.

And the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work. And that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow, like Ramp, are going to have supercharged builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully rock. So that's what we do. I love it. I have a ton of follow-up questions. I mean, it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the front line actually writing

copy, hitting send, and maybe we're more in the Centaur era, where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone. Is that how you're thinking about it right now, even if in the long term you're going full, the AI will actually send the emails? Yeah, and kind of going off of that specifically, I think everyone can see. see why back office work is getting sort of automated. Perfect for LLMs. And you know, cursor can have an amazing NPS even if it has like a huge error rate. Yet front office work when you're interacting with customers, like everybody's experienced

this at some point, you know, either the individual themselves or an employee of the individual like sort of messes something up with a customer and it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost revenue versus like a lost five minutes like correcting a bug. So balancing that sort of front, like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower. Yeah. Absolutely. As Lulu kind of gave me the best advice, like we're building bath suits, not butlers. And the core idea comes from, I've held a bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before. We're not at a point where you can completely go FSD for your largest customers. The core idea is how do you supercharge the Sam or

Max or Eric with AI, but they are the ones who are orchestrating or Q being the system where they review and send. Because the cost of really messing up is in Mike, the small term, feels like a bad email, but you would degrade trust through the brand, through the person. And that's what we focus on is how do you build an genetic system that you could use today. It's not a way per where things we can use today, but how do we supercharge the kind of frontline kind of back carriers? I think over time, like, there's going to be dramatic seat compression or efficiencies to be had where people who support those back carriers, which is kind of 80% of the employee base, they will have to kind of evolve to thrive or kind of risk basically not being relevant. Can you talk about the innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation. Logan Bartlett on his show said that, you know, if you go back to mobile, the sales force of mobile. was just Salesforce and his thesis was that maybe the sales force of AI is just Salesforce but

and they're obviously doing stuff in AI but at the same time we're seeing Apple drop the ball on product development Google's dropping the ball on product development it feels like there's more fertile ground than ever so how have you reasoned through that and why are you taking this bet even though there's some people that are saying hey it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it together 100% like bending up's the goat uh he's a good of all goods and let's hear it for Beni off folks. Legend. Yeah, like I grew up not in the Bay Area.

Like, you read up on them and they're the big inspiration. So if you look at ServiceNow and Salesforce, they have a massive advantage because they have distribution, but also data. Like, kind of foreign belief is that the alpha is in working with the intelligence providers and being earning the right to be the custodian for enterprise data and bringing in public data. So our position is what we're arbitraging is what somebody who holds kind of a bag

at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage, the users, they don't want to use them. They use new tools, but they've also lost data. Data is now in the warehouse. So if you, 40% of the data in a software kind of data warehouse, like the snowflake is actually go-to-market data. Interesting. So when we think about kind of building these new systems, incumbents, a $3 billion kind of incumbent has a massive advantage. But what we're focused on is, how can we, A, earn the eyeballs or the SAMs and MacFRAs. of the world, but do it in a way where we're doing a rugpole where build a system of record, which indexes the data that's not already in the system of record, right? So Ross gets installed,

indexes everything in the warehouse, brings in, you can connect all the other sources. And I think the winning kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of default platforms. Talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other companies, specifically in San Francisco around. You see these companies coming out. You see these revenue charts, right? It used to be investors. It used to be.

Seriously, in 2021, I remember saying investors would say, you know, sort of best in class companies are getting to one million A or are in nine months. Yep. And now it's basically like, okay, best in class companies are getting to 10 mil in three months. Yep. So if you're, and so what the sort of potentially toxic thing about. about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like, well, if I wanna win as a company,

like we need to put up, you know, just these ridiculous numbers that, you know, and anybody that's built a company knows that like, In vet, like revenue ramp is not necessarily, like always connect, you know, tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that. So I'm curious to know, like, do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is forcing people to make

sort of like short-term decisions or riskier decisions or in some cases even like, you know, misstate facts. Yes, I think it's ultimately the founder's psyche. Like, I've been around the block, but I have to say two things this time around. It makes me the most insecure. Like, all of us are very insecure, right? My wife's listening in. Obviously, like, we're all insecure monkeys in some way.

So two things. One is, I think this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of kind of revenue curves. The way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenues to make customers happy and the right customers happy. So we focus on strategic like the seamers of the world, enterprise customers like Redis and MongoDB and ramp like how do we land there, how do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses which would generate enduring revenue over time as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own revenue. So that's how I internalize that. I think the game is going to be our quality about

enduring revenue and there are businesses like Viz and Datadog to be built now. It's just that Datadog and Viz, although they were rocket ships, they always focused on essential kind of solutions to really, really large businesses, and that's what we're focused on. The first part of the psyche, I think it's not spoken enough is the fact is end consumer expectations are in this invisible asymptote where they're expecting singularity. Like, consumers, because they've been sold singularity and they're using perplexity in chat, GPT, they expect all work to be done by software.

So that is actually the one that keeps me up in mind. Like, how do you deliver these genetic experiences, which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations? And that's where I think the winning products are going to come from. So the revenue stuff kind of really, really hits, but I kind of process it out. But the consumers and their expectations, there's some stuff that kind of keeps me up 24-7. Is it, is it, uh, internally, are you thinking with the team, like, how do we achieve this sort of like chat GPT moment for the enterprise, right? Like you could imagine, like, there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality.

Yeah. That would be so magical that like, you would get that. I mean, cognition kind of had that where they launched Devin and it was like this viral sensation. Yeah. And though it was an enterprise agent for coding. Um, but it's a great question. Yeah. Like, do you think that's, do you think that that's, like,

Like maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize, hey, we have something magic here. We're not going to talk about it. We're just going to like it. You know, it's antimobatic. You know, we just. Right. Yeah.

You're spot on. So we're in the boring space of ERP and CRM, the most essential, but also the most lucrative soccer market. Like, we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer facing knowledge workers. So we focus on building something that's a land expand. Land with the maxes and the sound of the world, but grow into a 200 plus. kind of active users at cramp. Like that's kind of the core motion.

I think that agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day and day out. And so we optimize for like internal like post land virality. So there is no seats. You land rocks and everybody uses it. And I think that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver. Can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product? Obviously it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse, the snowflakes of the world. It sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations.

Is there a Rock's app? Like, how does a salesperson actually interact with Rocks day to day? Absolutely. Pure, ramp-like, kind of cracked engineering shops. So we build product. We're pragmatic product builders, and we work with the platforms. So we have a web app, an iOS app. Yep.

The guy who built ramp and Robinhoods here. We have a Slack app. We have an email app. So we want to be the front application where it is a form of agents working for you. It's powered by our own warehouse name. native CRM is running in your warehouse. And it's a two-way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot, right? So that's kind of our core idea.

Got it. In kind of large sophisticated organizations who are already winning, like the Mongols and these folks, like we would definitely integrate our API into the internal tools in most of the rest. We want to build an application that humans actually want to use and then hopefully get two to three X more productive this year and put them in apart to being kind of 10 times more productive.

I love it. Jury, you got anything else? That's all I got. Cool. Well, this is fantastic. We need to have to have you back with those big news. I hear there's big news coming. I want him back when he announces it. I want to hear it here first. Absolutely. One shot. Sorry, I'm a sports nerd. I grew up in India getting up in the morning seeing a sports center to see like Jordan and the Wizards. That's that's what I'm watching it. So you're Jordan. So we talked about this morning like there's going to be a one name entrepreneur. Yes. For AI B2B SaaS and you could be that you could be that guy. So you can be liberal. You can be Kobe of B2B SaaS. We're reading for you.

Wilt. Let's go. Jordan. Well, thanks for coming by. Cheers. We'll talk to. Shout out to Sam too. Thank you.

Well, we got another one name entrepreneur coming in the Temple of Technology any minute. Augustus. You don't even need to know his last name. You might know him by his. Augustus, the rainmaker. Former Roman emperor. Former Roman emperor. Yeah, yeah.

Accused member of the. deep state. A huge member of the deep state. We're here to confront him, put on the tinfoil hat, break it down. I promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the internet is watching and this will be clipped. I won't go too crazy. Augustus, I really appreciate you taking a shot and taking a chance on this crazy show.

No, I mean, the man has no fear. He faces his, he faces his vocal opponents daily. Yeah, he really is good at duking it out on the timeline, never lets them get to the last quote tweet. He's having fun with it too. But it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy. And we got Augustus here to break it down for us. There he is. Welcome to the Temple of Technology, Augustus.

Wow. I feel like your hair grew an inch. You must be drinking a lot of like milk or whatever to stimulate that hair growth. I'm drinking Justin Mayer's bone broth, bro. There we go. Kettle and fire. Shout out. Out of former brother, brother of the week.

Former brother of the week, Justin Mayers. Can you give us, just set the table for us for those who haven't been following the drama, what's going on? How'd you wind up in this situation? Is it frustrating? Is it hilarious? A little bit of both. And it's great.

It's the same effect as like the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like your attackers are like, he is the most powerful man in Silicon Valley. He is controlling the weather. Yeah, yeah, the hit pieces have gone direct now. Like you're getting the puff pieces in the in the mainstream media and then the decentralized media, the citizen journalists are coming for you. So break you that. Yeah, yeah. No, dude, my favorite so far has been the guy that was like, this is clearly a CIA sciop to make weather modification cool.

He's backed by Peter Thiel and the same like of the same cabal of BCs as all these things. The state of the union is 29 states this year have proposed legislation to carte blanche all. weather modification and atmospheric engineering. And so these bills, they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management. Chemtrails, it's a suspicion that the government is like, what you see is contrails long streaks in the sky. They suspect that's just like poison.

Probably not. I haven't seen evidence of that yet, but open to being convinced. And then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the earth to cool the planet down. So it's this climate intervention. And then cloud seeding kind of just gets lumped in. Cloud seeding is what Rainmaker does. And it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing.

But because nobody knows the difference, they're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that were some sort of like agenda 2040 anti-human globalist initiative. And so surreal as it's been, I'm both in the trenches in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the union. A lot of them I haven't testified at because I realize that actually drums up a lot more craziness than maybe it's good. But we're in this, we're in this public knife fight with the government of Florida in Tallahassee, just trying to, you know that tweet, that, that iconic

tweet where Trump says, like, I just want to stop the world from killing itself. Like, I just want to bring people water that need it. And I think that if you banning five seating, you're basically banning like rocketry or fission. And so that's what we're trying to stop right now. Can you talk about water scarcity? I think people, it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out and it's not that expensive. Yeah, water comes from the faucet. We're here in Los Angeles, which is, you know, one of the most sort of arid, you know, parts of the United States. It's like only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to like reroute the river like 50 years ago, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one,

the Owens Valley situation. So LA County basically had to like send out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between like the Owens River Valley and then redirect the water. Then there's a couple of water barrens that like you can't even say the name of or you'll be like here to California. But the California state water supply strategy like from the Department of Natural Resources says that half a million acres of farmland have to turn into desert by 2030 in California in order to like maintain water supply for the cities. Like Phoenix, Arizona is banning new housing development because there's not enough water. Salt Lake City people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up and there's not enough water. And then, you know,

like the wildfires that go on all over the country, that's because there's not enough water on the ground. And in the case of Florida, a lot of people have told me like, you know what, listen, I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that is a desert. But Florida, we get plenty of rain. Like, why do we need to bother modifying the weather here? Well, 14 million acres of farmland in Florida is currently in a drought. And then 30,000 acres of Miami-Dade County just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water, because there was a drought. So, like, if Mayor Suarez is listening, please save us. Yeah, we just want to bring people water. And drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential

than people realize. Like, if you want to make America healthy again, we have to grow food domestically. And if we don't have enough water to do that, then it's going to be some cookie GMO like Chinese stuff that get shipped over the ocean or like soil and green product not to I hear you deep cut yeah yeah that's that's where we're at right now with respect to drought no yeah a lot of just what are these uh is there anybody besides you uh fighting to save uh you know the the private and public uh just private and public groups from being able to do uh cloud seeding, like are, is it, is, are you the last man standing? Uh, or do you have a team? So, well, I've got a great team at Rainmaker and I'm really grateful for that. And we've got a

bunch of farmers that are beneficiaries of our program go to bat for us because like they previously had to tear up their pistachio ranches or their pistachio orchards because they didn't have enough water for them. And now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that we're doing. Um, but you know that, that part where, or that like famous Stanford for speech where Teal says, you know, you should go after a really small market. Like if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late. Well, I'm not like the last man standing. I'm kind of like the first man standing.

So it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members that have a rainmaker running around the country, it's, it's Augustus Dorica v. A couple states, 30 states. Yeah. And what is that? Yeah. like how do you even balance this sort of simultaneously you have uh you know your your company you generate revenue you have expenses you're sort of planning timelines and you're also potentially fighting like

legal battles and you're also dealing with like technical risk in the business like right like what you're doing is very hard it can be done but like that's also a challenge like as you know as an entrepreneur you know how do you kind of balance all those things and it feels to me like you know the the sort of legal risk is like the most asymmetric, you know, risk. You know, you can always launch and create a new prototype, you know, take another flight, et cetera. But then if there's sort of these like blanket bans, that feels like, is that like taking up 60% of your time now, just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in five years? Well, so not, not quite. I mean, it's definitely like a large double digit percentage. The interesting thing

with respect to the political dynamic, though, is this. It's not really like a right. left issue so much as it is like an east-west-west issue because the west doesn't have water. So Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the U.S. are like, oh, this is sick. I would love to have water. Then the people that have as much water as they have conventionally needed and aren't a subject to drought, they're the ones more wary of it. So I'm not worried about rainmaker domestically at a state level just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet like Nevada or Arizona or New Mexico. I do think that the domino theory thing holds true to some extent. So yes, we do have to focus on it. The super like funny, crazy outcome is that I just like,

if Rainmaker was totally banned from the U.S., then we just double down on Riyadh. And then we like camp out there for five years and come back, weathered and, you know, wearing desert garb. But, uh, my Iraqis. Lawrence of Arabia mode. My Iraqis. My Dune. My Dune. Who are you going to send you to Dune? I watched Dune Kew in theaters five times, bro. A religious zealot comes to turn the desert planet green. I love it. That's great.

Yeah, so no, I trust my team a lot. Can you talk a little bit about just like the general fear around cloud seating? I think that right now with health and Maha, there's just this general idea that like anything new is risky. Yeah, Mottite. Fertilizer. Muddites are having a heyday. Yeah. Bull market and ludicism for sure.

But I mean, at the same time, like, you know, you eat too much salt. Your doctor will tell you that's going to hurt your heart. And there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level, you take it up by 100x and it gets bad. And there's just all these balancing. And then also we do the mice studies, but does that really transfer? And, you know, what happens when someone's like, you know, vaping pink liquid? for, you know, 50 years, like, we don't really know and we're kind of figuring it out right now.

How, what gives you confidence about the, the low impact of this? So, you know, I really sympathize with people that are worried about this because it sounds on his face like crazy to be modifying the weather and to be dispersing chemicals. But to your point about like vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcomes, like, cloud seeding, even though Rainmaker is very innovative, even though a lot of new things have been done in academia that we're implementing from like the last five years. Cloud seeding is 80 years old, dude. This was invented in the United States in 1945. GE has the first patent from 1946. People have done 80 or 30 or 50 years, depending on the watershed,

studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil. And after decades of operation, you only see parts per trillion of this stuff. Like you need super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place. So there's been no negligible health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment. And those studies, they've been done. And like, should Rainmaker replicate those? Should we continue to do it just to prove it out further?

Totally agree. But, like, it's totally safe. And if you think about the, like, LD50, like the lethal dose of silver ice, it's less than salt. It's less than table salt. It's 2 milligrams per kilogram with salt. and then it's 2,800 for silver iodide. So this is like a resoundingly safe material to be using, and the data for a decade shows that.

Can you talk about a little of the history of, I feel like when it's easy to look at the chemtrails thing and be like, okay, well, like the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's like literally like mind control. And it's like, we're so divided in America. I don't know. The mind control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do?

but there is a legitimate criticism that like when you fly a bunch of planes around those contrails are emitting pollution and your skies get dirtier and I remember after 9-11 all the planes were grounded it was the clearest day in the skies ever and there is some sort of like low-key harm and and there's always these like knock-on effects I'm sure with the solar radiation management same thing we have been experiencing global warming but we've also been experiencing in global dimming and those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way. You just talk about some of the history of these things and how you think about worrying about the second and third order effects of cloud seeding.

Yeah, yeah, totally. So with respect to weather modification and climate engineering, like the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years. Yeah. Like build a city, then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation and precipitation patterns. If you have a coal plant or a steel plant or nat gas plant, the steam and the aerosol you emit reliably creates more clouds and precipitation like tens of miles downwind as well. The emissions from our cars, right? Like those have pollutants in them apart from just like CO2

considerations. So we do modify the weather unintentionally all the time. Rainmaker sees this is that like we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unbiased. fuck the earth as it stands or make it more lush and abundant once we've done the former. When it comes to knock on effects, the common question is like, you know, if you're making it rain more here, is that reducing precipitation downwind there? Yeah. Totally reasonable question. Like I think on its face that logic makes sense.

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

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

modifying the weather. Earlier this week, there was a video that went viral of a very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested. Do you think you'd have an easier time in the, the public eye if you were just planting trees or is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue regardless? And do they have to do cloud seeding in addition to that? Or are they just using traditional irrigation? Like how does that, I wanted to talk to you about that, that Chinese video that went viral because it was so striking. And it was like, for me, it was like, I want that here for sure. But I don't know how other people took it. Yeah, it looks like you get like a thatch roof in the middle of the govi. Totally. Yeah. It felt like this idyllic, like, little preserve.

You put a ranch house on that. The golden retrievers running outside. You're taking the horse down to the local... Golden retriever mode. Yeah, to the local saloon. And it just seems like it's the west, right? Again, you have new land that people can go live in. And that's just like a land of opportunity. And I think that'd be so cool. But yeah, what's your take on it? Dude, I mean, that's what the Central Valley was. The Central Valley used to be deserts and swamps. And now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet. It produces like 30% of all of the fruits and then the majority of like the red fruits in the United States. We used to terraform all the time.

Like the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the West. I think that like people that, you know, like maybe it's a last man problem. Maybe it's luddism. Maybe it's just like general, like, well, no, I won't say that. But like, we've just lost the desire to be great, I think, in the United States. We've lost a desire to like build the future and see the future through. If I was just planting trees, yeah, for sure, it would be easier. You need the water, though.

So unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is and cloud seeding In addition to that, it's a non-starter. There's a couple technologies, you know, I mentioned last time, like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water. That would be good. But, you know, trees, they emit dust that creates, like, a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation. Clouds skiing, like, it mimics that natural process.

It's just with the material that works a little bit better. So, yeah, man, like I plan to plant trees in the future. I plan to make as many things green as possible. I hope that people get on board with the vision to make deserts greening great, but it's going to take a minute. I had a funny experience at Hereticon. There was a guy talking about terraforming. I'm blanking on his name, but he put out this amazing... Thomas Cuero.

Thomas Huero. Made this amazing presentation. It was like 40 minutes long, showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be. And one of the places that he highlighted was the Salton Sea and how you could like theoretically, like divert the Colorado River. I've been there with Augustus. We went out there. And then I went up to him afterwards and I was like, this is an amazing project. I would love to make the salt and sea like Dubai, which just like, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a majority comes up. How do we make money off this? No, but I asked him. I was like, how do we actually do this? You know, I was thinking like the way to do it is

through a hyper commercial project that says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxic surrounding this sort of evaporating sea. Like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the salt and sea, that's now very depressed and then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen, like it feels like you need like, like he, I asked him, how does this get done? He was like, I have no idea. Like somebody should try it, but like I don't know how they would actually get it done. Is it really just like one person caring that that sort of like makes these kind of

projects possible, right? In the case right now, there's like a good chance that whether, you know, weather modification, cloud seating, et cetera, just would get banned if you weren't like flying to Florida frequently. Great man theory of history. Great man theory of history. But, but, but yeah, like, like it feels like in this sort of Doge era, like if we do enter a period of like deregulation in some areas, like some of these projects, you know, might be

possible. But, yeah, how do you think about? the salt and sea opportunity and then just like you know if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore so um a related thing interestingly enough is like i think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employed um i promise is related um i'm going to wait until q1 or q2 26 to do this but um we're just going to stand up a land fund and we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't arable primarily in arizona in California, because the same acre of land that's worth like six grand in either of those places

has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does that would sell for like 70 to 500,000. Like we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity in to get LPs involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an agricultural asset that is only made viable because of the water that we bring. It has to be a commercial interest. I don't think that we, you know, maybe America at one point had, like maybe there's this idyllic previous America that existed. I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit or because it was cool. Now, yes, it has to be cool, but moreover, like, there has to be commercial interest. And yeah, I'm going to do exactly that.

And I hope that somebody beats me to it for the sake of all the benefit that'll come from it. But if they don't, I'll make a lot more money because of them. This is hilarious because you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land. because Casey Hanmer, we had him on the show earlier, he wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a parking a lot. And you're going to be like, no, like, I'll pay a dollar more per square foot.

But I do. We can have the auction. We'll do the auction. Yeah, yeah. $5, $5.00. I have $6. I do have a question about the cloud sitting stuff. It feels like, I mean, all of this stuff is somewhat zero-sum.

Like we're not really creating new water. We're kind of moving it around. But desalination seems awesome. I was looking at it pretty intensely a year ago, and it seemed really difficult, honestly. But desalination, like, what is your take there? And it just feels like we have, you know, I would expect a gondow company to be doing this. Like, we have people working on nuclear now. We have people working on solar.

You're working on cloud seating. Like desalination, if I heard like, oh, yeah, there's some hot guy, hot startup. who's working on desalination, I wouldn't be like, oh, this is breaking my mind right now. I'd be like, of course, that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the Elsigando because they've kind of checked the box on everything else. What's the state of desalination and what's your take? Yeah, desal is great. I'm not anti-desel.

I don't think that we step on each other's toes. It is a modification of the water cycle, right? Like, whereas they are taking salt water out of the ocean, making it fresh and usable, we're taking cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable. It's relatively efficient right now. I think there's a lot of promise in catalytic desalination. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently innovative in the space, but I think that probably shows more promise than RO.

It's relatively efficient as it is. The problem with desalination for gigascale American projects for a lot of the world, that is currently undersupplied with respect to water is conveyance. We can set up a huge desal project in L.A. Sweet. No dice for Colorado. Doesn't matter for Nevada. Barely even matters for the Central Valley because you have to spend hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists.

And it's doable. Like the California State Water Project is evidence of conveyance working, but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes. into shipping that water. So should California be more reliant on it totally? Could we like with tariffs or something strong arm Mexico into giving us like the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona, maybe? But if you're in the interior of the United States, the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky. And that's, that's who we're primarily trying to serve. This was Blake Master's point that I really enjoyed. He said, you know, how do we get

water into the interior states, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. Well, we're going to reroute all the water from California into those states. And then California, the future of water in California is nuclear power desalination. And he said that like 10 years ago. Haven't heard anyone try and build it. Maybe he should have stuck with venture capital and back that company because I want it to happen. But maybe it'll happen soon. That'd be great. Okay. We're per-4. No desal, no cloud seating, boiling the ocean. Nuclear boilers on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly inland. Oh, interesting. Okay, so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river, atmospheric rivers, right? Many people have wanted to boil the ocean, but not literally. So we need more literal ocean boilers. For sure.

I have a more personal question. How are you doing with all this? I care about, you know, I'm lucky to be an investor in Rainmaker, but I care about you, you know, even more on a personal level. I think your prefrontal cortex is like, you know, about to maybe fully develop, right? But like you're under a lot of pressure for being like, you know, in your mid-20s. Like I, you know, anybody who's at a post go viral or sort of break containment knows what happens. Like your your message requests on every platform are probably like, you know, very dark. And, you know, are you, are you, you know, you seem like you're handling it incredibly well. But does it ever, does it ever get to you?

that's really that's really caring thanks for asking man um you know like i i view rainmaker as the best means by which i can serve god in my lifetime um and i owe everything in my life to jesus christ because of all that he's done for me in this life and then hopefully in next um so this this situation that i'm going through uh no big deal at all like if if it ends up on the other side with, you know, ideally me having gotten to educate and convince some people and bring them more water in places where they need it, I am happy to take the punches and the death threads in the interim. And even if it didn't work out, you know, I'm going to give it my all. And I was a high school debate kid. So I live for this kind of dorky.

Do not mess with the high school debate kids. They will go to war with you on the timeline. Yeah, we kind of predicted like the rise was so quick, the mood would shift, but I didn't expect that this was the instantiation of that mood that shift around the vibe of the company, right? Yeah, and I just have to say, like, there's so many people rooting for you, right? Like, you really are, you know, your critics that call you an industry plant, you know, in many ways, like, you are, you know, you are a product of, of, of our, industry and there's just a lot of people, you know, rooting for for your success. So,

proud of you for not, not letting the, uh, never back down, never back down. Always claim victory. Always claim victory. Don't let the haters get to you. And, uh, I would say, you know, like have a good rest of your Friday, but I'm sure today is basically a Monday for the rainmaker team. Job's not finished. Yeah, I, I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go. How are you getting fitness in these days then? That was tragic, dude. I am walking to and from the office because I live four blocks away in Gondale. And otherwise, I'm going hard, skinny priest mode.

I'm big skinny priest mode. You've been the muscular warrior. I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly merchant. It's going to happen. You're going to IP out the company, sell it all. become a private equity guy rolling up the rest of the farmland or something. Yeah. The poorly merchant is the future for sure. Now I'm excited to, I'm excited to have you back on when when you're doing some of the land stuff because like

that that does feel like, you know, verticalizing and like capturing the full value that that you guys can create over time is just like very obviously like you should own the land that you're raining water down on and and, you know, gain, you know, the full. economic benefit of the work. So it's fantastic having you on. Yeah, this is great. As always. Thanks, guys. Our weather, our weather man. We needed a weather man. We got it. We're forecasting for TPPN. Yeah, yeah, you should. It's, it's, you can't do for, like, forecasting would just be too easy for you because like, yeah, there's going to be rain, like, in that square mile over there. Yeah, we need the, the zoom background, like the green screen and it's you

and, like, the map of, next time you're on, fake zoom back. with the with the map of LA and you can tell us where it's going to rain this weekend I'll have you on Friday hang out be fun anyway great hangin we'll talk to you talk soon that's great and so next up we have Mike Noop from he founded Zapier he also founded Ark Prize which we've talked about in the show before so Ark Prize I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them. So ArcPrize is a AGI Eval, an evaluation that is designed to be hard for AI, but trivial for human beings. And so they look like puzzles, and there's a grid of squares that are different colors. And your goal is to recreate the pattern or understand the pattern.

It gives you a whole bunch of references. And then you are taxed. with creating the solution to the puzzle. And it's been very, very difficult for AI. AHA has struggled with this, even though it looks like something that should be able to be one shot. And Mike is in the studio now. Welcome, Mike. How you doing?

Hi, guys, thanks for having me. I'm doing good, how's your Friday going? Oh, that's great. How's yours? Quite excellent. It's a lot of time with the research team. Oh, awesome. Can you give us just a brief introduction, your background, and then how you wound up working on our,

and kind of what you're excited to announce most recently. Yeah. So I'm, I guess probably best known for a co-founding Zapier about 15 years ago, an automation company. This is what I've been working on the last 13 plus years. And, you know, I had sort of like calling AI curious. I got, I went sort of all in on AI early January 22 when the chain of thought paper first came out.

All these like LM reasoning benchmarks were sort of like spiking up in performance. And it got me really curious. Like, are we on path for AI or not? And this ended up leading to ZAPR deploying, I think, a lot of AI products really early into the market. And there was this trend I had seen and heard. I spent probably hundreds of hours talking with customers around, you know, applying AI agents. Saffir's been deploying it for a couple of years now. And the feedback was always consistent.

Like, hey, I get the hype, but like they just, they're not reliable enough yet. You know, they don't, they don't work two out of ten times. And that just doesn't work for these unsupervised automation products. And this was sort of in contrast all this like EGI hype, right, that I see on Twitter. Twitter all day long. Yep. Same thing. I'm sure you guys saw, you know, in the 2020,

2023, 2024 era. And so I try to set out to figure out, how do I, like, explain this? Because, like, I have two sets of lived experience that sort of don't match. And this is how I rediscovered Francoisela's arc benchmark that was originally published in 2019. And I sort of expected to have gotten kind of beaten by this point, you know, first looking into probably, again, 2020, 23, 2024, a surprise that it basically hadn't.

And not only hadn't been beaten. There'd basically been no progress on it, which I thought was really fascinating to given the fact that we've scaled up these language model systems by almost like 50,000 times of the last three or four years prior. And so that was kind of the genesis of me leading to meeting Francois and kind of pitching with this idea of like, hey, I think this is literally the most important unbeaten AI benchmark in the world. I think it makes a really important statement that like pre-training scaling alone is not

sufficient to get to AGI. And more people should know about this fact. And so we launched our price together to try to sort of raise awareness of the benchmark and just honestly inspire more people to work on new ideas again towards AGI. Can you talk about a little bit about the prize money and then what happened with Arc Prize 1 and then what's happening now with the second iteration? Yeah. So when we launched last year, you know, like I said, there's been very little progress towards, I think, GP4 had was scoring 4% on the benchmark. That's four years in, five years in. And again, like like an eight year old should be able to do these. Yeah, especially Arcadia won. It was, it turned out to be in retrospect quite simple. It's very binary sort of fluid intelligence test.

And yeah, like, you know, all the knowledge you need to solve this benchmark are doable by, you acquire the knowledge very early on in childhood development. You can take the tasks in fact, yourself if you go to arcprice.org, we have a big player. You know, I think what's special about ARC is that it is a, the sort of design concept of it is it targets something that's quite straightforward and easy and simple for humans, but hard for AI. And this is in contrast to every other AI benchmark that exists today, which you're trying to like challenge this like PhD plus plus frontier. you know, like frontier math or humanity's last exam. You know, these are sort of AIM benchmarks that you really do need to be like PhD level plus to be able to even solve as a human. And in contrast, Arc makes a very different claim that, hey, there's still a lot of like

very straightforward for human capability that these frontier AI systems don't have. And so that's why we launched our prize during the contest. The, I think one of the things our price 2024 will be noted for is probably the introduction of this like test time adaptation method that was some of the papers that came out from, uh, the contest. We had a big million dollar prize in order to beat the benchmark to get to 85%. No one did. You also have to do it with a very high degree of efficiency. And we kind of expected that was going to be the case. We also had this paper track where people could submit new ideas and push the conceptual forward force, which is where most of the coolest progress came out from

last year. And then at the end of the year, obviously last fall, we started seeing things like 01 and 03. And these are, this is a very big, this is a very big update, I think, because systems like 01, particularly O1 Pro and things like O3, are not just purely scaling up language models. These are not language models anymore. These are really AI systems. They have a big model as a component of the system, but they have some sort of synthesis engine on top that allows them to like reuse their existing pre-turning knowledge at test time to recombine the knowledge. And that allows them to make significant progress towards ARC. And we saw O3 in December, you know, score a pretty high degree of efficiency solve ARC at AP2 on.

It's 75%. So they're not quite at the 85%. And then, you know, opening, I tested and even compare compute a version of it that probably was probably a couple million dollars to test. They got 87% I think. And so that was kind of where we wrapped up last year. We've been part of work over a couple of years. Just real quickly, while you were saying that fantastic setting the table, I went to arcprise.org slash play. I did the daily puzzle.

I still got it. I'm still got a job. You could do it at home if you want arcprise.org. Do you think with all the billions of dollars flowing around the ecosystem, do you think Ark Prize is capital constrained in any way? Like would we have seen better results to date or is the sort of social status of just like, you know, achieve achieving? Is it kind of like scaling?

Are we compute bound here or is it algorithm bound? Right now I think ARC AGI 2 that we just introduced this week on Monday is pretty direct evidence that we need no idea still to get to AI. We shared, I don't know if we can throw it up or we can put the shows or something. There's a chart I shared on Twitter that shows the scaling performance of even frontier AI systems like O and Pro and 3 against the version one of the data set that we've been using for the last five years. And then version two that we just introduced this week. And basically it resets the baseline back to 0% language models. Purell LLM systems are scoring like 0% now again on ARCB2.

single COT systems like R1 and 01 score like 1%. And the sort of estimates we have right now for the frontier systems that are actually adding pretty sophisticated, you know, synthesis engines on top like O1-Prono3, single digit percentages on their efficient compute settings. So I think there's a very interesting point that like, you know, we kind of move from this regime where people are claiming, oh, we're just going to scale up language models, right?

More data, more parameters we're going to scale GI. And people realize I think that's not quite the story now. And then there's a new story. that's emerged over the last five months, which is, oh, we're gonna scale up this test and compute, and that's gonna get a stage I. And I think what V2 shows is that that's not quite either. We still need some structural and ideas

in order to like get to a regime where we can scale up to actually reach human performance on this stuff. Do you think like with how much human capital is sort of concentrated in San Francisco, like do you think that is in many, and sort of like geographic concentration of so many of the brightest minds and AI

is sort of like potentially even holding back like new random ideas. And that's why ARC can potentially sort of, if we need new ideas, like maybe they don't come from the sort of the center of the AI universe. And maybe they come from, you know, some random kid on the internet who's just like, you know, has has the time to think, you know, completely independently and try to practice. You know, this feels kind of scrolls adjacent. Yeah, exactly. You put this idea out and a bunch of people can take wild swings at it and you get just new idea generation.

I got to say thank you to Nat Freebie. We talked about the Pasebius Challenge. Of course. Literally, I was very inspired by what they were able to accomplish and that was one of the motivations for actually running the prize in the way we did. I think, yes, part of the goal of running our prize was specifically to try and reach independent researchers and teams and give them a problem to work on that they could actually make meaningful frontier progress on.

I think especially in academia in the last maybe five years, there's been this disheartening belief of like, hey, can we really advance the frontier? because you have to have billions of dollars in funding to scale up these language models. And I think ARC shows that, like, yeah, there actually are frontier problems that are unsolved, that individual people and individual teams can actually make a difference on today.

You know, that part of our whole goal of launching our Chrysler was re-inspire a lot of independent researchers to work on things like this and bring new ideas to the fold. I remember when ChatGPT got a computer and it was able to write some Python code, then execute it. Is there, are there restrictions on kind of custom systems that are LLM or reasoning model driven,

but fine-tuned to help with the execution of ARC prizes? Is that breaking the, like the rules? Or is that something that is actually encouraged and fine? How do you think about, like, I guess it all boils down to like overfitting on this? problem, but it seems like even with the incentive to overfit, it hasn't really happened yet. Yeah. This is one of the reasons Arkby won lasted five years was because it had very good design, original design built into it with a public test set and a private test set. Now, private test set really prevented folks from being able to sort of overfit on it.

And so there's actually two tracks for the Ark Prize Foundation. We have the contest track. This is on Kaggle. This is the like big grand prize. All the prize money is attached to this. Cagle graciously donates a lot of compute to allow us to host there. And on the grand prize is basically to get to that 85% within Caggle's efficiency limits. So this is about, get about $50 worth of compute per submission that you send in. And this is like a pretty high bar for efficiency. And in fact, this is not an arbitrary bar. We do think that efficiency actually is a really, really important aspect of intelligence.

You know, you can root force your way up to intelligence, but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff. That's the contest. When we launched last year, there was a lot of demand from just the community of the world on like, hey, I, okay, I get that like I can't run my big language model on this, you know, in Kaggle, but I really want to know how to frontier A systems do. And so we launched a second track that's hosted on arcprise.org where we benchmark and test all the like frontier commercial systems to showcase what are they, you know, capable of doing. Basically these existence proofs that I think will eventually, you know, filter down to higher efficiency solutions and open source solutions that can be run on something like Kaggle. And even there, like within the sort of same efficiency and, you know, accuracy specs, we still haven't seen any frontier AI system beat RKGI2, let alone RKHA1. Yeah. So there's still a long way to go.

What does that track actually look like? Does that mean that like the team from OpenAI is writing the specific prompt? Are they doing prompt engineering? Or is it your team is just taking the API and and giving everyone kind of the same goal? Is there any standardization there? There is. So our price does most of the testing today. ourselves like we basically wait we wait for API access either get early access or you

wait for the public access and we have a GitHub repo where we just have a standard very simple prompt that we use to baseline across all the sort of frontier systems that we test opening eye situation was a little different because they had reached out to us and said hey we think we've got a really impressive result on the public eval set and we'd like your help to verify on a semi-private set which is what we created that data set to be able to do and in that case there was really you know very little prompt engineering at all it was very very very mostly just a verification of what we'd are what we'd seen from them. So yeah, in all these cases, the amount of prompting that goes into these is extremely minimal, basically just giving it the

sort of grid with numbers and asking it to solve it and it directly goes into it. Very cool. Can you talk about consumer AI agents we've talked about on this show? Like it feels like, you know, once a week someone comes out and says they're building the consumer AI agent that's going to like book you a hotel or book you a flight or like, do these things, it sound really simple and then like nobody's delivered to our knowledge like a truly magic agentic consumer experience to book a flight even even you know you could use like opening eyes operator to do this but like even when you're sort of watching operator work it's like it feels like you're using it doesn't feel like truly magic yet and just you know given like in many ways like

zapier is just like the like such a foundational company when it comes to automating anything on the internet. I remember that was magic to me as a kid where I was like, oh, data, you know, a kid, I'd say like in like college, right? It's like, wait, data came in here and then it just went and did this other thing or like I did this one thing. Yeah, it feels like a superpower, right? Like, yeah, totally. And so in many ways, it's like criminally like underrated in terms of getting to that sort of like, you know, agentic internet. But like why haven't people been able to like, I even saw like perplexity like was saying last week, like we're building, you. you know, consumer agents that's going to like book your flight. So like an Apple's promised this

and everybody's promised it, but we haven't seen that magic experience yet. And I'm curious why you think that is. We've been trying to deploy agents for two years that's out here. And this was kind of what led me to sort of originally get a bit interested in ARC is, you know, it's this reliability problem. Language models fundamentally are stochastic in terms of how they work. And so you just never going to get that 100% accuracy directly from the model without adding a lot of extra additional guardrails. So we're like processing on top. We've done. some of that for Zapier. The way that I kind of think about it, you've got these concentric rings of use cases that kind of get locked as reliability and consistency goes up. And today we're

pretty much still in the can, and this is true at the frontier, we're pretty much still in the kind of concentric ring of like personal productivity and team-based automation where the risk to failure isn't very high. Right. Like if you're going to start deploying one of these like completely unsupervised agents into the wild, you're going to have a pretty high bar, right? If there's a sort of high degree of risk if this thing goes wrong, you know, I'll burn customer trust or brand trust or something like that. So that's what we've been kind of seeing is companies and users sort of slowly increasing those conscientious brings as the progress is the technology is improving.

I actually think we're going to start to see agents start to work this year, specifically because of progress in ARC. I think this is an underappreciated fact. People always ask like, hey, don't ARC looks like puzzles, like what's the economic utility of this stuff? One of the most important things that ARC tests for is your ability to adapt to problems you haven't seen before. That's really the spirit and the essence of what it is.

It's saying, hey, can you solve problems? You didn't just memorize, but you actually have used knowledge you did memorize to, like, solve new things that you've never seen before. This is fundamentally the same aspect of like thing we're testing for in terms of generalization or liability with agents. So I think because we're starting to see AI reasoning systems that are able to make progress against Arc AGI1, albeit relatively inefficiently. But the capability is sort of now existing.

There are AI systems out there that exist some degree of fluid intelligence. That's going to start increasing the reliability. And more and more of those concentric rings are going to be unlocked, I think, starting the share. I want to talk about just like AI, AGI, ASI metrics. I feel like Ark Prize is a fantastically important benchmark. I agree with you on that. Ray Kurzweil has been benchmarking against just like flops to human flops, basically. He's put the singularity at 2045.

He kind of nailed the Turing test date, I believe. But I've been kicking around this idea of like maybe the real test of like AI hitting some sort of like tipping point is just like how much economic value is being created by AI. And once that hits some sort of like 10% of total global GDP or 50%, then we've reached the AI singularity or something. Are there any metrics that you're looking at for kind of this like intelligence explosion, ASI, AGI? but outside of like an individual moment or, you know, application use case benchmark, something more global and like human relevant. You know, pragmatically, you know, I think the definition that I use for AI these days is basically when we stop being able to easily find tasks that humans can do that AI can't do,

we've got EGI. And, you know, I think that's like I said, a bit of a, but, dramatic answer. One of the things that surprised to me about RKGI2 was the relative degree of ease by which we were able to create it, right? Given this like big moment in December of like 03 beating RKGI1, you know, it was actually not too hard for us to come up with tasks that we were able to sort of verify. We actually did a controlled human study to make sure every task in the V2 data set was solvable by at least two humans on the same rule set. And we're able to find that relatively easily. So I think that shows we still have ways to go. I think once we hit that bar though, when the gap between, like easy for humans hard for AI is zero. I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to like argue the opposite side, but like we don't have EGI. I'm not I don't find the economic like measurements quite as useful for understanding the capabilities of what frontier AI does. I think it's a good measure of impact and I have no problems using it for that point. But I think if you want to use like an economic measure to make a statement about capabilities, the challenges

it obscures and there's multiple ways to get to that outcome. And this is one of the challenges like language models. Like language models generally work in like a memorization style regime where they're learning lots of data. They're able to apply to very similar types of patterns that they've seen before, but not novel patterns of Archigio shows. And like those have economic utility. It turns out that like intelligence is just memorizing actually does interesting things

for us as after is making money with the current regime of AI today. And so I think if you really want to like understand capabilities of frontier AI systems to make predictions based on the capabilities. You need more precise, narrow like wedges on that capability. And that's really what RKGI tries to be is this wedge on, you know, do these AI systems have the ability to actually adapt to problems that they haven't seen before and acquire skills, you know, rapidly and efficiently to apply to new things that haven't been done before. A little more fun question. What was your reaction to this week's sort of Ghibli moment? It felt like we talked about this on the show earlier.

The funny thing for me is like, so we had a couple of posts each that sort of like broke containment out of like traditional like teapot or whatever. And, you know, there was a lot of people quoting like normies. People quoting our posts being like, all right, the jig is up. Like what app? What filter app did you use for this? So like there's still people out there that like, you know, are just like completely unaware of like progress. But for those that sort of use these tools every day, it felt like this magic moment where people are just one-shodding these sort of image generation models and getting these sort of incredible outputs. But but and yeah, just felt magical.

And what they were very excited about, like, I guess my question to you guys is, you know, do you think that the degree by which we saw like the, you know, gibliization of like Twitter and X over this week? do you think that was the degree of baseline interest in that like series and movie prior to this week? Or do you think like most of the people that were posting that stuff were this is the first time they've ever really got exposed to that kind of content? Yeah, I kind of ran a test on this inadvertently because I posted both a scene from Oppenheimer, Giblified. It got like 30,000 likes. And then I posted an actual picture from Spirited Away, a real still from the actual movie. 24 likes. And so there's a little bit of like I love the fact you're running experiment. That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a little bit of like, okay, it's not just the filter,

this recontextualization. I thought a lot of it was like the there's a reason we're using Studio Ghibli specifically because there are other art styles that you can recreate with style transfer for a long time. But Studio Ghibli fits this like perfect. It doesn't quite go into the uncanny valley. And then if the AI, if you say, hey, I want you to recreate a picture of me, but use a Hollywood VFX pipeline to recreate the 3D model and then do exactly what they do in the Avengers and take it to the top level, it'll just look like a photo. Because VFX has now become photo real. And so you can't go full photo real or else it just doesn't look like a filter at all. And if you go to stick figure, it's unimpressive. And so you need this like perfect art style that looks clearly different.

but still recognizable. And the level of alteration that happens in Studio Ghibli's animation style is that perfect intersection where it feels like impossible to just create with a vanilla style transfer or like edge detection and just pixel manipulation. You're not just recoloring. It's not a filter. But at the same time, it's not just, oh, so it's so photo real that it's just like, oh, yeah, you took a picture of me like this and then it looks like this.

and it's like, that's impressive, but it just looks like you took the photo like this. I don't know. That was my take. I mean, I guess like, I just get, you know, my own answer to that is like, I think it significantly increased the awareness of like this art style, this media. Totally. I don't know by how much, but clearly like people are doing it who've never even like seen Sparred Away or heard of the doctor or like anything like that.

And so I do think that there's really important, you know, thing around the ease of use of the tools, you know, actually gets people like, I think exposed and empowered to actually like do this stuff on a very mass scale, very rapid, I think we saw this week, but you actually really matters for mass adoption on this stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm very excited to see it. What would you do? The human, like the human creativity. Like we had basic like AI image generation for a while. And then we got the Harry Potter, Belenziaga video. And that was clearly like AI generated,

but the idea to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, which are these two very orthogonal concepts. Like that creates the humor and that came clearly from a human. And so I'm excited to see like where this goes to where I will see a Ghibli or Ghibli inspired video and be like, oh wow, this is like actually entertaining to me, not just a tech demo.

So I'm curious to get your take. So, you know, if you were running an image, it was a bad week to be running an image generation model because unless you're having your users prompt and get that quality of output that consistently. And there's just sort of like a distribution effect too where like, you know, I'm sure they're, you know, even just like the user base increased, you know,

dramatically just off of this one sort of meme cycle. Like, where would you, you know, if you were running one of these sort of image generation models, where would you go? And do you think that some of these players should be thinking in a more weird way? like kind of trying to generate these new ideas versus making like sort of derivative foundation model efforts.

There's an interesting tie-in to things like ARC that we were talking about before and trying to assess capabilities and pushing new ideas forward, right? Like, this stir steering the conversation a little differently from how you sort of framed it there, but like, you know, one of the risks of like a sort of frontier of AI that is sort of dogmatic

and its view of scaling up is going to produce systems that end users are using that all look the same. I have the exact same capability. And our arc shows it's like, hey, there are still frontiers that are unsolved for. They're interesting things. Here's a benchmark that you can kind of go measure against and actually, you know, direct progress and inspire folks towards that potentially could have like some sort of large step function change in capability of what these systems are actually able to do. You want like people, I think, pushing and exploring that frontier and, you know, measures of benchmark that they think are actually actually good ways to help direct and guide research attention there. And I think I don't know the full details on how the new image generation from R works,

but like at a high level, it does seem quite structurally different from the diffusion approach that even DALI 3 and a lot of other image generators are using. They're doing some sort of like tokenization like system, decoding system. You know, they're like clearly have tried something new that like doesn't exist. It didn't exist before this week. It's allowing them to get these like frontier results. I think we want to see basically that.

mindset continue to get pushed across like the entire field, both on, you know, media, obviously, but also on this or reasoning and AI side. I think that's going to unlock a ton of use cases that people sort of written off AI for today. They're like, okay, I think I know what AI can do and can't do. And, you know, now I'm comfortable in my sort of, you know, my job or, you know, the things I'm going to ask it to do. And like, I think there's still a lot that we want it to do that it can't yet. And things like ARC are hopefully useful measures towards, towards those tasks. Yeah, my reaction was just generally like if you have $100 million in a bank and you're in the bank and you were trying to do what Open AI is now doing like remarkably better than you are doing, then like maybe you need to focus on like, you know, true innovation and trying to create these sort of like novel approaches to do said thing. Otherwise, maybe difficult to compete. Or maybe some unique distribution or something. Yeah. We talked about the enterprise. I had this hot take like a year ago. I was like I think anyone who's like just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on fire. If you. If you. really want to make a unique difference, especially if you're a small startup, like a founder,

like you've got to go take an orthogonal approach. You've got to try something different than whatever else is doing. That's the only way you're going to be able to potentially like, I think, capture attention and provide a lot new value to the world. Yeah, we talk, I know we're probably over time, but like there, there's no capital constraints in early stage AI right now. And like with Zapier, like I think the number one, one of the number one reasons that I would like see you guys in headlines is like another. story of like oh zapier raised x you know single digit millions or whatever you want to hear the funny quick quib on that it was about a million bucks back to 2012 uh we never spent the money by time we

actually got the round closed figured out who we wanted to hire got the payroll started like revenue had caught up and so literally i think you could trace every dollar we raised all the way to today yeah there's sort of any like it's potentially a problem right now that people aren't forced to be hyper creative because they just are like oh oh, well, we have $30 million, like we might as well. Like, we're supposed to spend it. And, like, spending money to be innovative is different than, like, you know, like being innovative because you are constrained on the capital side.

Yeah. I have a follow up here. How should we be thinking about Gary Marcus these days? He wrote deep learning alone isn't getting us to human-like AI. He's been an advocate for symbol manipulation. He's been kind of on the outs in inner AI circles. Rich Sutton wrote the, you know, scale is all you need, the bitter lesson, of course. But we're in this weird scenario where we're like, we've done the scaling.

We're still bullish on scaling. We are going to build bigger data centers and do bigger training runs. But then we might also need new algorithms. So he's like, kind of right. How do you interpret maybe not just his legacy, but just the puzzle of how scaling fits into all of this? I generally think he's been more right than wrong. I think if you'd like just take a limit. five-year view on this from 2020 up until 2020 end of 2024.

You know, I think it was a generally right, like he was making the right ideas. You know, I think one of the reasons I personally find things like ARC more useful is they provide a direct way to do sense finding on this stuff. You don't, I don't have to like rely on my trust of another individual or another human in order to make like statements or build my confidence or intuition or my model, personal model of the world based on like trusting someone else's analysis. I can just look at reality. Mark is a contact with reality moment. We can have AI systems. I could go try to do this stuff, have humans try to do it, and measure the difference and actually look.

And I've always found that that's a going straight to the truth is like a much faster way to get to the frontier of knowledge. If you really want to know what's true or not, you kind of just have to look for things like that that measure it as opposed to like relying on proxies like other folks. But yeah, I would say Marcus has generally been more right than wrong. And for what it's worth, I think actually the bitter lesson is somewhat under like I think often gets misinterpreted. makes a statement about search and learning as these general for methods of scaling. But Zun also makes the key point in the paper that, hey, like, these are, the thing that we are actually applying search and learning on top of is an architecture that was invented by a human in the first place.

The core idea of the thing that we were scaling finally came from a person, from a human. And that's still to do true today still. And I think that is very inspiring, even in the current regime, we find ourselves here in March 2025 where yeah I think we actually do need some idea changes I think we need some structural changes in terms of how the architecture how the algorithms work here in order to you know certainly beat something like RKJ2 the high degree efficiency and yeah there's going to be a scaling component to it but like don't miss that like ah yes there's actually an idea component too that often gets like kind of brushed over final question who do you want to highlight that you feel like is doing important

research and AI that's maybe under hyped but and not super online, but, you know, whether they're attacking ARC or just generally doing work, because there's a lot of people that love, you know, the sort of hyper commercial approaches to AI, you know, going and working at the labs, but there's totally valid if you just want to, like, do research somewhere and just like focus on that. Probably a few individuals that I think are sort of doing really interesting work in and around program synthesis, which is a sort of a parallel paradigm. AI paradigm to deep learning.

Actually don't think either is sufficient. I think some merger of the two is what's necessary to get to AI. Top story for another day. But there's quite a few people that are working in this alternate paradigm that are doing some interesting work. On Twitter, this is not this person is extremely online, but Victor Tailin's a really good follow on Axe and Twitter, been working on this sort of alternative like system called HVM that does this like crazy like enumeration of program synthesis really quickly.

There's a couple of academics that I respect a lot. Josh Jennebaum and MIT, Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute, or two folks who've been really deep in this, the arc world, and the program synthesis world for many years and have sort of cultivated and steward some of the community over the last five years for its working for its new idea. So I really do respect and appreciate those folks for that. I have one last question and then we'll let you go.

Would you recommend against learning to code? And do you think it's possible to try and build an arc prize for programmers? a task that a novice or reasonable programmer could do that no AI could solve? Yes. In fact, let me answer the second first. ARC is that challenge itself. So one thing is somewhat maybe confusing is like we present the puzzles very visual like for humans to take, right? They look like grids.

You like draw the pixels. When these challenges are presented to computers, it's not an actual image processing challenge at all. It's just a 2D list of numbers. It's a matrix of numbers that represent the input grade. It's just zero to nine for each number represents a color. And then you get an output matrix for the output. And your job as a programmer is to write a program that maps the input sequence to the output sequence.

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

And things like O3 are kind of unique because they're like language programs, right? They have this chain of thought. You know, you can think of a chain of thought as like, you know, a program in that in English that transforms the input to the output. But yeah, literally ARC is the second thing that you asked for there. On the first question, should you learn a code? I haven't like I guess thought super deeply about this. My hot take is like I guess yes, you should still learn to code like primarily because it's

been it gives you like leverage over technology today. And yeah, like I don't see that leverage over technology going away anytime soon, particularly if you want to work on like the frontier of this stuff. And so, you know, I sort of think the arc of humanity's history has generally been to like produce tools that give individual humans more. leverage over the universe around us. And I still think code is that thing today. I think AI will probably eclipse it, but I don't think code is going to go away in that future. Got it. Well, thanks so much for joining. This is a fantastic conversation. We'll have to go back. I know that there's

going to be more developments with ArkPrize too. I want to stay abreast of them. So please come back when there's big news. Thanks, guys. Arcprise.org if people want to enter the contest. Yeah, go check it out. Cheers. Have a great day. Thanks for coming on. Bye. I mean, I love, I love ARC prize. I think that they should take out like a huge billboard for it. Go to adquick.com. They should be doing out-of-home advertising, especially with ad-quick. They could make it easy and measurable.

They could say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home technology. Wait, I have an idea. Yes. Let's donate them enough money just to run a billboard with Adquick. That'd be fantastic. Now we're talking. I want everyone working on, on ARC prizes. It's a fantastic project.

It's very, very fascinating. We'll have to have Francois. The creator of the actual test as well on the show at some point. And maybe we can get them to pick up a watch on Bezell because they have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. And you know, if any company running on ramp will save time and money and then they can sort of actually, you know,

potentially do more distributions and then the shareholders would actually be able to spend more money on Bezell, which is one of the many reasons to use ramp. That's great. And I mean, if they're doing all that, like, where should they stay when they're on vacation? I would find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel degraded amenities, dreamy beds, top tiered cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service, folks. It's a vacation home, but better.

Do you want to do any of these in any of these timeline posts before we get out of here? It's already passed two. We've done a great job this week. I think we've streamed a lot. I'm excited to get home and just completely sleep on my eight sleep because that's right. Late sleep brings you nights that fuel your best days. You can turn any bed into ultimate sleeping experience.

Go to eightsleep.com slash tbpn. I love the head fake. Oh, should we get into some content? Oh, actually it's another ad, baby. And, uh, I mean, there's some other news that we should cover. Crusoe raised $225 million in debt to buy more Nvidia GPUs.

And they're using current Nvidia GPUs as collateral. And people are saying this is very circular, but it makes sense. I mean, Nvidia GPUs have value. And of course, they can be priced and leverage. Lever up. Do it again 10 times. You know, just one hand washes the other. I love it.

We also have a post that we should shout out to Rob Schultz over at Snagged. They're officially launching domain sales and brokerage service. We're starting with a list of 50 plus premium domains like try.com, tuscany.com, geeks.com, and beverage.com. You had me at tuscany.com, Rob. No, but here's the real story. Rob got us TBPN. He did.com.

And he did it in a shockingly little amount of time. It was like, a lot of people have been like, oh, TBPN, kind of a mouthful. It's a lot of letters. But I'm like, okay, think of another four letter.com that we could get very quickly. And we have the four letter handle on X. And so I think that it's underrated to find one of these short single word domains, single acronym domains and then build your brand world around it. And I think even though it's been, it's probably harder to get people to remember TBPN the first time they hear it. After they hear it

about 10 times, it has the chat GPT effect. Oh yeah, TBPN. It's a weird thing, but it just, it stands for what it stands for. It's great. Anyway, also, Xi Jinping advocates for stable trade at Beijing business meetings. This is a bigger story. I'm sure we'll be digging into later. But the Chinese President Xi Jinping engaged in a series of meetings with global business leaders and foreign dignitaries in Beijing, highlighted by his discussions with representatives of the international business community. C emphasized China's continued openness to foreign investment. He's saying, let's open the floodgates. Let's get some capital in here. Let's build some tech. We'll see how it goes. And we'll close out with an Elon Musk post that you were alluding to earlier. Kitsy,

he's quote tweeting Kitsy, who says finishing touches. We need more computer. cute to cure cancer, right? And you can see that the image is loading a, uh, looks like, a Simpson's character. And so it's very funny. We're in this weird thing, do you think that loading effect is, is, uh, just to make it more addictive? It's not. I think it actually does relate to the change in the algorithm of or technology because we're no longer using pure diffusion where it's all random noise and then you're denoising it iteratively at the whole image level, which is what you see on mid-jurney when they're sending you those updates. Now it is more going line by line because it's a token-based system. So there's some diffusion that's going in. And there's also

some tokenization. And I think Open AI, you know, the giblification kind of drowned out the technical discussion that should follow Ben Thompson, work it down a little bit. I'm sure there will be other deep dives. And I'm sure there'll be open source versions of this. Like every time a new, you know, Manus came out and there was Open Manus. And people always love. to dig into, even though the papers aren't released, you know, this is not an open source technology. I'm sure we will see an open source version of this technology within six months to a year, probably two weeks, if we're being honest, because as soon as people see this tech, they want to build it, they want to figure it out. And so that's the story. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Fantastic week. Go leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And stay tuned. We have a bunch of stuff lined up for next week already. Going to be doing more special days. We had a really fun time with Defense Day. Today, kind of turned into AI, author day. There was also some terraforming day in there. But we're very excited for it. You never know where you're going to get.

You never know where you're going to get. So stay tuned. Follow us. We are excited for Monday. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one.