Tyler (3:26)

It is like how hard can you crush a Joe Rogan appearance?

John (3:30)

He did do well. Yeah, yeah. So maybe that's it. But just in general, it feels like the idea of like, like the, the American populace is not frustrated directly over weapons production right now a little bit, but not, not, not as much as people as it used to be years ago. The idea of like working with the military is much, much less of a, of a cornerstone issue, a hot debate than it was six years ago, eight years ago. And the conversation has moved on to job displacement, to energy production, to Internet addiction, that type of stuff. Anyway, to restream iO1 livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, reach your audience wherever they are. I was noticing a pattern that everyone has 10 year AGI timelines right now. And, and it started, we started when Sam Altman put out that post. Like super intelligence is just a few thousand days away. And at the time it was kind of odd because like when he wrote that post last year, everyone was like, AGI is one year away. AGI is two years away. It was like fast takeoff time. Like everyone was very excited. And then he came out and was like, it's a few thousand days away. And if you do the numbers, I think Tyler has the clock. How, how long is a few thousand days? 3,650 days. How many years? 10 years?

Tyler (standing desk) (4:58)

10.

John (4:58)

It's a decade. Puts us squarely in 2035. Right. And so Sam came out and you know, and he was kind of in his blog post of the superintelligence age talking about, you know, maybe we're a decade away. Then Andrej Karpathy goes on. Dwarkesh, just a couple months ago, a couple weeks ago, says AGI is a decade away. And then Dwarkesh posts this probability density of when AGI will be achieved. There's a chance that America does it. There's a chance that China does it. And the median, the 50, the 50th percentile, was exactly 2035. Exactly 2035. Could have been any, could have been 2030 could have been 25, 40, could have been 2050, but it was 2035.

Tyler (5:38)

Then you know that, that, that chart, that like very schizo chart that says periods when to make money. Have you seen this?

John (5:46)

No. No.

Tyler (5:47)

And it's like it was created like, I guess about 100 years ago. People reference it anytime. It like actually aligns to events because it's basically has years in which panics have occurred, years of good times, high prices and time to sell stocks, and years of hard times, low prices and a good time to buy stocks. And so it's basically like astrology for stock picking.

John (6:11)

And what is it saying right now?

Tyler (6:12)

2035 is a year they're predicting is when a panic will occur.

John (6:17)

Ooh, interesting. Well, that certainly aligns with all these AGI timelines.

Tyler (6:20)

There you go.

John (6:21)

The other one that we mentioned on the show yesterday was George Hotz, the founder of Comma and generally regarded as like one of the sharpest hackers, computer scientists, AI developers. He was looking at the Tesla FSD data and projected that if the rate of improvement continues, you basically see a doubling in capability every year. You double it out if the benchmark is how many interventions happen per thousand vehicle miles traveled. And you compare that to how many crashes happen when a human's at the wheel. He says Tesla's about eight years away, which puts him like squarely in the 2035 camp. 2033, I guess in his case. And then I was looking at meter and this one we'll have to debate a lot more. But meter has been tracking AI's ability to complete long tasks and it's growing exponentially. It used to be like six seconds, now it's like two hours. And when you talk to anyone who's in the AI field, they'll tell you that the agents are getting more and more capable of handling longer, longer time horizon tasks. The question is, I feel like humans don't have a time horizon. I feel like humans, they're just born and the goal is survive, be fruitful, multiply, right? And so I feel like if you're tracking the meter data, you need to get out to like 30 years, like a full career, right? Like the prompt needs to be like, go, make money. And then it just goes and becomes a lawyer and lives its full life and retires after a 35 year run. And of course, when you track out the doublings in 2035, the meter is projecting based on that log curve or that log graph, that AI will be able to have a time horizon in the decades. And so you would have something similar to what a human would, would have. And so my read on the meter data is that, you know, AGI 2035, again, maybe the messiest, the least like definitive. And all these predictions have different methodologies. Some of them are extremely quantitative. A lot of the, some of them I'm like reading, really reading into some other people are just saying like it's a decade away specifically. But what's interesting is that it just feels like 10 years is this consensus right now. And there's much less diversity of opinion. There aren't that many people saying two years anymore. There aren't that many people saying 50 years anymore. Everyone's kind of saying 10 years. And I just wonder like, let's put aside like let's try and accurately predict when this thing happens and let's just analyze it from a psychological perspective and like what does it mean when the tech community all has a consensus of something that's a decade, Like a decade away could just be what people say when they don't know. Like if you ask me when flying cars are going to happen, I'm going to say a decade. If you're going to say when quantum computing, oh, that'll be a decade. Oh, Mars, yeah, that's a decade. It's easy, it's like, it's optimistic. It's way. When I say a decade, I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but I'm saying like, you're not going to be able to hold me to my bad take because you're not going to be able to clip this in one year and be like, he was wrong.

Growing Daniel (9:44)

Right?

Tyler (9:44)

Yeah. It is funny the quote, most people under overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, underestimate what they do what they can do in 10 years. And in this situation we're just like, yeah, we're estimating that we can just achieve AGI in 10 years. Somewhat a year is actually. So it's effectively like inverted.

John (10:04)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so but the other weird thing that I was grappling with was like when I personally feel like about AGI, I'm convinced by these. I feel like AGI is 10 years away and I don't feel like I'm coping or doing some sort of mental logic jumps or something. It's just like if you actually forced me to put a prediction down, I probably would say about a decade. And I feel like I've been around there, been on the Kurzweil timelines, maybe, maybe I'm 2045. More like Kurzweil, but still like a decade, two decades. I feel like it's real. I feel like I do believe it's gonna happen. I don't feel like I'm like AGI never. I'm not in that camp. And so then I go to, well, how should I actually be changing my behavior if something big is coming in a decade? It feels like you should actually, should not just be acting normally, but it feels like there's some sort of preference falsification going on. Everyone's saying a decade. How many people are actually acting like it's a dec. Like what should you be doing in the intervening years if it's a decade away? Like, are you just supposed to like build technologies that are fun little dopamine rewards? Are you trying to like accumulate as much capital as possible before?

Tyler (11:20)

I think, well, yeah. So when, who plans around 10 years at all? Right. People tend to go for things that they want today in some ways. Right. So if somebody like, let's say they're in their 20s, they're like, I want to own a home by the time, by 2035, they want that thing today. And so they, but they might understand, okay, it's going to take some time to get there. But actually making real changes in your life for this like impending scenario, that's hard to predict entirely. It's very, very difficult. And I don't know that, I don't know that any. You know, it was maybe more popular earlier this year to joke about, know, the golden retriever maxing, right?

John (12:06)

Oh yeah.

Tyler (12:06)

We would talk about this, right? But it feels like that dialogue has kind of changed.

John (12:14)

How so?

Tyler (12:16)

Part of it goes back to the other like enduring meme. You know, you have one year to escape the permanent underclass. And then everyone woke up like a few months ago and said, okay, maybe we actually have like longer, at least a decade now. Everyone's still just focused on escape, whatever that means, whatever their, whatever their number is.

John (12:36)

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

Tyler (standing desk) (12:54)

I think it's definitely interesting that people seem to kind of align around this 10 year thing. I think there's also some sort of Bias. Right. If you think AI is coming in three years, you're probably not just going to be like writing blogs. Like you're, maybe you're going to start a macro hedge fund. Maybe you're going to go work at one of the labs to like really try to influence how it's going to happen. If it's going to happen super quick.

John (13:13)

Yeah.

Tyler (standing desk) (13:13)

So I think there's some sense of that. And if you really don't believe AGI is coming at all, then like, you're also probably not going to be writing blogs about AGI. You're just going to be like, yeah, doing your normal job or whatever. So I think there's some like confirmation bias there.

John (13:27)

Ten years, exactly the time of a venture capital fund life cycle coincidence.

Tyler (13:34)

Tyler's probably the most AGI pilled person on the team. And so it's interesting that you're. You kind of, I think you day to day act like everyone else on the team.

John (13:45)

Yeah, yeah. You've done. What's your biggest revealed preference?

Tyler (standing desk) (13:52)

Hmm, that's hard to say.

John (13:53)

Maybe just hanging out on the show.

Tyler (13:56)

Yeah, just hanging out. Podcasting instead of going to university is just like, yeah, nothing matters.

John (14:01)

I guess. I mean there's a little bit of that. Yeah, yeah, maybe AGI. It's just hard because like in the intervening years there's clearly like just incredibly like high leverage work to be done. It's so easy to pull forward. Like, okay, well like the, the robots are going to be able to do X, so maybe you shouldn't spend the next 10 years doing X. But if in fact X is very valuable, then the next 10 years you can capture a ton of value as you leverage more and more technology right up until the point where you don't need to do it anymore because it's fully automated.

Tyler (standing desk) (14:40)

Yeah. I think there's some sense of like, at least for me it's like, okay, maybe I would be working at. Maybe I would have started some rapper company or something like that. But I'm more bullish on AI than I think most people are to where I think that stuff is generally not super kind of long term oriented. So maybe I think some sort of that kind of.

John (15:05)

Do you think, do you think we'll be podcasting in 2045?

Tyler (15:11)

Yes, but I say yes because I think the podcast is to live.

John (15:15)

I agree. I think it might be around way past AGI.

Tyler (15:21)

I mean, I don't, I don't know. I think, I think everybody, everybody wants to believe that. Like I. But I don't know I have yet to see.

John (15:30)

I don't know that mining is going to be around forever. I don't think people mine for the love of the game. I don't think people go in the coal mine and mine and they would do it if they didn't get paid. But I think people do play chess.

Tyler (15:41)

Children yearn for the mine and I.

John (15:42)

Think people podcast for fun.

Tyler (15:44)

Children yearn for.

John (15:45)

I don't think they actually.

Tyler (15:45)

Real life game of Minecraft.

John (15:48)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Minecraft for sure. Playing games for sure. That's actually sort of where my take.

Tyler (15:53)

But imagine, imagine you have an army of robots and you just get to use a computer to control them to mine for minerals. That sounds like it could be pretty fun and fulfilling.

John (16:05)

Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. That sounds like a loophole. I was talking about actually swinging an axe in a mine shaft. Yes. Maybe there will one day be an AI agent for mining. We've actually talked to some folks who are doing AI for mining. If you're mining value in your code base, get on Cognition, the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

Casey Hanmer (16:32)

Yeah.

John (16:32)

Where I landed at the end of this was talking about this clip of Alex Wang that's sort of going viral. People are dunking on it because he recommends that kids learn to vibe code. And I just disagree with the haters. I think the haters are wrong on this one. And I was thinking about, like, well, I have a kid, would I teach him to vibe code? And I was playing with Legos last night. I was assembling Legos and from what I've done vibe coding and what I've done Legos, I'm like, this is going to be very fun and this is going to be an activity that we do together. And I'm super, I'm like super in agreement that I think learning to vibe code is good. What do you think, Tyler?

Tyler (standing desk) (17:11)

I think like the point of view of like the people hating were that like, oh, your 13 year old should be like making B2B sass. Which is like, not. That's different than saying they should be vibe coding because vibe coding is just like, it's like basically playing a video game or it's like making a Minecraft mod or something that's like, seems totally fine.

Tyler (17:27)

Yeah. Some of the criticism, some of the criticism was like, you should just be doing really hard things.

John (17:33)

Okay.

Tyler (17:33)

But then you have to ask, is like, okay, should 13 year olds like only be hand coding? Like if you want to get them into maybe making, doing engineering work. Is it. Should they be doing it with a pen and like, what, what is the alternative? Or should they just be just doing math problems or studying physics?

John (17:52)

Yeah, I had some sort of. I had some sort of advanced LEGO thing, robotics thing that you could actually write software for and kind of make it drive in circles or you could program it to drive in a figure eight.

Tyler (18:04)

Yeah, that was really fun. As a kid When I was 13, I was working on little iPhone apps and knowing the vibe coding tools that are available today, I would have been able to make way more progress. I would have had a lot more fun. Yeah, it would have been like having an expert, like software engineer sitting next to me, kind of like pair programming, right?

John (18:25)

Yeah, yeah.

Tyler (18:26)

And so I just, yeah, I'm. I'm on your side. I think. I think people generally just, just don't like Alex because he's been wildly successful and people want to try to.

John (18:39)

He's basically the youngest, most successful person in the world, which invites a lot of criticism.

Tyler (18:46)

Yeah.

John (18:48)

And also it's tough when you build a business that it's not like. I think when Evan Spiegel blew up with Snapchat, he was very much loved because people were like, I like Snapchat. I got a date on Snapchat. I met my girlfriend.

Tyler (19:03)

Yeah, I use it all the time.

John (19:04)

Or I use it with my friends or my boys or whatever, or my group chats on Snapchat. So it's very easy to be like, yeah, he's rich, but I like the thing he made. Whereas with Alex Wang, it's like, yeah, he's rich. And I have no idea what the thing he. I don't interact with it at all. And so it's a lot harder. But yeah, I don't know, I feel like a generic call to action, to young people, to vibe code, to be entrepreneurial is good. I mean, I discovered entrepreneurship in some ways through Tim Ferriss, who had a similar sort of like the four hour workweek was not some like deep understanding of how business and technology works. It was more just like, hey, you could set up a business and like, it could be a really interesting life. And it's very different than like becoming a lawyer or becoming a doctor. Like when you're just like a blank slate kid, you're kind of offered a menu of options which is like, do you want to become a fireman, doctor, policeman, like construction worker? Construction worker, businessman. And yeah, and you hear businessman, but you don't really know what that means.

Tyler (20:10)

Businessman.

John (20:11)

And it's very different to be like accountant. A businessman is an investment banker or a consultant if you stay on the track and you're just like, I always ask for permission. Right. I always go into the next thing. I always have a boss. Entrepreneurship is this like, sort of vague thing that's like hidden and it's nice when it's served up.

Tyler (standing desk) (20:31)

Yeah.

Tyler (20:32)

And there's so many different flavors of it.

John (20:33)

Yeah, yeah. So I enjoy a little serving of entrepreneurial insight. What do you think, Tyler?

Tyler (standing desk) (20:40)

Fun fact. So in fifth grade, in the yearbook, they asked like, what you wanted to be. I put investor.

John (20:45)

Investor in fifth grade?

Tyler (standing desk) (20:47)

Yeah. I didn't even really know what that meant.

Tyler (20:51)

Are you sure you didn't put capital allocator you put in.

Tyler (standing desk) (20:54)

I think that's what I meant.

John (20:55)

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, in fifth grade they had a. It was like, bring in a mobile. Create a mobile for someone that you respect. And everyone in the class brought in a picture of their dad and I brought in a picture of Bill Gates because I was like, it made the computer. The computer's awesome. And everyone was like, what are you doing, dude? Stop deifying business people. I was like, I will never stop deifying business people. It's great.

Tyler (21:22)

Ever since the fifth grade, I knew I wanted to get into asset management.

John (21:27)

Love it. I love it. Well, speaking of asset management, Masayoshi Sohn is back in the news. SoftBank's big profits jump this quarter came from OpenAI's increased valuation that SoftBank lifted higher by buying shares from employees and selling them at a higher price. And so there is question about, is this too circular? It's unclear if SoftBank was really the price setter on this deal. But just Dario is certainly just Dario.

Tyler (21:57)

Saying SoftBank books a capital gain on an investment it hasn't paid for and recorded in its assets yet. So I guess the narrative here gains.

John (22:09)

On OpenAI shares by designating Vision Fund 2 to underwrite the second investment tranche at 500 billion value that SoftBank Group cannot pay and created a forward derivative contract worth 8 billion. All gains out of. Out of thin air. How is this legal? I don't know. This doesn't seem that crazy.

Tyler (22:27)

There's a scenario where you would do this if you were a company that invested in a fund and it's called maybe some capital, but not all of it yet. And so you can show that there's a gain even though you haven't paid, actually paid in the capital yet. But I think the way in which SoftBank is doing VC firms doesn't seem illegal, but I think it's non traditional. Sophie over on X says SoftBank is selling its Nvidia stake to fund companies whose main expense is buying from Nvidia.

John (22:59)

But don't VC firms run into this all the time? And there's always a question about how they mark to market. And if you're marking to market an asset that you invest twice and that's why a lot of venture firms don't want to do, it's a little bit iffy to lead back to back rounds because at a certain point your LPs are going to start having questions. But it does happen and it's not the end of the world and as long as you get other buyers. Like didn't Founders Fund do ramp back to back or something like that? Right. Yeah, but then there was like a secondary transaction that came in pretty quickly and then eventually another firm came in and so once the other firm comes in, that market's a lot stronger and then ramps actually like mark themselves to market multiple times.

Tyler (23:48)

I mean, yeah, this is.

JD Ross (23:51)

I don't.

Tyler (23:52)

Know, the more important.

John (23:56)

I tried to slide off the camera to sneeze and the PTZ called me.

Tyler (24:00)

The more important thing here is that this is not the first time Masa has exited Nvidia. He exited in 2019 before the run up. He was then Nvidia's largest shareholder and he had a 5% stake in the company that he sold for 3.6 billion and it would now be worth over 200 billion. So this, this was ultimately one of the bigger.

John (24:28)

How much did he wind up investing? Totally, because he must have made money overall. How much has.

Tyler (24:36)

I don't know. I don't know exactly when he actually bought back in.

John (24:41)

Yeah, because if this was all from that initial slug, I feel like this 5 billion could be on a basis of like 500 mil or something. It's still relatively small for the size of SoftBank. But while that's cooking, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Let's see, SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for 5.8 billion. 3 billion. Quantian says no, they expect one of us in the wreckage, brother. Have we started the fire? Why? I don't understand how this links to what's happening here. Who's in the fire? Like, how is this? How is this? I don't understand this meme. Do you understand this?

Tyler (25:29)

I just like the line. They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother.

John (25:33)

Yeah, it's funny because it's from the Dark Knight Rises. Right, but. But like selling Nvidia, selling your stake in Nvidia. Like, are people mad about this because they think Nvidia is going to rip further or do.

Tyler (25:47)

Selling your stake in Nvidia.

John (25:48)

Yeah.

Tyler (25:49)

To buy. To actually buy shares in a company that you've already marked a. You're showing a gain on in the last quarter.

John (26:00)

Yeah.

Tyler (26:01)

So basically SoftBank is booking profits.

John (26:05)

Sure.

Tyler (26:05)

OpenAI profits. They are then selling Nvidia shares to fund the original investment of which they've already booked the profits on. And the number one driving force behind Nvidia's growth is OpenAI.

John (26:21)

Yeah. Is that true? I mean, how big is OpenAI as a customer of Nvidia? I mean, yeah, it's probably the biggest, but I mean, the rest of the hyperscalers are still. Still buying a ton of Nvidia, right? I don't know.

Tyler (standing desk) (26:36)

I mean, yeah, I would say, like, indirectly they're a big customer, but like, obviously it's not like they're funding the data centers.

John (26:41)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So James Thorne says today we will get the SoftBank completely sold out of Nvidia. Fear from bears on mainstream media and Wall Street. Does anyone do objective research anymore? SoftBank initially bought its Nvidia stake through the vision fund in 2017, then exited completely in January 19th. They missed it. They lost patience. Not the first time. And so, yeah, when did they buy this latest slug? That's the question. SoftBank sold 32 million shares of Nvidia in October. Also sold part of its stake in T Mobile for 9 billion. It's not the first time they've cashed out of the chip maker. That's a funny way to put it. Despite the sale, SoftBank remains tied to Nvidia through its other ventures. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And they don't stop there. Our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring and security reviews and vendor risk. Warren Buffett says he's going quiet. The world's most famous investor warns against corporate greed as he prepares to hand over the reins of Berkshire Hathaway. There are a bunch of interesting posts, but there's also a story in the Financial Times. I don't think it hit the. I don't think it hit the paper edition yet, but we can read the paper.

Tyler (28:01)

Paper edition, always lagging.

John (28:05)

So Warren Buffett has told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that he is going quiet, quote unquote, as the world's most famous investor draws a line under a career that has shaped corporate American Wall street over the past six decades. As the British would say, I'm going quiet, sort of, buffett wrote in a letter published Monday. The 95 year old will step back from day to day responsibilities at Berkshire at the end of this year when he retires from his role as chief executive. Craig Abel, of course, is coming in. Investors have long seen Buffett, often called the oracle of Omaha, as a corporate folk hero, interspersing guidance on his portfolio company's performance with life and business advice, his frank manner with shareholders. Both his annual letters and his marathon question and answer sessions during the annual meetings in Omaha has been a hallmark of his tenure. Buffett's letter to shareholders on Monday took the same tone, with warnings about corporate greed interlaced with calls for kindness. He noted, for instance, that requirements for executive compensation disclosures backfired as business chiefs engaged in a race to earn more than rivals. What often bothers very wealthy CEOs they are human, after all, is that other CEOs are getting even richer, Buffett said. Envy and greed walk hand in hand. Interesting. Buffett added that Berkshire should try to avoid future CEOs who are looking to retire at 65 or who want to become look at me rich or initiate a dynasty. Look at me rich. What an interesting turn of phrase.

Tyler (29:36)

Yeah. It's very notable that Buffett has never been photographed doing a money spread wearing Balenciaga Rick Owens.

John (29:45)

Does he have any chrome hearts?

Tyler (29:47)

Probably no chrome. No chrome heart. He's never been photographed with chrome hearts. Chrome hearts on it is cool. He's going to continue to do his thanks. Thanks. A letter every Thanksgiving.

John (29:58)

I love that.

Tyler (29:59)

I thought that was Thanksgiving. Of course, one of the most underrated holidays.

John (30:04)

Yeah. So he took the pledge to give away to give away his wealth. And so it's gonna be a pretty big changing of the guard and that's gonna have a pretty significant the thing.

Tyler (30:20)

I'm looking forward to seeing is how many what the attendance will be like in the shareholder meeting next year. Like is the is the draw Buffett.

John (30:30)

Or is it its own brand?

Tyler (30:31)

Yeah, exactly. My expectation is that they will retain a huge amount of people because it's people that have been going every single year for a long time. It's just like a kind of a meetup for people that have probably, you know, that have spent probably decades, at least some of them decades, visiting and being a part of it.

John (30:50)

So yeah, I also Wonder to what degree can Greg Abel, like actually pick up the torch? Because there's that interesting stat that like, if you go back 30 years ago when Buffett was 65, he was, I don't think he was close to the richest man in the world. He compounded a ton in his third 30 year run, like from 65 to 95, he had a particularly good run that took him from like, pretty rich to one of the richest people in the world. And so it would be very interesting to see like, Greg Abel. What if he really goes on the run for 30 years and is just executing, executing, executing. It's very rare. We just don't see that many business executives or that many people broadly where that's like the highlight of the career is 65 to 95.

Tyler (31:44)

You think it's exciting? Do you think that, that he can be fearful when others are greedy? They're kind of acting like it right now, right? Yeah, I don't think it's quite half a trillion. I think it's more like under, under 400 billion of cash. But they will be getting, they will be getting calls, quite a lot of calls at some point for sure. And we'll see how they play it.

John (32:07)

Yeah. Before we react to some of the reactions in the timeline, let me tell you a graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Howard Anglin is taking shots at Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett's talking about his final letter. And Howard says Buffett has commissioned no plays, no poems, no symphonies, no operas, no ballets, funded no paintings or sculptures that will outlive him, endowed no theaters, choirs, orchestras, built no monuments, monasteries. Is this true at all? I feel like he has to have, I feel like Warren Buffett has to have given away enough money to endow at least one theater. How do you not just get hit up by your local theater in Omaha once and say, sure, I'll send a check. I would be shocked if he's never done anything. And also he's committed to giving away half of his wealth. So, like some of the money is gonna wind up with the opera, I imagine, just because it's gonna go out and get diffused amongst all the different charity efforts, not going to all go into one thing. So Howard agrees with him on this. He says he's right, that greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, which is what he is known for. But beyond that, it's fortune cookie level. Advice. It's not wrong, but that's about it. His partner Charlie Munger's contribution to architecture was to fund factory like college dorms in which a majority of the apartments don't have windows. Was that ucsb? Where is that?

Tyler (33:39)

Yeah.

John (33:40)

Have you been to that dorm?

Tyler (33:42)

Yeah.

John (33:42)

Did you live there?

Tyler (33:44)

I'm trying to figure out which.

John (33:47)

We need to pull up a photo of the Charlie Munger dorm. The Charlie Munger dorm at ucsb.

Tyler (33:54)

It's Munger Hall.

John (33:55)

Munger dorm, ucsb. It is a wild picture. It's so funny.

Tyler (34:01)

And it's like, so they abandoned. They.

John (34:03)

Oh, they didn't do it.

Tyler (34:04)

They made the donation.

John (34:05)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyler (34:06)

There's some reference to it on the campus, but they abandoned the plans to build a windowless dorm.

John (34:12)

So Sig. It's so Soviet. It's extremely Soviet. I don't know why they wanted.

Tyler (standing desk) (34:20)

I thought there were fake windows and they were like TVs essentially, but they would show outdoor scenes.

John (34:25)

It should be vertical TV windows that you can just put Sora on and just watch AI.

Tyler (34:31)

He's like, you were complaining about the cost of housing. I gave you housing, and now you're complaining it doesn't have windows.

John (34:37)

Yeah. You give a mouse a cookie with these people. It is so funny. Apparently. It's also just so funny. Why are you so involved in this project? I thought he was a bigger donator to Stanford first and then also why. I feel like if I donate money somewhere, I'm like, okay, it's gone. You enjoy it and it's on you. You are the one that takes care of it. To be in the weeds to the level of, like, deciding where the windows go is a wild move. Like, I thought you had other stuff to do. I would just be. I feel like if I was in this position, I would just be, too.

Tyler (35:14)

He does have other buildings on campus.

John (35:16)

Okay.

Tyler (35:17)

That is among her residents.

John (35:19)

Okay.

Tyler (35:20)

That do have windows. So I don't know.

John (35:23)

I mean, also, like, is. Is it safe to take the other side of this and just say that, like, he was about to create the greatest lock in of all time?

Tyler (35:31)

I mean, what if he was basically saying, like, college students spend very little time in their actual dorms.

Lawrence (35:35)

Yep.

Tyler (35:36)

Because they're out and about in the world. They're studying totally. Library, they're at events. They're really just using the dorm to sleep. Why don't we create common areas that have windows and outdoor areas? But then you go in your pod. Yeah, go in your pod.

John (35:48)

Almost like a cave.

Tyler (35:49)

Yeah.

John (35:50)

It's Like a cave.

Tyler (35:51)

Because ucsb, the complaint from a housing standpoint is that, like, nobody has. Like, nobody shares a room almost all the way through. Everyone shares a room almost all four years.

John (36:00)

Oh, interesting. So you never move off campus.

Tyler (36:02)

Yeah. And it's like. It's like one square mile that people really live. And, yeah, there's super limited housing. And so I think Munger was coming at this, like, probably, like, very pragmatically. And it's like, hey, you get. You're giving up windows. You're going to get your pod, but in exchange, you get your own private space. People call it Dormzilla and they cancel it.

John (36:23)

They call it Dormzilla. I forgot about that. Do we find a picture of Dormzilla?

Tyler (36:27)

I mean, the. The actual designs. I saw it for a second.

John (36:32)

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

Tyler (36:59)

That's from Munger.

John (37:00)

No, this is from Eric Adams, the New York. New York guy. Okay.

Tyler (37:03)

I was like, that doesn't sound.

Growing Daniel (37:05)

That doesn't sound like that.

John (37:06)

It is a crazy.

Tyler (37:08)

I put a picture of the floor plan in the chat team. If you guys pull this up, they.

John (37:13)

Should have called it the munger bug den 14,000. The cave. The Munger cave. I don't know. It's pretty. It's pretty funny. It's also. It's also just. I mean, maybe ucsb. When I think of ucsb, I think of, like, you know, it's this beautiful, like, so. Just amazing, like, near the beach, beautiful sunlight. Like, you definitely don't want to be in a cave. It's like, I feel like I kind of get the Soviet cave, the Soviet bloc era. Like, you know, big buildings, because it's like, you don't want to. Gormzilla is so good. I love it. He was like, this is what I need to do. It's just like, also. Just like, can't you just give, like, a little bit more money and get the windows? Windows aren't that expensive, right? It's such a wild. Such a wild thing anyway. It's so, so funny. So I don't know. Tyler, did you figure out if Buffett has ever commissioned one play, poem, symphony, opera, ballet, Painting, sculpture, theater, choir, orchestra, monument, home, museum, church, monastery, Chantilly.

Tyler (38:31)

Just at ucsb, to give him credit, he has the Charles Munger Physics residence, which is a beautiful, stunning building with windows, with many windows.

John (38:42)

There we go.

Tyler (38:43)

And so, yeah, he decided to window max on this one.

John (38:46)

Yeah, he's taking a bar rail strategy. Some of the buildings have lost, but obviously.

Tyler (38:49)

That's Munger. That's Munger.

John (38:51)

Yeah. This is Buffett. So, yeah. What did we learn about.

Tyler (standing desk) (38:53)

Yeah, so I think basically all of his donations. He does do a lot of donations, but they're all. Basically he just gives stock to people. So he's never like saying, I want this museum to be built in this way or anything. He just gives it to a, you know, endowment or institution or some charity. Then they, like, do what they want.

Tyler (39:11)

And is that because he wants them to like, kind of try to 10x it?

John (39:16)

10X it again? Yeah, he wants bag holders. Yeah.

Tyler (standing desk) (39:19)

But like, I don't think he has very strong opinions on like, should kids have windows?

John (39:23)

But can you find an example of when he gave stock to an organization? Because if that organization went and commissioned an opera, I'm putting this in the truth zone and I'm thinking that he did, in fact. Oh, the Munger Research center in Pasadena does have many windows. Credit where it's due. Thank you, Taylor. You can't commit to the Munger cave, then you are really committed to deliver.

Tyler (standing desk) (39:48)

He's given a lot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

John (39:52)

Okay, that's kind of sort of a circular thing. It doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, let's move on from Warren Buffett. Let me tell you about Julius the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get it insights in seconds, no coding required. We have a clip from Scott Bessant on. What is this? Newsweek, abc, abc.

Tyler (40:14)

Newsweek, ABC this week.

John (40:16)

ABC this week. Okay, I'm learning the $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms. Let's play the clip. The $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms in lots of ways. George. It could be just the tax decre creases that we are seeing on the President's agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill. Tyler, do you feel like this?

Tyler (40:55)

How, how is that going to help the day trading community?

Tyler (standing desk) (40:58)

Yeah, I was doing rampant speculation with this $2,000. What am I going to do now you're actually.

Tyler (41:04)

You're basically fully. You've already committed the funds, right?

Tyler (standing desk) (41:07)

Yeah, yeah, I've already placed a ton of parlays.

John (41:10)

Yes.

Tyler (standing desk) (41:11)

So, like, what am I supposed to do?

John (41:14)

I can't pay my parlay bill with a tax decrease on auto loans.

Tyler (41:19)

Yeah, you're not looking for passive income, you're looking for massive income, bro.

Tyler (standing desk) (41:24)

I'm looking for massive income.

John (41:25)

I'm looking for generative media on a platform for developers. I'm looking for fall, the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Doomer says they should put a button on the IRS website that allows you to either receive the $200 stimmy check or if you press the button, you have a 50, 50 chance of getting either $4,000 or zero. I really think a lot of people would press that button. Absolutely. Absolutely. Wild Certified Bangers X now has an account called Bangers and it is an account that highlights the best bangers. They're testing something new. Certified. We want to recognize the very best posts that move the timeline, ranked by authentic interactions. If your post is featured, you will get a certified Banger badge on your profile for the month. Here are the top five bangers for October. Very cool concept. Very similar to a project that Jordi sort of incubated about 12 months ago, almost a year ago January. It was during the fires, I remember they were ripping. It was called Banger Archive. And Jordi would go and screen screenshot a post that had done very, very well and resurface it. And the findings were shocking. Do you want to break down what you learned in that project?

Tyler (42:49)

Yeah. If you take any post that had gotten like a minimum of 3000 likes and you just screenshotted it and then posted the screenshot and said Banger, it would immediately get usually more likes than the original post.

John (43:01)

It was crazy.

Tyler (43:03)

There were some posts that had. I screenshotted them. They had like maybe 20,000 likes and then I posted on there to get like 150,000.

John (43:09)

Yes.

Tyler (43:10)

Yeah, it's like millions of views.

John (43:11)

And some of it is like. There's. There's a timelessness and there's just like a hot. It's just high quality content is high quality content. There's certain, certain sentences that just are always funny. They're just always funny. Some of them get funnier. Some of them. Some of them did fall off. Some of them would flop even though they were a banger. Previously there were a bunch of interesting findings from the, from the Banger archive.

Tyler (43:35)

Including at least one person that was. That got Matt. They were like, you could have just reposted it.

John (43:40)

Exactly.

Tyler (43:41)

And the whole. But the issue is it doesn't work.

John (43:43)

Doesn't archive it then. Because if they delete it, then it doesn't stay. But they want the, they want the right to delete. So I understand where they're coming from.

Tyler (43:50)

Bangers on Bobby in the chat says, don't care about a Donald Boat says don't care about a badge. They should come to your house and tattoo it on your body. Yeah. Having a badge for a month is.

John (44:02)

Yeah, I don't know. It's cool. I think it's interesting because it's also.

Tyler (44:08)

I mean, so looking at the posts that they have here, they're just kind of random.

John (44:12)

Yes. So we were debating this. So first off, I think what is interesting about this is that it's not a new functionality in the X app. Like, there are plenty of ways to surface popular posts, mainly in the Discover page on the Explore page with the little window glass. So you search there before you search, you see for you, you see trending topics, you see who to follow, business news. There's a who. Bunch of things that are going on that are like, it's basically like new ui, new projects. Like they could have created like a separate tab or something like that. They didn't do that. They just created an actual account on X that's native and then they created an organization and they just give you the organization tag if you post a Banger, which is. It's just a very interesting use of like the X primitives, like the code that's already there. Like, clearly this did not require software engineering to do, which is just interesting way to like create some new content.

Tyler (45:15)

On Zoomer says. Did you guys seriously not include this Banger?

John (45:19)

Zoomer.

Tyler (45:21)

We honestly need to get Zoomer on the show. I invited him because he's got some truly wild take he has got to put him into.

John (45:30)

He's been on the coast, he's been on a roller coaster for sure. But yes. So we were debating is the, Is the Bangers account going to be teapot tech, Twitter venture capital related stuff? Will you see naval in there? Will you see Marquis Andreessen growing? Daniel Roon posts? These posts that go super viral but within tech or will it be more broad? Will we see something from basketball, Twitter or something from all sorts of different sub communities? And it was just an interesting way to check the the pulse, because I feel like we are in a little corner of X. But obviously there are folks that use X and they never interact with tech Twitter, really, they're over in some other. They're talking about basketball or they're talking about football, or they're talking about the Oscars, or they're in film Twitter, or. There's so many different little sub pockets. Well, the result was that they went broad. A lot of the tech folks think it's slop, but some of these were kind of interesting. The first one that they Highlight is from 0x45, and it says, can y' all please tell me the lore behind your profile picture pictures. And it got 285 million views. So people really enjoyed, quote, tweeting this. It got 80 or it got 39.

Tyler (46:51)

The challenge there is that in itself is not a banger. It just got a lot of reach. Yes. Because people were quoting it like, it has zero value as an individual post.

John (47:01)

Well, it starts a conversation. It creates more content. Like, it is sort of a viral seed of content in this weird way. In a way that there are special words in that post that lead it to generating more content than an average post. If you just posted, like, how'd you pick your profile picture?

Scott Shapiro (47:25)

Not a banger.

John (47:25)

Yeah, this. The lore. It specifically worked, and it obviously did get a lot of attention. But I agree with you that this is not something that, like, sparks thought, I suppose, or like laughter. I don't know. What is the lore, Tyler? What's the lore behind your profile picture?

Tyler (standing desk) (47:45)

I think it was my Halloween costume. I was dressed up as Julius Caesar last year. That's fine.

Tyler (47:51)

I thought that was just how you dressed back during your studies.

John (47:55)

Yeah, that's not exactly, like, deep lore, but.

Tyler (standing desk) (47:57)

Okay. What's the lore behind your picture? It's just a picture of you. Wasn't it like a stock exchange or something?

Casey Hanmer (48:03)

Yeah.

John (48:03)

Mocked. There's not really deep lore, but, I mean, I could tell a whole story about it. How it was at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna ipo. And it was also the day Charlie Kirk passed away or was assassinated, which was horrible. So there's a lot of lore there. I don't know, but it doesn't have the same deep lore as I don't know what. I don't know what people expect. Who?

Tyler (standing desk) (48:28)

Jordy, do you have any lore behind your.

John (48:30)

Now, I'm curious, who had the biggest quote tweet of this? Did anyone have a really, really great view? Post, engagements, quotes? No one? Yeah, I'm not seeing anything that was like wild. A lot of people did, did, did actually engage with this cold healing. Says their, their profile picture is their apartment in Peoria had a total ivy colored ivy covered window that I really liked. One day in mid spring I took all the furniture out of my bedroom to take this photo. Huh.

Tyler (49:04)

I mean the criticism here, the most common criticism has been congratulations, you brought Reddit gold to X.

John (49:13)

It does seem a little bit like gold. It is even gold colored how a mathematician sees the world. I saw this going viral. I didn't realize this was this viral. 200 million views. What is the. What is this saying? Tyler, did you see this? Do you know what this why this went so viral? Just because it's, it's. Is it funny specifically?

Tyler (standing desk) (49:35)

I don't. It's just like they just drew a bunch of lines and like random math equations.

Casey Hanmer (49:39)

Yeah.

John (49:40)

Like is this actually how anyone sees.

Tyler (49:43)

No, it was like everyone was quote tweeting it. Like how a podcaster sees the world.

John (49:46)

Yeah. I think people were just spinning off of it on different ways of. So it just became a good meme template. Yeah, that makes sense. What was the other one? When your AI girlfriend was on AWS US east one. 60 million views. That really shows you how big the like the tech community is. Or like the AWS like ball knowers.

Tyler (standing desk) (50:06)

I think this one is closer to what we would describe as like a normal banger.

John (50:10)

Totally, totally. I mean Netcap girl, one of the first posts we reacted to on this show. Great, great poster. Absolutely. A banger. The I'm shocked that 60 million people have the context to enjoy a post about AWS US East 1, but I guess it is a dominant technology that lots of people interact with, so they must know. Or maybe there's enough context to enjoy it.

Tyler (50:35)

Well, in other news.

John (50:37)

Yes, what else?

Tyler (50:39)

There is a JP Morgan AI CapEx report and they're Max Weinbach says is a great way to put AI ROI into perspective. To drive a 10% return on our AI on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require 650 billion of annual revenue in perpetuity, which equates to $34.72 a month from every current iPhone user in perspective. Ross Hendrick says the AI math ain't math and two ways to fix it 20x the revenue in the next five years or slash data center Capex. I'll take the latter on 100 to 1 odds. So what does a Capex pullback look like? There was another post here I thought was a solid hari Raghavan says annual US spend on software is 400 billion. Professional services is 2.8 trillion. Logistics labor is 1 trillion. Healthcare admin 1 trillion. Education labor, 1 trillion. That's 6 trillion. Globally is probably 3x. Every market is up for grabs, all of them. If you don't get that, you aren't ready for what's coming. 650 billion is a joke. So again, I think understand the concern, but when you put it in terms of every, basically every iPhone user needs to spend $34 a month on.

John (52:08)

Yeah, well, obviously it's not.

Tyler (52:10)

Yeah, yeah, no, I know, I know.

John (52:12)

But it's like if you're using Uber and on your phone and Uber is spending a dollar per user on AI inference just for fraud detection, like that counts, right? It's like, it's like, how much are you spending on cloud computing? Like, cloud computing is a huge market, but you don't think about it as like, oh yeah, everyone spends my household cloud budget. Exactly. It's like, no, there are some customers, some companies that spend billions and billions of dollars on cloud hosting and then you interact with services all over the place. And the broad cloud computing market is just bigger than the AI market right now and will be for a long time. When you look at the AI CapEx numbers, they're all smaller than just the traditional CapEx numbers. Like the actual. Just building of a normal data center is still higher than building of an AI data center. And that's because they're actually monetizing cloud computing very effectively. Because everyone, everyone needs a database for something or other, or a web hosting platform, something like that. Everyone needs turbo puffer search, every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Where else did you want to skip ahead a little bit or you want to go back to the AI CapEx build out? It is, it is very odd to put it in those terms. I remember someone putting Bitcoin in the same terms when Bitcoin was at like 10k or something and he was like, look, the math is like, in order to have like a stable price at like the 100k price targets that people are talking about, you would have to have, you know, billions and billions flowing in every day and stuff. And it's like. And somehow that just wound up happening. And I remember being very convinced by this by saying like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why? How could it possibly become an investment vehicle that is constantly seeing so much demand that it can justify such A huge, such a huge price. And yet it just did because it just worked its way into every single person's pension fund. And every single person's ETFs have a little bit of bitcoin in them.

Tyler (54:27)

Yeah. And you stayed long even if you thought that that scenario was crazy because you were like, well, I should have some exposure if it's at all within the realm of possibility.

John (54:37)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There were more reasons to stay long than actually dip out. The most interesting point from the semianalysis segment yesterday was this. Did you pick up on when he mentioned the Tyler standing up? Tyler's rocking the standing desk today. Give us a review. How is it feeling? You haven't been standing the whole time you've been sitting down. You need a. I like to move around.

Tyler (standing desk) (55:05)

Yeah, I like to stand up. Sit down.

John (55:07)

Yeah. Well, we need to get you one of the taller chairs. But there was. In the semi analysis interview yesterday, our guest was talking about this idea of putting an H100 index on the stock market. That was like something he kind of alluded to. And I feel like that would be pretty, pretty crazy. And I don't even know how mechanically that would work, but like if all.

Tyler (55:33)

Of a sudden just treating it like a commodity.

John (55:36)

Yeah. But actually taking something from. Currently it lives on the balance sheets of neo clouds and hyperscalers and actually taking a product and just like making it, making it a commodity that you can just invest in directly is not really like. I don't think it's very simple. I think, I think it actually is a complex process. But it certainly would potentially generate a ton more liquidity. Like there would just be a lot more investment dollars flowing in if, if there was like a way to like directly get in on the AI trade by just investing in like the underlying AI.

Tyler (56:11)

Capex trade is betting on AI and then we need other people betting on the AI Capex.

John (56:17)

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

Tyler (56:19)

I mean, like derivative bets, John.

Tyler (standing desk) (56:21)

So you're saying we're going higher.

John (56:24)

I mean, that's certainly what semianalysis was saying. And it's certainly. It just feels like the. It was foolish to. It is foolish or it was foolish to. To sound the alarm bells around the idea of like debt being used at all. It's like, debt is fine, debt is good. The question is just like, are we actually over levered? There's not like. So when I look at like, oh, Metta has like 4 billion of debt for this one little side project thing, I'm like, that's still a very stable business. Like that's not like, oh, they're super indebted. Like they, oh, how are they going to pay their debts? Like, like there's just a wild continuum on like how much leverage is in the system, what that leads to in terms of like risk. We're, we're now, we're at a turning point where we might be going really heavy levered. We might be bringing in, you know, more ETF government guarantees. I don't even know if there's a Neo Cloud in the S&P 500 yet. Like that is an interesting breakpoint because once you're in the S&P 500 you like there is way more liquidity because there are funds ETFs that just buy the S&P 500. And so once you're in the S&P 500 you sort of have like price support. You have extra investors that are like lining up and they're like, I'm riding with you no matter what as long as you're in the S&P 500.

Tyler (57:49)

And so yeah, I mean it's notable that Oracle has fully round tripped from before the OpenAI announcement. So leading up to the OpenAI announcement they were at $241 a share. They're now at $235 a share.

John (58:05)

Yeah.

Tyler (58:06)

And so the market is no longer giving them credit for the OpenAI deal.

John (58:11)

That is interesting. Yeah, well.

Tyler (58:15)

Nabius is down 10% in the last five days. Core Weave is down 25% in the last five days and Iron is down 17% in the last five days. So Jitters to say the least.

John (58:29)

Microsoft can't power all of its AI chips as CEO. Satya Nadella this is from Zero Hedge. I don't know if you want to read through a little bit of this.

Tyler (58:36)

But yeah, the thing that was notable here is coreweave on their earnings call yesterday. Corweave was saying that they aren't power constrained, that that's not their problem.

John (58:46)

What are they constrained by?

Tyler (58:47)

I mean they had a weaker forecast, which is part of why it's traded down dramatically today. But again they grew revenue 2x and they still traded down pretty dramatically.

John (59:01)

Well, there's more data center news from Joe Weisenthal, but first let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. Get started at AI Studio Build. Joe Weisenthal is excerpting a Bloomberg News article that says two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia's hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity. In Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting energization. Stack Infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital, has a nearby 48 megawatt project that's also vacant while the city owned utility Silicon Valley Power struggles to upgrade its capacity. 48 megawatts. What are we doing here? That seems like that's child play.

Tyler (60:09)

The data center for ants.

John (60:11)

That should be child's play, but they're not able to do it. What's going on?

Tyler (60:18)

Byron Dieter was responding to Elon Musk's post, saying Elon was agreeing that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of foundational model providers. Byron said, I don't buy it at all. No chance that four companies deliver all software value in the future, especially as the software Tam is growing 10x to include a labor component? Yeah, I think we'll have to see. Obviously the labs are extremely ambitious, but I tend to side more with Byron here that as long as the labs don't have as long as the labs are saying you can access our best intelligence vrapi, it feels like there's going to be durable competition while you have open source models lagging but not lagging by very much at all.

John (61:17)

Yeah, my current way to think about this is that the labs are new hyperscalers as you've put it before, which means that they will compete in a lot of different categories and there will be matchups and ultimately it will depend on the quality of the teams. So the way I think about like browser base versus AWS's competitor is like, well, if Paul at Browser Base goes up against the AWS project manager and works harder and is more creative and marshals capital and does the right deals and partners with with the 1Password team, for example, he can create a sustainable business. Sometimes that might be a duopoly, sometimes that might be total victory, and a lot of it depends on the nature of the market that they're going after. Is it possible that in 5 years OpenAI just gets completely destroyed on AI vertical video, but AI vertical video as a category wins and that there's actually a different startup that cracks it and makes it great and grows it huge? I think absolutely that's possibility. It just matters on like there's a matchup that happens in every single category and I don't think it's fair to say that the Foundation Model Labs will win every category by default or they'll lose every category by default. It's like Google happened to win in email and Maps, but they lost in chat and they lost in in social networking and in RSS feeds. They won in some places, they lost in others. And that's just the nature of these competitions. It's like if there's a particular team in place at one company and then there's a startup that's better than that team, then the startup wins. If the team inside the company is better than the startup, you get Paul Buchite at Google and he's building Gmail. I'm sure there were a lot of email founders out there that were trying to compete with Paul Buchite, but Paul Buchite smoked them and Gmail is what it is today. And so I still lean on like who are the actual folks working on the project? Are the best people inside the organization or outside the organization?

Tyler (63:39)

Yeah.

John (63:39)

And that's how it actually over on.

Tyler (63:41)

The app store charts, ChatGPT is still number one. Threads is number two. Shout out Connor Hayes. Number three is Go Wish your digital wish list. Create wishes and get inspired. Number four is Google Gemini. Number five is Sora. So Sora is sliding down the charts but still in the top five. We'll have to look if Fubo can overtake Sora that would be. That would be a win for organic media.

John (64:12)

I am a little lost. Let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Do you want to did you go down the post?

Tyler (64:26)

Jay Boltard one says calm down people. Masa's son is a male Cathie Wood. Him selling Nvidia today means Nvidia has plenty of upside left. It is. I mean it just comes down to he will take. He's selling Nvidia. He's going to give that money to OpenAI and then OpenAI is going to give it to Nvidia.

John (64:46)

Sold.

Tyler (64:47)

We will see. Casey Hanmer who's coming on the show in 20 minutes says that remember we could automate 99.99 of air traffic control if it wasn't deliberately being used as a government funding Canary. So we will have to ask him. He had another post earlier this week.

John (65:09)

Government or a month ago Canary or funded Canary. Canary. He said funding Canary. The canary in the coal mine. What is a canary? Yeah, we have to ask him about this. I saw his other post, which was interesting. I realized the doom graphics engine running on a pregnancy test CPU could handle all of North American traffic control. I'm gonna sit down for a bit. This needs to be in the bangers. Get this, man. The bangers tag. This is such a good.

Tyler (65:40)

There's an article, I was curious. There's an article here from the Verge that says digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC.

John (65:49)

That's insane.

Tyler (65:49)

A lot of computer to read an old fashioned P strip.

John (65:52)

Yeah, that's what it does. You know that, right? Like. Like when you see those digital tests, it's literally just like basically pointing a camera at a. At a test strip and being like, did it turn blue or not or did it turn red? No way. Yeah, no, that's how it works. So, so in. So basically they make a test strip and then it has a chemical in there. And when the person like pees on it, the human sample interacts with the chemicals and turns a color. And so normally you just look at it and you're like, oh, it turned the color. Like it's pink. So that means one thing or it's blue, that means another thing. But to make it digital, they just point a camera at it and say like, what is it looking at? I'm pretty sure I might be wrong. Who knows? This is probably fake news and it'll go viral on Instagram as it always does.

Tyler (66:38)

In other news, Yann Lecun.

Tyler (standing desk) (66:40)

He's out.

Tyler (66:41)

See ya.

John (66:42)

He's out.

Tyler (66:43)

He's out from Meta. He's gonna launch his own startup. Tyler, what's your reaction?

Tyler (standing desk) (66:50)

I mean, this is pretty big news. I think people have kind of expected this for a while.

John (66:53)

Yeah.

Tyler (standing desk) (66:53)

Basically since Alexander Wang came in. Because Alexander Wang kind of in some sense like took over as like the chief AI person at Meta, which was.

John (67:03)

Not enough room in this town for two AI.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:06)

Not enough room for chief scientists.

John (67:08)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not enough room in this town for two chief AI scientists.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:12)

And so Jan is like very goaded AI researcher. He's been in the game for like super long. Yes, he did. He. I think probably his most famous paper is like Lunette, which is like the original convolutional paper.

John (67:26)

Lynette the Net. Well, name it after himself.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:30)

I think that's what people call it. I don't know what the actual paper is.

John (67:32)

That's awesome.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:32)

That's like the. It's like Alexnet Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, not actually called Alex.

John (67:35)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:37)

But, yeah, it was like the OG Convolutional Neural Network paper, and then that kind of basically led into deep learning.

Casey Hanmer (67:42)

Yeah, yeah.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:44)

And then the main thing is, is, like today he's like, very much seen as being bearish on LLM.

John (67:49)

Sure.

Tyler (standing desk) (67:49)

He doesn't think they can reason. He doesn't think they can, like, do novel tasks or whatever. So he's been, like, very outspoken about that. I think that's maybe part of the reason why he's. He just has kind of a different vision from. From Zuck and Alexander Wang. But yeah, I mean, this is pretty big news.

John (68:05)

Do you think he will raise a private credit fund, get into data centers?

Tyler (68:13)

I'm no longer interested in research and the science behind it all. I'm interested in finance.

John (68:18)

I'm interested in finance.

Tyler (standing desk) (68:20)

I mean, he has. I forget exactly what it's called, but he has, like, another kind of path that he sees to AGI.

John (68:26)

He's.

Tyler (standing desk) (68:26)

He's. He's still a professor at nyu, which I think is. Is where he does most of his research these days. So I think he'll probably just stay in academia.

Tyler (68:35)

Does he have any active classes going on this semester? Because if he does, we should send you onto the campus to study, not just from the timeline, but in the classroom and you can do a little on the ground reporting. Taylor in the chat says Lecredit.

John (68:58)

Has he taken a formal victory lap on scaling laws not holding? Because from your perspective, it's a preemptive. It would be a preemptive victory lap because I know Gary Marcus was sort of taking a victory lap with Richard Sutton after that Dwarkesh podcast. And then Andrej Karpathy sort of like, confirmed that it might be a little bit harder to scale up the current paradigm.

Tyler (standing desk) (69:27)

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone is saying, like, scaling up is going to get easier.

Growing Daniel (69:30)

Right.

Tyler (standing desk) (69:31)

You just need to. You need bigger data centers. You need to, like, spend way more money. I don't think today you can just say that, like, pre training is dead, though. That's, like, definitely not true.

John (69:42)

Isn't that sort of Yann Lecun's take, though, or Richard Sutton's take or.

Tyler (standing desk) (69:47)

I think Yann Lecun is generally against all LLMs. He's not just saying that, like, LLMs were. They were very promising and then they kind of fizzled out. I think he's kind of always been against LMS as a way to AGI. Yeah, I think it would definitely be Preemptive to say that he was like, correct though.

John (70:09)

Yeah.

Tyler (70:09)

Okay. Don't want to cut you off, Tyler, but this is more important. OTP in the chat says Buffett is low key, a huge boxing fan, and I know at least one gym around his state that he has at least had a hand in funding. And I looked it up and he's a huge fan of Terence Crawford the boxer. And he will go watch, he'll go see the fights and he likes the cheap seats because he can see he has a better. He feels like he has a better angle.

John (70:40)

That's interesting. I like that.

Tyler (70:42)

I did not know. So he is. He's a patron of combat. We're not ready to say he's a patron of the arts, but in some way this is Marshall, somewhat of a martial art.

John (70:53)

Never look down on Warren Buffett. This guy is amazing. Loves McDonald's, loves boxing, apparently loves allocating capital efficiently. He stays in his lane. It's great. Do we have an update from Brian Johnson? He came back from his trip. He was on psychedelics. I feel like I'm expecting him to fall in love with at least one fast food restaurant. I want him to flip around on at least one and say, okay, yeah, I'm an in and out guy now. He's been quiet. I do wonder if he'll update on anything or if he's just like so, so powered through that it just will not affect him at all because, like wasn't. He was kind of framing it as like, this is like a big deal. It seems like he got through it just super fine.

Tyler (71:48)

Saw a very viral post of somebody saying, I don't think it's a good thing that billionaires can talk about taking Schedule 1 drugs publicly with no repercussions. It did seem that he was doing it. Like this seems like such, still such a gray area where you can get it prescribed by a doctor, but it's still schedule one. He posted an update on his experience. He also talked more about why he says there's potential. It's potentially a longevity therapy for psilocybin. Expands lifespan in mice. It can reduce inflation markers tied to aging. It can increase brain entropy, breaks rigid patterns and boosts long term cognition and flexibility.

John (72:38)

And yeah, I don't know, I kind of agree with that person who is saying, like, they shouldn't be able to talk about it publicly. I feel like he should have a disclaimer or something because there's going to be. There's people. He is such a huge audience. There's going to Be some people that just look at what.

Tyler (72:57)

In the early podcast era you had Tim Ferriss, who to his credit was like doing work on himself and would share what he was doing, but he would talk about doing things like ibogaine, which is like a crazy, super powerful psychedelic. And he wasn't directly saying, hey, I think you should go take this. But when hundreds of thousands of people follow Tim for health advice, it sort of is like an indirect. It's somewhat of an endorsement, even if it's not directly so.

John (73:34)

No, no. I mean, I 100% think some people will see this and be like, oh, looks like he had a good experience. Let me jump straight to exactly his protocol, which is clearly not accessible for the average person. Like, he has been building up a tolerance to this particular chemical for probably a decade. And so it's going to hit him very differently than it will someone who's not in the same place. We were joking yesterday about like, oh, if he wanted to like really challenge himself, he would have been at like a crowded concert or something. And there are going to be people that see this post and wind up actually doing that and winding. Wind up in a very, very rough spot. I feel like there should be more, a little more disclaimers on this. Like, hey, I'm running a crazy experiment on myself. Like, do not try this at home. He needs. It's the. You know, you ever watch Jackass back in the day? Remember it opened every, every episode opened with like, don't. Do not. These are stunt professionals. Like, they do this professionally. Like, yes, they just look like random guys. But like behind the camera there is a huge. They are stuntmen. Like, and, and even that was still, like, was like, okay. Kids were like, you know, trying to try to jump their skateboards down too many stairs and getting hurt. But it wasn't like that bad. But there was still like a do not try this at home.

Tyler (74:54)

I did see some people responding and saying, I took a similar dose to this and it ruined. Basically ruined my year. It took me, you know, months and months to recover.

John (75:05)

Yeah, I would say stay off the psychedelics. Stay on linear. Because linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. That's where you want to be. You want to be locked in. In linear.

Tyler (75:21)

Yeah, I do, I do knock out. I have, I have joked in the past, it's like, is. Is, you know, are psychedelics gonna fix your life or just doing the tasks that you've been Avoiding. Is that gonna make you feel relief? You know, is that gonna make you feel better about your life?

John (75:37)

It's like that meme of like the, the anime ninja. If you're tired, do it tired. If you're sober, do it sober. Right? Just do it. John Coogan if you're sober, do it sober.

Tyler (75:50)

Well, if you want to help make history, AngelList is launching a new product to fund the most creative, hardworking, technical founders building the innovations that push humanity forward. AngelList is hiring a marketing lead to launch and scale this product. Eric over at angellist, a friend of ours and the chief legal officer over there says you don't need prior experience experience running a marketing function, but you do need to be scrappy, data driven and comfortable in a startup environment. You'll own marketing strategy across a variety of channels to build awareness and drive growth. I know what this product is. I'm very excited about it, but I unfortunately can't share. But if you reach out to Eric, if you DM him on X and you're interested in the role, I'm sure he can share more. But excited and excited for this one to come online in the next couple months. I thought this was good. Somebody found a post from Sam Altman in 2016.

John (76:48)

Oh, I didn't realize this is old. I thought he just posted this 2016.

Tyler (76:53)

So almost 10 years ago says digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time. And Blade says Unk had this thought and immediately was like how do I profit from this? The greatest to ever do it. TBH hilarious. Hilarious. Of course ChatGPT wouldn't launch for many, many years.

John (77:15)

Yes.

Tyler (77:16)

But in that same he what did. When did he write the merge?

John (77:21)

That was like around the same time but also 2017. I don't know to be fair. Like I like there are lots of things that you could like if you're. If you're trying to layer up the OpenAI is bad case you don't start with the product's too addictive. Like I don't think that's the claim. The claim is like it uses too much water or like it it like one shots people or it does erotica or it's like AI slop. But very few people are saying like oh yeah, people are on their phones too much and it's because of OpenAI now people are like it's people are on their phones too much but it's because of Instagram and it's because of like social media actually not the AI because of sora Well, I think it's a little bit too early to say that.

Tyler (78:08)

I don't think.

John (78:08)

I don't think it's working.

Tyler (78:09)

Certainly short form video.

John (78:11)

Have you ever been in the gym or in a coffee shop and seen someone scrolling sora like over your shoulder? I haven't seen it.

Tyler (78:19)

I meant vertical video. Broadly.

John (78:21)

Totally. Totally. Which is I guess like a good take here, which is like, how do I profit from this? I gotta make an AI version of it. That's probably like more of what they were thinking, but in terms of actually profiting on digital addiction, it doesn't seem like it's going very well.

Lawrence (78:41)

Yeah.

Tyler (78:42)

4.0 seems to be extremely addictive. So much so that for a very.

John (78:48)

Small amount of people. Absolutely.

Tyler (78:50)

Yeah.

John (78:50)

For sure.

Tyler (78:51)

Yeah. And we don't know how many people.

John (78:52)

Yeah. You know what else is addictive? Doing your sales tax with numeral. Putting your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I'm also addicted to the Financial Times. The Financial Times has coverage of Sequoia Capital and what's going on with Roloff Botha out.

Tyler (79:14)

Both of these top lieutenants pushed Roloff out.

John (79:19)

That's what they say. Leadership duo prepare to chart a new course at Sequoia after ousting of Imperial. Botha venture capital firms limited partners hope Grady and Lynn can boost strategy and bring super intense period to close. They want to become less intense. That is very interesting. I would not think that. Okay, let's run through. Let's try and understand the level of intensity at Sequoia now and potentially in the future. So from this article, we love seeing Andrew Reed there. The Financial Times. Let's just say they had to find a picture where he was pushing. He looked like he was pushing. They're like, you know, we're going to tell a story about someone being pushed out. We need a picture of one of the lieutenants pushing as much as close as we can get to that motion because that's the story we're trying to tell. Let's figure out what's actually going on. Sequoia Capital's Roloff Boto was ousted by top lieutenants who lost confidence in his ability to keep Silicon Valley's most powerful venture firm ahead of its rivals. Bota stepped down as managing partner of the group last Tuesday following an intervention from Alfred Lynn. Pat Grady and Andrew Reed said multiple people with knowledge of the matter. The trio of senior partners had the blessing of the wider firm and Daglioni Sequoia's former managing partner said the three of the people. Their move came on the back of concerns about Bota's management style and questions about Sequoia's artificial intelligence investment strategy and followed high profile clashes between senior figures at the firm, the people said. Financial Times spoke to 10 people close to the firm. It's a leaky bucket over there. It's Sequoia Capital. They got the Financial Times on speed dial, I guess, including investors.

Tyler (81:08)

One of them was an lp.

John (81:09)

Yes. Also it says people close to the firm, not necessarily people that are actually at the firm. It's hilarious to be like, oh, sorry, I can't, I have to, I have to. I can't be on our. On our all hands today. I have a call. Oh, with who?

Tyler (81:21)

I'm going to the dentist, actually.

John (81:23)

I'm going to the dentist. Yes. I'm going to the dentist.

Tyler (81:25)

You went to the dentist last week. Oh, yeah. I'm going again.

John (81:28)

You're going again.

Tyler (81:29)

I have another checkup. I just gotta. We just gotta give props for. One second to Sean McGuire.

John (81:35)

Yes.

Tyler (81:35)

For there being an article about Sequoia and not being it. I mean, round of applause.

John (81:40)

Whoa, that's amazing.

Tyler (81:41)

He's like, this is the first freedom.

John (81:44)

I'm not in the doghouse for once. Oh, thank goodness. I love it. Yeah. Props to Sean for staying out of the dodging the bullets.

Tyler (81:53)

He did it. They said it was impossible dodging the bullets.

John (81:56)

Okay, so investors who have worked with both the and institutions that bankroll sequoia, known as LPs. So the LPs are snitching. The LPs are snitching. His ousting was motivated by a belief that a new generation of leaders would better serve Sequoia's LPs. They said. So, yeah, I mean, basically, if there's a change in leadership, even a change in the GP structure at all, you would expect an email to go out to all the LPs. That's probably what they're leaking. But then a lot of the LPs probably got on the phone with people and then the Financial Times got on the phone with those people with those LPs. One of those described the removal as a revolt against both imperial style of leadership following a period of upheaval at one of Silicon Valley's most successful and enduring firms. On an IQ level, he is off the charts. Off the charts. They didn't say which way he's off the charts. Are they calling him 0 IQ? Minus 1 negative 1 IQ? That would be terrible. No, they clearly mean he's very intelligent. He's 180, 200, 300 IQ, who knows? But the heart of the matter is that Roloff is one of these people who always needs to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. Interesting, the person said, adding that both his emotional intelligence did not match his intellect. Roloff is a legendary investor, a leader in human being, sequoia's new leadership team told the ft.

Tyler (83:22)

I mean it's possible he was using too much Claude. And Claude kept telling him after every meeting he would dump in like the meeting notes and he'd be like Claude, am I goaded? Am I goaded?

John (83:34)

You're definitely in the conversation.

Tyler (83:35)

You're absolutely goaded.

John (83:37)

You're absolutely right. The reason Sequoia has stayed Sequoia for 53 years is they refused to cement themselves in hierarchy. Grady and Lynn will now run the firm while Reid and Grady will co lead Sequoia's funds investing in more mature startups. So Reid is going up to the growth stage. Lynn and another partner, Luciana Luxandrew, will co lead the firm's early stage investment funds. So Alfred Lynn will be doing some seed stage investing early stage Botha, who's run its US and European businesses since 2017 and took over the whole firm in 2022, will remain as an advisor. The 52 year old grandson of Roloff Pique Botha, the last foreign secretary under South Africa's apartheid regime and later a member of Nelson Mandela's first government, was hired by PayPal to PayPal by Elon Musk. Early in his career he's led investments in Instagram, YouTube, MongoDB. Sequoia has returned more than 50 billion to its US and European investors. Despite those successes, partners decided Lynn, who has backed Airbnb, DoorDash and OpenAI, and Grady, who's behind investments in Snowflake, Zoom and ServiceNow, were better placed to lead Sequoia under both the Sequoia has taken a more cautious approach to AI investment than some rivals invested a little more than 20 million in OpenAI in 2021 when the ChatGPT maker was valued at about 20 billion and has boosted that stake in subsequent rounds. When OpenAI raised funds at a 260 billion valuation, Sequoia offered to invest 1 billion but ultimately was given a stake a fraction of that. Ooh, so they didn't get there. They didn't get their 1 billion position, which still would have been less than 1%. Sequoia also holds a stake in Musk's X AI but is focused on early investments in AI application companies such as Harvey Sierra and Glean, an approach also advocated by Grady. This is very interesting. Well, we have our first guest of the show, Casey Hanmer in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Casey. How you doing? Happy Veterans Day.

Casey Hanmer (85:59)

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Tyler (86:00)

Great to meet this. A real background what's going on here.

Casey Hanmer (86:05)

I mean it's a real photograph.

Tyler (86:06)

It's a real photograph.

John (86:07)

What is it a photograph of?

Casey Hanmer (86:10)

Sorry, there's a weird lag there. That's a photograph of some sample containers made last year of pipeline grade synthetic natural gas made in America. Fossil, carbon free 100%.

John (86:23)

Yeah. Give us the update on Terraform. How's it going? What's the latest?

Casey Hanmer (86:28)

Oh, terraform's going great. Yeah, thanks. We're 23 strong now and we're like literally putting the finishing touches on our first full scale synthetic fuel system. So this is a machine that takes in sunlight and air and produces pipeline grade natural gas. Also kicked off work on our methanol process, which is kind of the other half or the flip side of the coin. So methanol is in the department of Liquid fuel and natural gas is the department of Gaseous Fuel. So between those two, we pretty much covered everything that humans need. And it's just kind of a fairly mind boggling thing to think that in 100 years and 1,000 years, in 10,000 years, humans who need hydrocarbons for any purpose, whether that's flying rockets or jets or making paints and fertilizers or pigments or medicines or whatever, we'll do so using a solar synthetic process and that we're building the first one.

John (87:17)

Do you fit neatly into any of the current, the current market? Political, I was going to say like political trends or initiatives like, I mean we had Isaiah Taylor on yesterday from Velar, he's part of this group. Yeah, Just raised. And there's like four companies that it feels like the administration is really trying to accelerate. In nuclear, it feels like solar. Elon's a solar maxi. There's tons of energy around solar generally. But are there specific programs or milestones or just conversations that are happening on Capitol Hill that you're kind of drafting off of?

Casey Hanmer (88:01)

I mean the genesis of Terraform, which actually four years ago yesterday was a basically very suggestive spreadsheet. And very early on I said I don't really want to make this dependent on political, various political whims. And so it hasn't been. But actually across the spectrum we deal routinely with crunchy coastal liberal elites and heartland Americans and everyone in between. And I've never met anyone who says they'd like their fuel to be more expensive.

John (88:28)

Please.

Casey Hanmer (88:29)

So we're in the department of making more fuel, making it better, making it cheaper, making it locally, making it free of various geopolitical catastrophes. And I think that actually, as I said, never met an American who disagrees.

John (88:40)

Yeah. What about the AI narrative? Are you drafting off of that? Or is it just like a separate industry that's growing? Or is there basically a way to lower your cost of capital by doing a deal with someone who wants to buy a bunch of synthetically produced natural gas?

Tyler (88:59)

Press release, economy.

Casey Hanmer (89:02)

I should hire you guys as my pfm.

John (89:06)

There's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And at a certain point it's like, if it's raining, make hay, right? There's just a little bit of like, okay, maybe there's something. But I'm wondering how you're tussling with it. Like, what's real? What would be over your skis to do? What's the actual application of the technology? Take me through the various intersections.

Casey Hanmer (89:27)

Yeah. One of the really fun things I get to do as a CEO of this company is, is basically make spreadsheets and charts all day long and try and figure out how this stuff will go. And I've got a blog post, I like to have ideas and write them down two years ago saying that the way that this is going to go is we're going to need solar power to power AI data centers beyond a significant leap beyond what we're able to do with natural gas. And people have paid attention to that. And we've had significant inbound interest from most of the major players at this point, saying, hey, can you help us figure out how to do solar plus battery mostly or completely off grid AI training data centers and inference data centers? And we say, sure, happy to help. And we've done quite well by that. It's actually a very, very strong market signal that maybe I'm in the wrong job and I should be an energy system design consultant rather than a CEO. But tough luck to my stars. I am determined to figure out how to build a hardware company and manufacture stuff because you can never have enough factories. You can always have another factory. More factories is more, better, more factor as far as natural gas goes. Yeah, I mean, I think that the primary constraint that the AI hyperscalers are seeing right now is in the department of methane destruction. That is to say that the turbines that produce power, as opposed to the department of Methane Creation, which is us, and then every driller between here and maybe Charlotte or something like that. The United States at this point at least, is once again the great beneficiary of God's bounty when it comes to synthetic fuel. Fuel, when it comes to fuel in general, actually, synthetic fuel is a work in progress.

Tyler (90:59)

Can you say more about the very suggestive spreadsheet?

Casey Hanmer (91:04)

Yeah, sure. Essentially you look at a chart and you try and make a prediction for what oil will cost to produce in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years. I mean, peak oil. It's an idea that's been around for a long time and of course over time, oil drillers are very, very studious and hardworking people and they figure out better ways of getting oil out. And we've seen the fracking revolution. And I think that's just a wonderful thing. I genuinely do think it's wonderful to think, yes, it has certain climate implications, but at the end of the day, the human welfare benefits to cheap oil are 100 times better than the climate problems caused by it. It's just a matter of fact that we will run out sooner or later. And so oil is unlikely to get radically cheaper in the future. On the other hand, solar is getting something like 40% cheaper per doubling of cumulative production and that takes about two years. So we're seeing 20% cost reductions per year. And when you see something like that, it's a little bit like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs or Bill gates in the 1970s, looking at the arrival of integrated circuits and consumer grade computing systems, like very, very primitive computers by today's standards, and thinking this is a product that has already hit product market fit, it's already hitting this cycle of cost improvement. There's going to be a big wave here. How do I ride that wave? How do I cost commodify that complement? How do I build value on top of this platform? And I'm thinking, what can I use these cheap solar panels for? There's already plenty of people out there building large utility scale solar arrays and plugging them into the grid. And the grid itself even then was kind of strained by that. And in particular the kind of grid development bureaucracy was strained by that. What else can you use it for? And I was like, well, off grid, off grid stuff, obviously behind the meter. Build a giant solar array and then have a captive load attached to it for AI computing type stuff. That's an obvious one to do. And then Fuel synthesis. Fuel synthesis was an idea I've been thinking about for probably 30 years at this point, because we have to do it on Mars someday. And I was saying, well, on Mars it's enormously expensive due to energy cost, but energy cost on Earth is getting cheaper. I wonder, when these lines cross, if I'm able to surf that wave of cheaper solar and I can pass most of that value onto my customers by keeping my costs under control, then at what point should it be cheaper to synthesize fuel rather than dig it out of the ground and ship it halfway around the world? And the answer then, and I think the answer is basically the same now, is sometime this decade, 20, 30 at the outside. Okay. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. A few people had. What are they doing about it? Not what I would do about it. Okay, well, I guess I should probably stop kicking myself in the shins at NASA and go and do this at. Go and start a company and at least give it a go, find out what it's like, see if building a hardware company is as fun as everyone makes it sound. And here we are. So say it's an info hazard to play around in spreadsheets too much.

Tyler (93:51)

What happens to the price of land as solar energy production costs decline?

Casey Hanmer (94:03)

That's a good question. Because ultimately the value of land under solar is the value of what people are willing to pay for that power and things they do with that power. And so what we've seen, for example, is that the value of land under solar is something like 50, 100 times higher on a per acre basis or per revenue basis than your kind of average agriculture, even in a fairly developed agricultural state like the United States. And that's the same for synthetic fuel. The flip side, actually, and the thing that I worry about in terms of AI safety, is that it's pretty clear to me that the economic utility of land that's being used as solar array to power an AI data center is over $100,000 an acre, net present value. And that's just higher than almost any existing human use other than particularly dense and large cities. Which makes me wonder, maybe not in 10 or 20 years, but in 30 or 40 years, whether the AIs will encroach upon our agricultural land and make it harder for us to eat.

Tyler (94:58)

Yeah, this runaway AI that just decides it's in my best interest to blanket as much of the US or the world as I can with solar to further myself.

Casey Hanmer (95:11)

Yeah, I mean, it seems to create a strong economic forcing function, and maybe we can slow it down a few years with usual regulatory stuff. But I think that may be one of the reasons why Elon has been talking more about doing large scale AI development in space. If you can convince the AIs they're better off doing it in space where they don't have to fight with humans, maybe they'll go there first instead of. I mean, there's plenty of land on Earth. There's more land on Earth that's not being farmed than there is land that is being farmed, but it's not inexhaustible. Something like 100,000 terawatts lands on the oceans and 50,000 terawatts lands on parts of the Earth that no one lives on. Users and humans consume about 10 terawatts of energy. So there's plenty to go around. For now.

Tyler (95:53)

Yep, for now that makes sense. I want to get into NASA, government shutdown, bunch of stuff. But before we get into, let's touch the third rail. I'm ready. No, let's go even more schizo. Tucker had a guest on the show yesterday that was talking about chemtrails. What's your take on. On chemtrails?

Casey Hanmer (96:19)

I'm a pilot and I've flown around a fair bit and I've never seen one. I think that playing around in kerosene is not very good for you. And we do see health impacts from people who live too close to freeways and things like that. There are definite health impacts from burning the longer chain hydrocarbons. As far as chemtrails go, I must confess I'm not as deeply familiar with various conspiracy theories like that.

Tyler (standing desk) (96:45)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (96:45)

Although I do think that NASA's been covering up life on Mars. So we'll see about that.

John (96:48)

Covering up life on Mars?

Tyler (96:50)

Yeah. Before we talk about life on Mars, the chemtrails thing is funny because you have to believe that tens of thousands of people are coordinating to do this large scale operation. Not one of them has ever come out and said, hey, here's evidence that this massive operation is happening without.

Casey Hanmer (97:10)

There are aircraft which spray chemicals. Right. Like they're called crop dusters.

John (97:13)

Yeah, crop dusters.

Casey Hanmer (97:14)

And they have a very particular look and feel, of course. And then of course, if you spend much time doing structural calculations and you look closely at say a triple seven or something, it's pretty clear that. Sorry, my son's at work today and he just wanted to see if he'd come in.

Tyler (97:31)

It's a family friendly show.

John (97:32)

It's Veterans Day.

Casey Hanmer (97:34)

Yeah, yeah. His face is not on the Internet though. So you're always a veteran of any wars and hopefully never will be. Crop dusters, aircraft. I fly to Australia every now and then. And you're like. Actually the conspiracy theory that planes can't contain enough fuel makes more sense to me because it seems unlikely to me that you could actually keep a plane that big up in the air for 14 hours and cross an entire ocean like halfway around the world.

John (97:54)

Oh yeah.

Casey Hanmer (97:56)

Where are you putting all the chemtrails you're spraying out? Like in the overhead bin. There's never any room in there. So I don't understand.

John (98:02)

Yeah, yeah, we got plenty of space. It doesn't work out. Let's bring the fuel and the toxic chemicals or whatever. Yeah, I mean there are levels to the conspiracy because there is just the world of like, what if it's just like leaded gasoline where it's like sort of the chemicals are deranging people in a bad way because it's just pollution. Like, I don't think people really debate that, like the possibility of pollution is happening. It's different when it's like, okay, yes, it's like specific chemical that does a specific thing and triggers a specific reaction from the population.

Casey Hanmer (98:33)

I mean, there are chemicals that can make you crazy. Most of them taste very good.

John (98:36)

Really? Like what?

Tyler (98:38)

Stevia?

Casey Hanmer (98:41)

Diet Coke? No, I mean like quite literally. Like until the invention of GLP1 agonists, like something like a third to a half of Americans were going to die quite younger than they otherwise would because of weight related heart disease and obesity. Why? Because sugar tastes good?

John (98:56)

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Casey Hanmer (98:58)

That's a poison. It's actually poisoning you. It's actively degrading the quality of life.

Tyler (99:01)

Ray Pete would disagree. Why are we covering up life on Mars?

John (99:06)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (99:09)

So to be fair, you know, you don't want to be the boy who cried wolf and shut. It's aliens, it's aliens, it's aliens. So what tends to happen in these, in scientific fields is it becomes very fashionable to be quite skeptical cycle of things as it should be. But at the same time evidence will accumulate over time. And so you'll have this kind of neat cottage industry of people who can explain away any evidence they see without necessarily updating their prior knowledge or prior assumptions about it. And I was trained at Caltech by the geologist, I've forgotten his name. This is age, okay? It's coming to you. It'll come back to me eventually. Kirschwink, Joe Kirschmik and legend. Legend among men. And he was the guy who, when he got his sample of ALH84001, a Martian meteorite that was found in Antarctica a while ago. Now that he identified these cubo like hexoctahedalhedral magnetite crystals that were in the meteorite, it's not controversial that they were found in the meteorite. And it's also never, ever been demonstrated they can be made by any known lab process other than culturing magnetotactic bacteria that use them for navigation, essentially. So the meteorites are full of magnetite. Magnetite is a naturally occurring mineral, but there's a particular configuration of its crystalline form which we only know can occur. We only know of ways it can occur with biological precipitation. So, yeah, it's called the magneto fossil, if you want to Google it at home. And I think it's about as strong as evidence as you could possibly hope for finding without actually going there and kicking rocks yourself.

John (100:45)

Are you familiar with this thing, the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon? Have you ever heard of this?

Casey Hanmer (100:49)

Yeah, I've been there, yeah.

John (100:51)

Can you explain this to me? Somebody sent this to us. You got to talk about this on the show. And I was just going to read the Wikipedia, but now we have someone who actually is familiar with it.

Tyler (101:00)

Not an expert.

John (101:01)

I don't want to pop quiz you, but it would be cool.

Casey Hanmer (101:03)

No, I've been there. I've been there. I've been there several times. It's amazing. I've taken my kids there. So if you go to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, there's a trail called the Bright Angel Trail. And if you're very, very fit and it's not too hot, you can walk down to it and back in a day. But I would recommend starting at midnight, right? You get down to it in the early morning and then. And then, you know, after, after, after daybreak. But then you get back up before it gets hot or take a couple of days, enjoy it. But there's also an exposure just northeast of Vegas at a place called Frenchman Mountain, which you can just drive right up to, although last time I was there, it was unfortunately covered in broken glass. Okay, great unconformity. So over time, you know, the oceans rise and fall due to climatic variations, and also land rises and falls due to geological stuff. And when land is above sea level, in general, it's eroding, and when it's below sea level, it's in general accumulating sediment. And so what you see in the Grand Canyon, that is to say that most of the Grand Canyon is a series of layers of carbonates, which means it's shallow oceans that are forming reefs and sand dunes and sandstones, which means it's riverine kind of delta environment or something, where the land is gradually sinking relative to the ocean, creating an accommodation space in which which new dirt and soil and rocks and stuff can come down and fall and be compacted and form these layers. And then what happens is if the ocean falls down or the land gets lifted up, then you see erosion. And what happens is that newly formed rock gets eroded away for a while and then it sinks again and then it starts to build up again. And so you get these, what are called little unconformities, which is where you've got a little period of missing time. A million years here, 100,000 years there, 10 years over here, and maybe 10 million years over there, where, where the land has been above sea level. And so no new rock has been forming or if it has, it since been eroded away. Okay, so this occurs at all scales. And it turns out that at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or very close to the bottom is the thing called the great unconformity. And it's kind of mind boggling because the rocks on one side of this are this kind of the Vishnu schist basement rock. It's this ancient rock that forms the, you know, the core of our North American continent, At least in this place. It's ancient at crystalline, it's 1.6 billion years old. It's like what, 13% of the age of the universe. And then literally like one thumbs width away from that. Above it is the, the oldest sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon, which are 500 million years old. I think they're just after the, after the, the Cambrian explosion. Okay, this is stretching my memory. It's a long time ago now, 535 million years ago. And it's just kind of crazy. So what happened there? It's a missing billionaires. There's a missing billionaires. And so in that time, rock formed, right?

John (103:30)

Sure.

Casey Hanmer (103:30)

And probably entire mountain ranges form. It takes 100 million years to form a mountain range and then eroded away to nothing.

John (103:35)

Sure.

Casey Hanmer (103:36)

So like the Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian Mountains were a mountain range taller than the Himalayas 130 million years ago. Pretty much eroded away to nothing. So you could form and destroy a mountain range the size of the Appalachian Mountains in that time, 8, 9, 10 times in that time, entire continents form and sink. Entire supercontinents form and sink. Probably not dinosaurs back then. As far as we Know, but there was definitely, like, life and lots of life in the oceans and some plants and stuff on land and some insects and things. Actually, insects, I think came later. Look, don't quote me on this. Check Wikipedia.

John (104:06)

Ask Grok.

Tyler (104:08)

Grokopedia.

Casey Hanmer (104:08)

But it's all gone. It's all gone. At least when you look at one of those geological timescales, you see a lot of recent rocks and not so much detail in the older rocks. And that's just because as you go back in time, you get exponential destruction of the geological record. There is actually a corner of the eastern Grand Canyon where what's called the Grand Canyon Supergroup, which is a series of layers that's inclined like this kind of pokes up. And that's the only place on Earth that we have rocks from that age. It's kind of an intermediate, Intermediate age rock. Yeah, it's just bizarre. So you can go there just outside Vegas, like, skip the tables for half a day, drive out, and maybe they.

Tyler (104:39)

Could put a casino at the Great Unconformed.

John (104:42)

I mean, on the Wikipedia page, the reason this is so interesting is because on the Wikipedia page it says there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the Great Unconformity among geoscientists. There are hypotheses that have been proposed. It is widely accepted that there was a combination of events which may have caused such an extreme phenomenon. One example is a large glaciation event which took place during the neoprozoic around 720 million years ago. And so there's like a whole bunch of theories, but the question is, there's like, it's.

Casey Hanmer (105:16)

How did they grind away so much, so much rock? Yeah, because. Because essentially, like, where this, where the rock is forming and being destroyed is very close to sea level almost always, Right?

John (105:24)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (105:25)

And. And so at some point, the rock that is on the underside of the Great Unconformity had to have been lifted up near sea level, and then it has to have sunk down a mile or two to form all the rocks above it. Right. And now it's been lifted up again above sea level. Because the bottom of the, of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado river, is obviously above sea level, otherwise it wouldn't flow to the ocean. So it's kind of crazy that this goes up and down. Yeah, I mean, that's geology for you. There's still work to be done. Maybe you'll figure it out one day. Okay, let's talk about supporting a new gradient conformity. Right. Like the rocks below the Great Unconformity, the Vishnu Shista being eroded by the Grand Canyon as we speak. So if the Grand Canyon ever fills in and starts to build rocks again in the future, the great unconformity will be below where it is now in that part of the world.

Tyler (106:07)

Okay, well, let's talk about something we can all agree on, which is Three Eye Atlas. What's going on with that?

John (106:12)

What? I don't know anything about this.

Tyler (106:15)

You know this is a comet. Yeah. Some people think they're saying it's a comet. A lot of celebrities are saying it's an alien ship. But what's the Casey Hanmer give us a breakdown on it. We haven't been following it. There's been enough happening in technology.

Casey Hanmer (106:30)

Likewise, I've been focused mostly on the finer details of like, like fixing electrolyzer seals and things like that. I would say that these interstellar objects are super interesting and I would like to get a close look at them. And I really wish that we had some. Like maybe Tom Mueller could build a series of spacecraft with lots of onboard ISP that we park out near the moon or something. And then when one of these comes through, we press the button and it immediately adjusts its orbit and shoots off in that direction and we get a nice flyby, we get a few photos that'd be super cool. We're seeing them about once a year at this point. And that's just because our telescopes have gotten better. As far as Three Eye Atlas goes, I have a cousin who routinely texts me updates on like, it's an alien ship for sure. I don't think it is. I think it's a comet. I think that actually some of the earlier ones will be better than it. I think it's a very large comet, a very old comet. Seems to be a comment to me.

Tyler (107:17)

But if you were sufficiently advanced alien race, would you not want to just attach yourself to a comet that was headed in the direction you want to it to go and just ride along with it?

Casey Hanmer (107:28)

No, no, I think too slow. Well, so I went. Yeah, exactly. Well, who knows how long the aliens live. But I went to Caltech to study kind of warp drive to try and understand how to do that. And I didn't succeed, obviously, but someone might one day. But I think that if you've seen Avatar 2, the spaceships that Jim Cameron puts there for the humans to fly to Alpha Centauri are like kind of what I have in mind when I think, like, how would humans or aliens that are comprehensible and legible to humans travel? It'd Be something like that. Enormously energetic, relativistically accelerated, very, very bright, very flashy, very obvious. Or maybe something like warp drive, if we can ever figure it out. But I think a comet that takes 100,000 years to kind of wander its way from the nearest star to here. Very boring.

John (108:10)

Very boring.

Tyler (108:11)

Yeah, boring.

John (108:14)

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

Casey Hanmer (108:58)

So initially I was quite pro Mars and I wrote a couple of books about doing stuff on Mars and realized that its advantages are actually both destinations are pretty difficult in their own way. They both have their challenges. And actually I think what SpaceX correctly realized is that if you're going to do anything meaningful on either place, you have to develop a rocket system like Starship that can basically fire her's mass at pretty much any target in mind. It's not a fair fight kind of situation. And so once you have something like a starship, doing something pretty cool on the moon is very straightforward. But if you're constantly trying to put together some mission that's just made of like little bits and pieces and small puny rockets and very expensive slow going contracts and stuff, you really struggle to do anything meaningful on either of them ever. So yeah, I'm very much in favor of kind of incidentally, on the way to Mars, setting up a couple of lunar research stations and putting a few thousand people there and running it like the space station is now, but for more than six people. Yeah, and I think we could totally do that for Antarctica program level budget with Starship.

John (110:06)

Yeah. My theory on it, just as an outsider has always been fire hose mass at low Earth orbit, get starlinks going every day. Tons of. I love those montages that are just showing Falcon Nines up and back every single day. Do that in low Earth orbit, then do that for the Moon and same thing, dozens of flights to the moon and back every single day and then start weaving to Mars because it feels like Mars is just a completely different set of trade offs and cadences based on when we can actually Launch. It's not every day. And so just getting the reps in of like humans, just, even just a human or I don't know, maybe a robot at some point, like getting off of a, like landing a rocket on a celestial body and then getting out and jumping around. Like even if that's, that's happening every single day, it's going to be, that's a lot of that has to transfer to Mars, I would imagine.

Tyler (111:07)

What's the most underrated planet?

Casey Hanmer (111:08)

Yep, underrated planet.

Tyler (111:14)

What's a planet that you think about a lot?

Casey Hanmer (111:16)

I spent a lot of time thinking about Mars.

John (111:18)

Mars still underrated. Most people, they're number two after Earth.

Casey Hanmer (111:23)

Yeah, I had a little, little side project where I, I built, built the highest resolution topo map of Mars using a bunch of NASA data that's kind of in the archives.

John (111:33)

Interesting.

Casey Hanmer (111:34)

Not being directly funded. So I have a 6 meter resolution global topography map of Mars and I've been doing some hydrology simulations and stuff with it to see what happens when we terraform. It's kind of hard to appreciate, but even small planets like Mars are overwhelmingly big. Once you start dealing with these planetary scale data sets, it's like 200 terabytes. I start asking my wife, can I please buy another hard drive? And she's like, you've already spent $5,000 on hard drives this month. Maybe you should slow down. Okay. But planets are really, really big. And yet I have an almost photorealistic render of mars to sub 100 meter resolution sitting on a spinning platter on my desk at home. It's pretty wild that we get to do that. I could never have dreamed of that when I was a kid. It's just unimaginable.

Tyler (112:18)

Air traffic control, should it be run by a pregnancy test?

Casey Hanmer (112:25)

No, I don't think so, but it could be. At the end of the day, the shoulds, the normative discussion is kind of beyond my pay grade. But the descriptive discussion of whether it could is something that I think I can opine on. Fundamentally, what a graphics system does on a computer is it's doing roughly a billion collision calculations a second. And that's a much more sophisticated graphics engine than Doom. But still it's something that you can buy in any PlayStation or something today. And ATC is just not that complicated. It has a bunch of edge cases, but it's not that complicated. And it's also a system that for justifiable reasons is very, very conservative about adopting new technology. But at the same time, the cost that we endure as a As a civilization to various air traffic control problems. And they're not only caused by government shutdowns. Kind of undeniable. And there's also an efficiency aspect. We could probably shave 5% of our fuel usage if we were able to have basically weather optimal direct point to point flights for all aircraft that wanted them. Rather than usual ATC thing, which is you basically follow existing instrument approved routes between in many cases, like places on maps that were once radio navigation beacons but no longer exist.

John (113:44)

Yeah. You mentioned giving the project to the mag 7. I wonder, do you think that there's an opportunity for a startup to sort of do like the Anduril flipped model, build it with venture capital dollars and then try and sell it to the government once you have a better system in place. And also is the actual software and hardware actually the problem there was that Nathan Fielder HBO special that was kind of like. It's maybe more about pilot communication and human training, human error when something goes wrong. And it's not necessarily like a computer system and a bad line of code.

Tyler (114:20)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (114:20)

I think you probably still want to have people sitting in control towers looking at radars. I'm not saying the solution to our problem is to fire every last air traffic controller, Quite the opposite. But think about what those air traffic controllers are doing. A lot of the time it's stuff that could be a few lines of code. It's one of these things we got, I don't know, 1,000 corner cases, but 99.99% is just one case. It's just the standard like did these intersect instrument routing? Well, just like you basically get a clearance to fly a certain route at a certain time and then all goes well, you'll never see another plane. Every now and then you've got to keep an eye on things. You got to control the airspace. It's not a complicated puzzle. I mean like Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 had a pretty good simulation of this. So. So it's the sort of thing that I think is well within our technical capabilities.

John (115:08)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (115:09)

Something that we actually want to do. Yeah.

John (115:10)

I guess to some degree you can forecast the entire flight path before the plane takes off and make sure that it does not intersect with any other flight paths at any point in time.

Casey Hanmer (115:22)

Yeah, that's relatively straightforward. I think some people on X were like, oh sure, we should just hand another monopoly to Starlink to do all this stuff. Actually, I don't think that's the case. I think that you could actually design a series of algorithms that would run centrally but also Autonomously on every aircraft. And so you have everything in aviation is these multiple layers of backups. So there's always something checking the system. Sorry. And a coworker just brought in her new baby. Because I start this company and then all my employees start having more children, I think I'm doing something right.

Tyler (115:52)

That's a great sign.

Casey Hanmer (115:53)

Yeah. So the idea there is like your, your onboard computer, onboard your aircraft, if you're flying a, you know, commercial 737 or something, should be like getting minute by minute updates on weather and tailwinds and headwinds and so on and being like, well, you know, I can save 5 cent fuel, fuel if I got 1500ft, you know, route into the jet stream. Sorry about the bumps, everyone. And we get the route faster and, and then it just kind of automatically does the flocking thing where it, it, it sees and avoids and, and doesn't intersect with other, other aircraft. But yeah, just the technology adoption cycle at the FAA is understandably, and airlines and aircraft manufacturers understandably, pretty conservative, but it's also very, very slow. And so we end up with a situation where delays and actual crashes and stuff are occurring because the system is not as good as it could be. So I think the way, I mean, it's way beyond my pay grade. But the way you would do this is you'd basically commit to buying or purchasing a family of improved products that are interoperable according to some pretty straightforward standard. You could base it on. Australia and Europe has largely automated ATC at this point. And then you integrate.

Tyler (117:02)

Europe is automated. What is there already Europe automated at the same time?

Casey Hanmer (117:07)

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

John (117:31)

Do you have a take?

Casey Hanmer (117:32)

Pretty dicey in LA sometimes.

John (117:34)

Do you have a strong take on the AI CapEx build out? It feels like I just feel like your company and a lot of the companies of your vintage are very much aligned with do something really ambitious that as it scales, it compounds and all of a sudden once it's working, you're marshaling. Like I do imagine when I think about the story of your business, I Think about billions and billions of dollars flowing into more and more solar panels and just this crazy flywheel once the technology gets working. We've talked about this in the past. It feels like that's kind of happening in the context of token factories right now. But are there anything that has given you jitters to the structure or how things are playing out, or do you see it as one narrative? Is just like, it's felt cool to watch big things get built. And I'm wondering how you're processing the AI CapEx build out all the crazy capex that's going on.

Casey Hanmer (118:45)

I think the United States has always done well when they're able to take a difficult problem and transform it into a form that could be solved by pouring money on it and then pouring money on it.

Tyler (118:53)

Yeah, let's give it up for boring money.

Casey Hanmer (118:56)

Yeah. And so if someone were to ask me, do you really think that every dollar being spent on hyperscaling right now is being spent the best possible way it can? No, of course not. But is it nevertheless efficient from the perspective of competition to spend as quickly as they can to ramp this technology up right now? Yeah. I mean, there's obviously a there there. I use all the models every day. I'm a discerning customer and I think that's quite transformational. I mean, they frustrate me as well. But like, the direction of improvement is very clearly going in one direction. And this is not a race where United States can afford to be anything but first. And I think it's a real question to wonder like, well, what does the UN Security Council look like in 15, 20 years when you basically most of them today have their own nukes? And I think they actually UN Security Council, permanent members all have their own nukes these days. And in the future, most of them will not have their own AI sovereignty.

Tyler (119:57)

How much would.

John (119:57)

AI sovereignty projects are not going to bear fruit because they're underscoped or underscaled because I feel like a lot of countries would say you just answered the question. But a lot of countries, we're doing a 1 gigawatt data center center. Like, we're good, we're checking.

Casey Hanmer (120:15)

The United States is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in this direction right now. And how much is in China, I guess is serious about it. Do you think Russia is serious about it?

John (120:23)

It does not seem serious.

Casey Hanmer (120:24)

UK and Transar.

John (120:25)

It does not seem.

Tyler (120:26)

Some of Russia's biggest clusters are like a thousand GPUs.

John (120:30)

Australia, we did hear is investing in quantum computing. Do you think that that's going to be relevant.

Casey Hanmer (120:35)

No.

John (120:38)

Can you say more?

Tyler (120:39)

Just sent the market down.

Casey Hanmer (120:41)

I'll say it in the street.

Tyler (120:42)

Shamble. No.

John (120:46)

No, no.

Casey Hanmer (120:48)

It's a shame because Australia has this as like basically the best solar resource on earth and it has, you know, it's a modern western liberal democracy with rule of law and incredible natural resources and 25 plus million well educated, wealthy people. And every time there's a new wave of technology, they go, oh, never mind, mate, we'll catch the next one. Drives me crazy. So, so that's why I'm here.

Tyler (121:12)

But they have Kira.

Casey Hanmer (121:14)

Yeah.

Tyler (121:14)

You ever surfed? You ever surfed there? It's one of the best point breaks of all time.

John (121:19)

Yeah, yeah.

Casey Hanmer (121:20)

No, no. The beaches are incomparable and like I live in, I live in the San Gabriel Valley and I come to Santa Monica about once every two years under duress, I will add. And people say, oh, Santa Monica, it's the most amazing beach. And I'm like, yeah, maybe if you're like from, I don't know, like Canada or something. But I grew up on, I grew up on Kilkent beach in, in the central coast of New South Wales.

Lawrence (121:38)

It's.

Casey Hanmer (121:38)

I would, I wouldn't, I wouldn't swap all of Santa Monica for like a single bucket of sand from that beach.

Tyler (121:43)

It's the best sand. Incredible. Best sand on earth.

John (121:46)

You've been there?

Tyler (121:46)

Yeah.

John (121:47)

You've surfed in Australia?

Tyler (121:48)

All over Australia.

John (121:49)

I didn't know that.

Tyler (121:50)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (121:51)

EVPN down under.

John (121:53)

Yeah.

Casey Hanmer (121:53)

We need market calendars down under.

Tyler (121:56)

I like, I like, I love Australia. Australia feels like just a very large foster. California feels like California is a continent.

John (122:05)

A violet crumble. That'll get me going. I love violet crumble.

Tyler (122:08)

Last thing I was curious to get your take on this company. T1 Energy went super viral last week because they're just making a massive amount of solar panels. Everyone got really excited because including ourselves saying, wait, we know how to build things and turns out it was a Chinese company that was like a forced seller of their manufacturing facility. Do you think there's anything that we can learn from T1 Energy and what the original kind of builders of this facility did in terms of just scaling that out?

Casey Hanmer (122:45)

I haven't actually heard the story, so I'm not the right person to comment.

Tyler (122:48)

Yeah, T1 Energy, I mean you'd be interested in the story. It's a $800 million stock. They're making 1 gigawatt worth of solar a year. And people got really excited.

John (122:59)

That's Tiny.

Casey Hanmer (123:01)

Yeah. Globally, we can make 1.4 terawatts of solar this year and deploy about 700 gigawatts. A couple of years ago, I used to say it's about 1 megawatt per minute, but now it's closer to 1 megawatt every 40 seconds.

John (123:14)

40 seconds.

Tyler (123:16)

We got to get those.

John (123:17)

Okay. Are you engaging.

Casey Hanmer (123:24)

2 billion modules this year? Like, would you encourage one for every family on Earth?

John (123:28)

Would you encourage America or the venture ecosystem or the government to try and bring manufacturing capacity back to America? Because when we've talked about this before, you've always said, hey, if China's going to be subsidizing it, just buy as much as possible. And that makes sense economically, but over the long term, like, if you need to scale exponentially, there might be a case for reshoring. Do you think that that's a good idea?

Casey Hanmer (123:57)

Yeah, I think controlling supply chain for solar technology is super important. And just because China currently leads doesn't mean the US can't lead in the future. We've seen this in the past, right? Yeah. The industry is extremely dynamic. You wouldn't have to try all that hard to. If you had a 5% edge over your competition, you could be the number one in five years. Something like that. Right.

John (124:21)

Why didn't you look into that? Or why aren't you vertically integrating? Is that just something that might happen in the future?

Casey Hanmer (124:27)

I mean, it might be the last thing we vertically integrate. It's. Well, it's not really a problem for venture or government.

John (124:33)

Right.

Casey Hanmer (124:33)

It's a problem for banks.

John (124:34)

Sure.

Casey Hanmer (124:34)

Right. It's like, buy the machine from Germany, put it in a shed and put it in a giant building and start churning them out. It's pretty well understood how to do this scale. It's not really a technology problem. Technology development problem. But that's my bread and butter. My bread and butter is like doing. Doing weird, complicated stuff.

John (124:50)

Is the reason that it's in China, mostly labor cost or environmental concerns or regulation or the cost of capital. Do you have an idea of, like. Like, I understand, like, the whole story of. Yeah, the whole story of, like, why the iPhone landed there. Like, I understand that story a little bit. I don't necessarily understand why solar panels went there specifically.

Casey Hanmer (125:14)

Yeah, I mean, Australia invested a bunch of money into developing this technology, and then Germany spent a bunch of money on manufacturing it at a steep loss. And both of them basically gave up at some point. And meanwhile, China looked around and said, we just had the Beijing Olympics. We're kind of a big Deal now. And we'd like to do something about Taiwan sooner or later. But the last time anyone got uppity in the eastern China Sea area, they did a lot of damage until the United States curbstomped them by choking their supplies of energy. And it turns out that neither Germany nor Japan had anywhere near sufficient supplies of domestic energy sources. And once the combined bomber offensive and the submarine war took out their ability to transport oil from where it was being made to where it was being used, basically both war efforts collapsed within months. So if you're China, you'd be like, where's my oil coming from? 12 million barrels a day is coming from the Middle East, a long way away. Fire up via Straits of Oman and the Straits of Malacca, Straits of Hormuz, Straits of Malacca, which we don't control, can't control, don't have a deep water blue water navy, via our historical and current geopolitical adversaries who kind of allow the oil to pass by because they're playing nice today. Maybe it's actually something we should spend because the Chinese political economy is much more kind of expansionary in its spending. It's much more supply driven rather than demand driven. So if we're going to spend a bunch of money on more or less inflationary projects, may as well spend them on giant solar panel factories. And they got really good at it, and all credit to them. It's a bloody lot of hard work to do that. And they did it. Now, basically, we all benefit from that if we willing to buy from them, but that doesn't mean it's something that's like intrinsically impossible for United States to do. You know, it's. It's just a question of will. It's a question of who. Who actually wants to go and do this scale.

John (127:06)

Mm.

Tyler (127:07)

Always a pleasure.

John (127:09)

Always a pleasure.

Tyler (127:09)

Thank you for taking the time after you, after you create abundant energy, we're going to require that or we're going to make a bid for you to become a, you know, a more. Invest more of your time in podcasts.

John (127:25)

Yes, we do enjoy this.

Casey Hanmer (127:26)

That'd be hard to do at this point. I've been on every show.

Lawrence (127:28)

Yeah, you have.

John (127:29)

You've been on a tear. Congratulations. You've been all over.

Casey Hanmer (127:33)

Well, I know your secret. Sitting around talking about stuff is incredibly fun.

John (127:36)

It's so much fun.

Tyler (127:37)

It really is.

John (127:38)

Well, thanks for doing it with us today.

Tyler (127:40)

Great to see you.

John (127:41)

Come by.

Tyler (127:42)

Talk soon.

John (127:43)

Happy Veterans Day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Fin AI. The number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. We have a surprise guest joining us in just a few minutes. We'll see if he can join in the Restream waiting room. He says he's down to join. In the meantime, let's go through some more post. What else? Back in the timeline, there's some news in the Wall Street Journal.

Tyler (128:14)

You see some of these images leaking from Nano Banana 2?

John (128:17)

No. What is this?

Tyler (128:19)

They are a little too photorealistic for my. Interesting for my preference.

John (128:27)

Okay, what's going on here? Oh wow. Okay, so it's got Jeffrey Epstein with Diddy Diddy. These are very accurate images. These seem remarkable third term.

Lawrence (128:39)

Yeah.

John (128:40)

Is this so this is from Roberto Nixon who came on our stream at MediConnect. He says wild times nanobana2 apparently leaked a few hours today on some platforms and the limited results by a handful of users have been pretty insane. The model was apparently from an uncensored, slightly older checkpoint. When it actually launches, it won't be this uncensored of course, but crazy to think what a handful of engineers at the Frontier Labs have access to and the chaos they could cause if they so wished. I wonder. Yeah, it's so interesting where. I would love to actually trace where these leaks came from, what the whole flow is. Because it's possible that like it's possible that there's like some Photoshop in here as well. Like if you're in the business of creating a leak or a fake leak, you can do all sorts of funny things. There was a. What was it? There was someone who. What did they do? They went and they. They filmed something normally and then they went into after effects and they made it look like they were on a green screen for it and they made fake behind the scenes foot for their real footage. So it looked like they were. So they actually went surfing and then they made a CGI version behind the scenes just like that. There's that Apple trailer now for the introduction to Apple tv and they say we made it all practically. We did it all practically. Let me see. We need an image for. For our next guest because we are not doing video. We are just doing.

Tyler (130:19)

He is semi non.

John (130:20)

But we have Growing Daniel in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Growing Daniel into the tv.

Tyler (130:26)

There he is.

John (130:27)

Growing Daniel. How are you doing?

Growing Daniel (130:29)

Doing really great. How are you guys doing?

John (130:32)

Fantastic.

Tyler (130:32)

You're doing well. It's great to finally have you on the show. It only Only took very excited invites, but you've been busy and you finally made it.

Growing Daniel (130:42)

It's an honor to be here. I didn't have anything to say before.

Tyler (130:45)

I'm glad now you do. I'm glad you're launching the Moral Discernment Company of San Francisco.

John (130:51)

Getting into moral discernment finally. I would love to know what that means. Is this a vibe shift on your part, or do you feel like this is a continuation of your affinity for moral discernment? Walk me through how you evaluate, like, what is or is not a good startup idea, or like a virtuous. Like, Trey Stevens has that good quest philosophy. Like, how do you think about judging the work of the technology industry that we see every day on display on X?

Growing Daniel (131:26)

I guess it's not really complicated to me. I mean. Okay, so if you're selling, like, gambling, then you're basically selling drugs to people. Like, and everyone knows that, right? I. I didn't think it'd be a big thing to say, but you should want to build things that are good for people. And I think that's exactly what the Pope was saying. If you are engaging in the act of creation, then you should try and create something that's actually good for people. And I think over the past 10 years, we've had this really weird, I guess, school of moral philosophy that we all collickably call woke up.

John (132:05)

Sure.

Growing Daniel (132:06)

It's been really dominant and it's had an extremely aggressive priest class that tries to get everyone. Tries to coerce everyone into bending the knee to it. And nowadays that's not a very popular perspective, thankfully. I think that that fever kind of broke, but I don't think what replaces it is nothing. I don't think that's a good solution. I think everyone should want to. Should want to help, actually.

Tyler (132:32)

You cannot criticize technology at all. All if it's software, you cannot criticize it. We're banning you. We're making it illegal to identify negative externalities of any technology product.

Growing Daniel (132:44)

And a lot of this stuff is even externalities. It's literally just you're selling drugs to people. It's the economic transaction, right? Like the core product. It's not like somebody got, you know, left fielded walking down the street by gambling.

John (132:56)

Yeah, okay.

Tyler (132:57)

People used to be criticized. You know, three years ago it was like, like, stop building enterprise SaaS. And people were like, okay, I'll build gambling apps.

John (133:05)

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

Tyler (133:44)

These massive income.

John (133:45)

I mean, I mean, yes, sometimes they're just interfaced with it. But is it? Is it? Is it? I'll know it when I see it.

Growing Daniel (133:52)

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

John (134:16)

Yes.

Growing Daniel (134:17)

If you get like, I, I don't think. I'm not here to tell you what is right and wrong, but the Pope's entire point was that you should think about that and try and do good things. And I didn't think anyone on earth, I guess one person for sure, had a problem with that. And so I, I don't have the moral guidebook. There is a guidebook. I. I own a copy. It's called the Bible. Yes, but I do not, I cannot, you know, extrapolate that to every modern situation. But I do encourage everyone who's building anything to think about what they're building. What good is it? Is it actually helping people? And by the way, B2B SaaS doesn't get me up in the morning, but hey, that's honest software that actually, you know, solves people's problems honestly. That's a great thing to build, I think.

John (135:05)

I like that. I like that. I mean, so let's get into steel manning the other side of this, because that's what's fun. It's okay to. It makes for good content. So it's okay to, you know, hit the casino, the craps table like once every couple years on a vacation or something. Isn't that what Andreessen's Doing by net asset value, by the actual deployment of the capital. Like, 99% of the dollars are going into honest B2B software databricks. It's going into things that feel virtuous. And then, yes, they do have Speedrun, which is an incubator. And yes, within Speedrun, there are some crazy, crazy companies, and I'll give you that. But as a percentage of the capital that Andreessen has allocated, we are in the. Yeah. Once a year, he goes to Las Vegas. We're not in the. He only funds gambling. So how do you react to that?

Growing Daniel (136:09)

I think that if you are. If you're going to Vegas, then you're. There's nothing. The. Whether or not you're betting black or red is pretty. It's an extremely amoral situation.

John (136:22)

Okay.

Growing Daniel (136:23)

When you come out and you put $15 million into Cluli, I think that is not an amoral situation. You made a decision there about what you want to fund, what you want to see in the world.

John (136:32)

Okay.

Growing Daniel (136:34)

And so what I see if he. If he wants. You know, and again, that's, you know, obviously, a 16Z will do what it's. Do what it wants. Right? Like, they don't have to listen to me. But. But for a lot of people, I think the Cluli investment was a real moment, at least for a lot of my founder friends, totally, that was a moment where it was like, oh, okay, like, we're just literally going to fund whatever retarded thing now, no matter whether or not it's good. It's just more vibe, more bigger tweets. Come on. And just try to keep this constant sense of excitement going. And for what? For. For this cheating app. Like, this is stupid. Like, what are we doing? I didn't come out here to build cheating apps. I didn't come out here to build gambling apps that advertise that they can, you know, help people gamble under the age of 21. Like, these things do not seem. They don't seem. They don't seem immoral to me. They seem actually immoral. And that's a decision they're making, and I would encourage them to not make that decision.

John (137:37)

Well, the good news is that it does feel like Cluley has pivoted to just B2B. Sass. I guess so. Maybe. Maybe it's total victory for honor. Sass, I have one more.

Tyler (137:48)

Yeah, I guess I have one more.

John (137:49)

Steel man, that I.

Tyler (137:50)

Go for it.

John (137:51)

Daniel, get the helmet out.

Tyler (137:52)

Get the helmet out.

John (137:53)

I should get the helmet out. Although, I don't know. Can you see us or is.

Growing Daniel (137:57)

I can see you right now. Yes.

Tyler (137:58)

Okay, good. So John's gonna throw on the helmet. Get the second. The second Steelman.

Growing Daniel (138:06)

I was really hoping it'd be Crusader helmet.

John (138:10)

So this is the Steelman helmet, which is for when you're steel manning a point. And so it's very hard to wear, but as it should be. Yes. Heavy is the head that wears the steel man helmet. So the second Steelman is. While I agree with you that you should not mock the Pope, you should not try and dunk on the Pope. It's kind of rude. I would say that potentially it is okay to critique the Pope for trying to set regulatory frameworks around business. And I would cite the Wall Street Journal's post mortem obituary on the previous Pope and kind of look back on some of the stuff that the Pope had done that was maybe leaning too heavily into some of the environmentalist trends and maybe caused too much of a shift that actually sort of hurt the quality of life in Europe and America. And it was not. It wound up being incompatible with human flourishing. And so the Pope is maybe not always correct. And so there does need to be some level of dialogue between even Catholics and the Pope.

Growing Daniel (139:29)

John, did you just say the Pope isn't always correct?

John (139:32)

I'm saying I have the Steel Man Hamlet on for a reason.

Growing Daniel (139:36)

Yeah, of course you could say that. Of course. That's a totally. You don't even have to wear the helmet. It's a totally reasonable take. Of course the Pope's gonna say things that are incorrect. And especially, I think on temporal issues, on political issues, the Pope does not just reign supreme when we can't disagree with them.

John (139:53)

Yes.

Growing Daniel (139:54)

I do think that if the Pope makes a very like, you know, anodyne and Ernest post about how we should care about the things that we're building and the effect it has on people, then you shouldn't mock them. Yes, I think especially, especially, I mean, if you're some, you know, low be, that's whatever. But if you're Mark Andreessen, come on, man. So I guess seeing it from him, I was like, that bothered me. But no, absolutely. Obviously I disagree with, you know, probably many things the Pope believes on political issues.

John (140:24)

Sure. We do have a question from the chat. Why is the Pope above being mocked? I think we touched on this, but is it just purely respect? Do you think all people should avoid mocking the Pope? Or specifically Catholics? Specifically religious people, specifically Americans? Is there any more nuance to who gets to mock? It sounds like Lobies. Maybe could mock the Pope if they're, you know, some sort of a non stop.

Growing Daniel (140:46)

Em.

John (140:46)

Silly.

Tyler (140:48)

Young growing Daniel. Young growing. There's a young growing. The future growing Daniel.

John (140:52)

Would you have marked the Pope two years ago? Probably.

Tyler (140:56)

I think my view is just, is not to interrupt, but I'm guessing you agree. Just like it should be okay to expect. Like the technology industry broadly has so much power. It impacts our lives in so many different ways that people within the industry should criticize it, people outside the industry should criticize it. We should, should, we should expect that people understand the weight of their work, even if it's not in defense tech or national security related, etc. Like the work impacts our lives and it impacts people that are outside the industry. And to basically, I don't even know. I mean part of this is like this was such a new meme format I was trying to clock. Like, okay, what does he actually mean by this? This is like a, he was so.

Growing Daniel (141:42)

Bad at applying it.

John (141:44)

Did you watch the full interview? The GQ Sydney Sweeney interview? It was very interesting because it was an interview for an event that GQ holds that's called Men of the Year. And it was an interview between two women. And so I think that they have genericized the term, but they stuck with giving an award for Men of the Year and then they give it to whoever or something, something like it was very confusing branding for me.

Growing Daniel (142:14)

Handsome man.

John (142:15)

But then, but then also like there was a very weird, it felt like a little bit of a Rorschach test actually watching the interview because when I actually went and watched the YouTube video, it feels like they're having a ton of fun with each other for like 10 minutes. And then they do get into that one question that's kind of sharp, sharply worded and she kind of dismisses and says like, look, I'm not going to.

Tyler (142:35)

Why would you even try to understand the source material, John? It's just a meme.

John (142:39)

I, I, I get, I don't know.

Tyler (142:41)

That that was, that was part of my like, you know, Mark, Mark applied it in a bunch of different ways in a very short period of time. Right. So it's, yeah, he was, he was a little trigger happy with it.

John (142:51)

I don't know.

Growing Daniel (142:52)

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

Tyler (143:22)

Yeah, it was. It was definitely anybody out there that was thinking about mocking the Pope. I think is gonna. Is gonna at least think twice.

John (143:32)

The Pope has level 9,000.

Tyler (143:34)

Have you been leveraging that prayer? We covered the prayer. I forget which church it's in exactly, but the prayer Star of the Sea. Yeah, yeah. Have you leveraged that at all?

Growing Daniel (143:46)

Oh, I leverage that every week. Absolutely.

Tyler (143:50)

That seems like some serious alpha. That should have become the current thing. There should have been lines out the door.

Growing Daniel (143:57)

It's insane that it's available for a 50 cent candle. You can go and pray for San Carlo to intercede for you, who is in heaven, by the way, hanging out with God, and he will intercede on your behalf for your technical problems. Incredible, incredible. Star of the Sea Parish, San Francisco.

Tyler (144:18)

I could see VCs, you know, actually putting that in term sheets going forward. You need to take 50 cents.

John (144:24)

Who's the patron save of capital allocation? If it's like, I think I'm going into a down round. I think my portfolio is about to tank. I need to pray.

Tyler (144:35)

What do you think tech is getting right right now? Anything?

John (144:38)

Oh, yeah.

Growing Daniel (144:40)

Oh, I think we're in a way better place. So I don't know. I came out here in 2018. From then till 21, most of tech Twitter was crypto Twitter, and that sucked. And so now we're actually building tools that are useful. Many AI tools are actually legitimately useful, which is a radical change from when I was out here in those three, four years. So I think a lot of things are going really well in tech right now. I think that I will continue to creep into every crevice of our capital structures and our processes throughout society. I think that's awesome. I think it's going to save people a bunch of time. It's going to make people's lives much better. So, yeah, I think tech's doing really great overall right now.

Tyler (145:26)

Why do you think there's so much darkness on the timeline? John and I were talking this morning. It feels like more infighting than ever.

John (145:35)

It feels like it ebbs and flows. But right now, yeah, it feels like there's a lot of infighting right now.

Growing Daniel (145:40)

Infighting?

Casey Hanmer (145:40)

Like what?

John (145:41)

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

Growing Daniel (146:26)

I don't feel that. The only thing that I feel is weird lately and it's in San Francisco and in tech, is that it? We attracted a lot of, like, kind of grifty, signally people. And there's like, people messaging me about how to like, you know, establish their image in San Francisco and stuff. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you doing? Like, literally, like, if you like building things, then come find some guys or whatever. So come find some people that like building and talk to them and. And if you vibe, then you can work on something, right? Like, I don't know, it's how it always was. And so there's a lot of people that are like, now moving in and trying to like, you know, get their headshots done. Like, they're moving to la and you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that, man.

John (147:10)

Yeah, yeah, I'm picking up.

Tyler (147:13)

I think it won't be the top until you have founders doing pitching at demo day and Chrome Hearts and Rick Owens and that happens. It's over. So sell everything.

Growing Daniel (147:24)

I hope the top comes before the end.

John (147:27)

What is the correct way to launch a new startup today?

Tyler (147:33)

Is it a 90 second vibrio?

John (147:36)

I feel like a lot of stuff's played out, but is there anything that you think is actually the correct way to do it?

Growing Daniel (147:43)

I think first you should have a Twitter account with 175,000 followers.

John (147:49)

Yeah. Step up. For sure.

Growing Daniel (147:51)

No blocks until you do that.

John (147:53)

Yeah. Post constantly.

Growing Daniel (147:56)

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

John (148:19)

Yeah, I like that. I like that. Just. Just the advice is like avoid the templates basically.

Tyler (148:23)

Do you get any inbound. Do you get any inbound customer interest? Like do any. Any. Any. Anybody ever put it together?

John (148:31)

Least monetized account with 175000 followers.

Growing Daniel (148:36)

I got one.

John (148:38)

One customer.

Growing Daniel (148:39)

Shocking to me.

John (148:40)

Let's ring the gongs.

Growing Daniel (148:43)

Go.

Tyler (148:45)

Hell yeah.

John (148:47)

Congratulations on your one customer.

Tyler (148:50)

I mean that's probably really.

John (148:52)

It's great.

Growing Daniel (148:53)

It's one more than I thought I would get. I. We won't talk about my industry here, but I definitely work in an industry that is a Twitter industry.

John (149:02)

Yeah.

Growing Daniel (149:03)

And so I never expect. I really should have built dev tools or something. I should have done something. But yeah.

Lawrence (149:10)

Yeah.

Growing Daniel (149:10)

So my Twitter is not really related to my real life at all. But yeah, we did get one out of it.

Tyler (149:18)

I think at some point you could just. All the people asking you for advice on personal branding just say fine, I made a course. It's $10,000.

John (149:30)

The $10,000 course.

Tyler (149:32)

The $10,000 course. It's effectively non dilutive funding for the company.

John (149:37)

Yeah. You can do it as a joke.

Growing Daniel (149:38)

I don't think that would be good. I don't think it would be good for the world.

Tyler (149:41)

That's true.

Growing Daniel (149:42)

Actually make it good. And I feel like I'm just ripping people off.

John (149:45)

Moral discernment strikes again.

Growing Daniel (149:48)

I am the most in the least probably except no I accept Rune the least they're monetized person on Twitter. I see people at 20,000 so inspiring brother. Get out there. I will say we have an announcement from my real life. The council has met and we've decided we are hiring an engineer.

John (150:16)

Congratulations.

Growing Daniel (150:17)

So DM Growing underscore Go on X the it's the everything app and forget which. Which app X is. Yes go and find. Find Growing Underscore Daniel and you can send him your LinkedIn or your. Your resume if you want to live in San Francisco and you can pass an FBI background check. Both those things have to happen and you are a good engineer. Then you can come work with growing Daniel every.

Tyler (150:48)

Every.

Tyler (standing desk) (150:50)

Qualified.

John (150:51)

It is never. You are the most doxable person in the world.

Tyler (standing desk) (150:56)

No.

John (150:56)

Thank you for taking the time to come on now.

Tyler (150:58)

We will. We protect.

John (150:59)

We will protect. We protected on. We protected on.

Growing Daniel (151:02)

Thank you guys. Very exciting so much.

Tyler (151:04)

Very exciting role. I'm Going to, I'm going to message some people say, hey, go, go, go. Join the Moral discernment company of San Francisco.

John (151:12)

I respect it on so much. Like, I don't even save like full names in my phone or anything. The first time, the first time growing. Daniel sends me his email for some reason and it's just his full name in his email. It just first name, middle name, last name. Like, dude, you should.

Growing Daniel (151:28)

If I could do it again.

John (151:29)

If I could do it again.

Growing Daniel (151:32)

Thank you so much for having me.

Tyler (151:33)

It's great to see you. Love watching you build and have fun on the Internet.

John (151:41)

You know how to do it.

Tyler (151:42)

We both come a long way. I think we met up at, had a very LA meeting many years ago. Got together at Erewhon.

John (151:49)

There you go.

Tyler (151:50)

I don't remember what we got, but it's been fun to watch you build and entertain us all.

John (151:58)

Fantastic.

Growing Daniel (151:59)

See you guys.

John (152:00)

See you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about some honest B2B software. Adeo Customer Relationship Magic Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have JD Ross from with coverage in the Reese treatment.

Tyler (152:16)

Co founder of Opendoor.

John (152:16)

Co founder of Opendoor.

Tyler (152:18)

Hardly been in the days at all.

John (152:19)

It's open Door week here. How you doing, jd? Good to see you.

JD Ross (152:23)

Doing great, guys.

Tyler (152:23)

What's happening?

JD Ross (152:24)

Oh, wow. I love the effect.

John (152:26)

Sometimes it's, it's a little bit of a jump scare. Getting you into the ultra dome from the Restream waiting room. You can see you're on display here. You got some news for us. What's, what's up? I'd love to ring the gonk first. Why don't you introduce yourself? Why don't you give us a little bit of background?

Growing Daniel (152:39)

He says he likes one.

Tyler (152:40)

Sound effects.

John (152:41)

I see that sound effect. You got an American. You got the bald eagle. Let's hit the bald eagle. Eagle. Let's have bald eagle.

Casey Hanmer (152:47)

I'm in Texas.

Tyler (152:48)

He's in Texas.

John (152:49)

There we go. How you doing? What are you working on these days?

JD Ross (152:53)

Yeah, I mean, I'm working on honest B2B software. I'm working on extremely honest software.

John (152:59)

Fantastic.

JD Ross (152:59)

I, I think, you know, you had Kaz on yesterday, by the way, talking about the importance of having like a leader, the right leader in a business. You know, he's, he's really amazing. That is a hard business business. I think we like, we had a core value called we eat basis points for breakfast. And like a basis point is a 100th of a percent. And so you were like, fighting for each edge of a percent to cut off the cost to make the business good. Back in the day. He's obviously a better operator than I am. So I'm working in the opposite business now. It's an insurance business where you have like 99% retention and 99% gross margins.

Casey Hanmer (153:38)

Wow.

JD Ross (153:39)

Because I'm lazy and I don't want to fight anymore. And it's all the coverage. And basically the background was a couple years ago, I was talking to my buddy Max, who's my co founder, and I was like, look, in every company I've started or been in, we've had great legal counsel. I've liked my tax counsel, my insurance guy, and everyone else I know is insurance guy is kind of an idiot. They don't really know what we do. They don't really know what we is for our business. Yeah. And so we're like, we could probably do this better. Let's just mess around for a bit and see what we can make happen. And it's now, two years later, we have well over 500 clients, 10 million revenue. Profitable the whole way.

John (154:22)

There we go. That's great. What?

Tyler (154:26)

Profitability. Not something you see. We're going to hit the gong for profitability real quick. Before we dive more into coverage, I wanted to ask you about Opendoor's new feature. Kaz was talking about introducing returns to home buying. I think you could make the case that it would just increase overall sales velocity if people knew, like, hey, I can buy this and if I don't like it, I can return it. But when you talk about eating basis points for breakfast, like, you know, returns end up being like a huge, like, line item or expense for a lot of companies that sell physical goods. But what's your take?

JD Ross (155:14)

My view is you always want to have the right incentives in a business. And returns is a good incentive in a business. Like, if you know that you can be returned, you are going to keep your quality bar high. You're going to make sure that you are selling with integrity, that there's a true value in the product. And if you can't return it, you can sell it. You're going to sell as cheap as you possibly can.

John (155:34)

This is lemon law. Lemon law in cars, right? It's like, yeah, you. You don't want to sell lemons because you. You will be forced to buy the car back if there is a problem with it.

JD Ross (155:43)

Exactly.

Casey Hanmer (155:44)

Yeah.

JD Ross (155:44)

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

Casey Hanmer (156:09)

And so you want to be able.

JD Ross (156:10)

To have that confidence point. And if you're like, hey, this is going to affect the bottom line. Well, only if we're selling bad product. Sell the right product.

John (156:16)

I had a friend who bought a house who gets into it, and, like, a year in discovers that, like, it has a bad foundation. And I was like, that sounds like a catastrophic loss of that house. Not the part of the house you.

JD Ross (156:29)

Want to have a bad issue.

John (156:30)

Exactly. It's like if the chimney on the top protects the.

Tyler (156:33)

Okay, just pick up the whole house. We'll fix the foundation.

John (156:36)

Fixing the roof feels way easier than the foundation.

JD Ross (156:39)

Yeah, just get under there.

John (156:41)

Yeah. So what are your clients actually looking for on the insurance side? I mean, we have a variety of insurances here. Is it all one deal? Like, does it get crazier as the. As the companies get bigger and bigger and bigger?

Casey Hanmer (156:56)

How?

Tyler (156:57)

We had an experience getting insurance for tvpn.

John (157:01)

Yeah.

Tyler (157:02)

That I couldn't tell you how many times they would come back for a new signature. And I was like, I've signed. I've signed for this insurance, like, six times now. It's like, oh, there's another doc you missed. You didn't. You didn't do this one doc. And I'm like, oh, well, didn't know this doc was coming in one doc.

John (157:18)

Put all the docs in one dock.

Tyler (157:19)

You didn't know about this doc. Or the last one. Or the last one. Or the last one I got to keep signing. So.

John (157:26)

Yeah.

JD Ross (157:26)

So I think the way. First of all, the hardest part of our business by far is just getting the first call because it's a thing no one wants to care about. Unless you're talking about our insurance clients in construction, where it's a huge deal for them. Most clients, it's just like, just get the first call once we have that, that they're like, oh, wait, this is much, much better. It's like ramp before versus any expense management system you had in the past. No one was thinking about changing out the expense management system. But then once you have a much better risk management system in our case. Now your entire life as sort of a CFO or you know, GC gets a lot easier because this whole thing that you know is very important and are very afraid of but don't understand is taken care of. And so our view is we replace the traditional broker with a tech platform. We pair them with an industry expert who's basically your fractional risk manager. And instead of commissions, we try to align the incentives with a fee so that our job is to save them money instead of making them spend more money year over year. And those three things, the platform, the plan and the team driving savings has generally worked really well. And the types of insurance depends on who we're talking to. Right. Like for a restaurant and we're a manufacturing company or like a next generation defense manufacturer. It's workers compensation. Typically there's contractual risk. You're talking about fintech. It's like cyber insurance and errors and omissions and things like that for tech companies usually DNO and then benefits. And so our job is just like build a point solution. At each stage of this software has gotten so much easier to build than years ago. Right. AI makes it so you can just, you can launch new features. Is when you have the right foundation. It's not cracked and you don't have to return it a few years later. When you have the right foundation as a business, you can build these things much easier now than you could in the past. And our clients really like they get a lot of value from that.

Casey Hanmer (159:19)

Yeah.

Tyler (159:21)

Have you thought about buying existing insurance agencies? I heard at least one company that portfolio company of a fund M&LP in.

John (159:33)

It'S just a hot trend right now with the AI thing is like you pull forward by rolling legacy thing.

Tyler (159:39)

JD It'd be great if you could figure out a way for us to give you another $50 million. I do not like how profitable you are. This is a big problem for us.

Growing Daniel (159:47)

Yeah.

JD Ross (159:48)

Literally. I think that's part of it. I think people are chasing opportunities with dollars before understanding the opportunities.

John (159:53)

Sure.

JD Ross (159:54)

Look, insurance is a very like acquisitive space these brokerages because it's been the only way to grow. I think we might be the only one I know of who's doing purely organic growth where you're saying hey, you know that guy you golf with every weekend, Forget him, come on over to us and having that work. And I think it's because the whole industry is broken. Like everyone kind of feels fleeced by their guy. But no one in that space actually wants to innovate because it's the most one, it's the most boring industry on earth. Like no one wants to talk about this or think about it. Even if it's your job, you generally don't want to think about it. And now with AI it's finally like right for disruption on a platform side. But if you're acquiring brokerages, you have to convince this 50 year old golfer, whatever to change their operations. Like no way.

Tyler (160:40)

I noticed you don't have the word AI agents anywhere on your website. Is that intentional?

JD Ross (160:47)

I even had a website until like a month ago.

Tyler (160:50)

Yeah, no, but it feel, but it feels intentional where they're like other people building this business would say would have, would be selling this as like we're building AI agents for finding and insurance and risk management. But it feels like businesses don't really care. They're not used to using agents that are awesome yet. And so that's not really a selling point. I'm curious how you think about how software is evolving and how you think about integrating AI for the user as well as kind of back office and actually to deliver value.

JD Ross (161:24)

Definitely. I think right now the storyline for AI on the foundation model side is really obvious. Right. It's just increasing general capabilities and I think the AI software pure kind of play where you're just saying hey, we're selling AI into businesses to make them more efficient isn't working as well as people want. In certain areas it's really going gangbusters like engineering software engineering others and content generation, things like that and others. It's just not performing as well. Our view is that it's much easier to build an AI native business than it is to build the software and sell it into people who don't know how to even adopt this stuff yet. Over time I think maybe it'll get easier as the, the entry points make sense in each of these businesses. But it's very experimental right now and so we're very, very focused on from the ground up how do we build a business where it works from an AI native way where our clients can just say okay, I'm buying something I already understand. And behind the scenes. Yeah. When you request a certificate of insurance, an AI agent does that.

Lawrence (162:29)

Right.

JD Ross (162:30)

It reads through this 200 page PDF and says are you qualified to get this data or not? Okay, great, we're going to email your insurance carrier, blah blah, blah, and it comes back and works to the customer. It's just magic. They just get what they want. They don't need to know how. Like it's like explaining. You don't want to know where the sausage meat comes from. You just want to get your sausage.

John (162:49)

Last question. Do you have any mattress companies that you're working with?

JD Ross (162:54)

We work with this incredible business called eight Sleep.

John (162:57)

Let's go. That's my next ad read. Thank you so much for coming. Going on the show, I'm gonna transform.

Tyler (163:02)

Amazing setup.

Growing Daniel (163:03)

Well, you're.

Tyler (163:03)

You're our new insurance correspondent, so anytime there's some hard hitting insurance news, just a risk guy.

JD Ross (163:13)

Whenever something's going wrong, just call me in.

John (163:15)

Yeah.

Tyler (163:17)

If something. I mean, careful what you wish for.

John (163:19)

I mean the big, the big question actually is, is, is the like the how how, like who is it? Deutsche bank is like, like creating insurance products around the AI data center leases to try and hedge the risk there. That's a fascinating story, but we'll have to jump into it another time because we're. We're running late. But thank you so much for coming.

Tyler (163:38)

Great to finally have you on and come back on anytime.

John (163:40)

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good night. How did you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 76.

Tyler (163:45)

I still am away from my eight.

John (163:47)

Oh, yes, yes.

Tyler (163:48)

I gotta move it over.

John (163:49)

Well, I'm fighting against myself. Then let's get to Tyler's cam. Just check in with Tyler. Oh, what.

Casey Hanmer (163:55)

What.

John (163:55)

What happened to your.

JD Ross (163:56)

Oh.

John (163:56)

Oh.

Lawrence (163:57)

Oh.

John (163:57)

What happened to your. Oh, you can't.

Tyler (163:59)

Where's your desk?

Growing Daniel (164:00)

Where's your desk?

JD Ross (164:01)

He.

John (164:02)

He, he backed down. He backed down. You can see that the microphone is moving upwards because he lost the strength to stand at his standing desk and put his standing desk down.

Tyler (standing desk) (164:14)

I didn't lose the strength.

John (164:15)

You lost the strength.

Tyler (standing desk) (164:16)

I like to move around Back down from the cause sometimes I like to sit down.

John (164:18)

Oh, yeah, okay. Well, you can sit down though. No problem. No problem. Our next guest is Josie Zayner who is building a literal unicorn using DNA editing to. I will be right back to modify horses. Is this correct? I mean, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you.

Growing Daniel (164:39)

Hey, what's up, John?

John (164:40)

How's it going? Yeah, I mean, we're gene editing animals. I think animals are kind of like the software of reality. Fantastic. Software of reality. What a turn of phrase. I love it. What does this actually mean? I know. Especially nowadays with all these people. Sorry, there's a little bit of a delay.

JD Ross (165:03)

No, it's theoretical.

John (165:05)

Here's the thing.

JD Ross (165:06)

Yeah, I know. Where am I?

John (165:10)

I'm in my lab in Austin. Texas.

Casey Hanmer (165:12)

Oh, fun doing.

JD Ross (165:15)

Is the delay still there? Can we go?

John (165:17)

Yes, it is. Why don't you give me an introduction on the company kind of where you are and I'd love to know what your actual timeline is for building this actual literal unicorn going through. Yeah. So the company I run is called.

JD Ross (165:37)

Embryo Core and we're working on gene.

John (165:40)

Editing animals and I'm kind of just like I'm tired of people investing in.

JD Ross (165:45)

AI note taking apps and I look at universities and how science isn't going forward. So I'm like, fuck it, I'm going.

John (165:54)

To build a startup company that people actually care about and like and I'm going to build science that I can.

JD Ross (166:01)

Invest my blood, sweat and tears in.

John (166:04)

And to me that's gene editing the future of life, you know. Amazing. I think we have some. Is there anything we can do about the delay or should we come back to this? I think we might need to have you back on the show another time. The delay is just a little crazy right now, but I'm glad we got to check in a little bit and talk about the story somewhat. I'm sorry we couldn't get it figured out somehow. We can edit Animals DNA and yet we. You can't get the WI fi to work. It happens. But the chat is loving you and they're very excited about this. But I'm sorry that we ran into technical difficulties but we will check in with you soon. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest after I tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Scott Shapiro from Coinbase. Let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room into the TPP ultradom. Scott, how are you doing?

Scott Shapiro (167:08)

Great. How are you guys?

John (167:09)

We are doing fantastic. A little recovering from some technical difficulties, but hopefully there haven't been any technical difficulties in your life recently. Give us the update. What is the latest news in your world?

Scott Shapiro (167:23)

Probably our token sales announcement from yesterday morning.

John (167:29)

I think that was in the Wall Street. Correct. Can you give me. Can you give me the full story?

Tyler (167:32)

Guys got in the journal the sacred text?

John (167:35)

I think so. Coinbase launches site for soak for token sales Blockchain startup Monad will be the first to sell its digital coin on the new platform. Coinbase Global is launching a new platform to allow individual investors to purchase digital tokens before they are listed on its exchange you tell me me, is this fake news or is this the truth?

Scott Shapiro (167:55)

That is probably the realest news in the whole journal yesterday for the first time bringing token sales to the full US retail community since 2018.

John (168:03)

That's fantastic.

Tyler (168:04)

Okay, so yeah, break down the different levels because I know you guys just acquired Ekko, that serves a different use case. But what, what are the different types of offerings?

Scott Shapiro (168:15)

Yeah, you know, we're trying to go full life cycle when we think about asset issuers.

Growing Daniel (168:19)

Right.

Scott Shapiro (168:19)

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

Casey Hanmer (168:48)

Awesome.

Tyler (168:48)

So. So this new product you could compare to certain, you know, companies like Robinhood and Public will take an allocation in different IPOs and give an allocation to everyday investors, people that are non investment banks or sort of established investment firms. Is that like a good comp?

Scott Shapiro (169:09)

It's a fair comp. I'd say the two biggest differences, these are not IPOs, these are token sales. These are purely crypto, no stock exchange.

Tyler (169:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Shapiro (169:18)

Second difference is it is only distributed to retail investors on Coinbase. So there's not a little IPO allocation for retail and then a big allocation for institutions. This is 100% just focused on a sale to the retail community. And then post sale, the real float that comes will be from these folks who bought tokens on Coinbase in that primary sale.

Tyler (169:41)

That makes sense. Why was now the right time to bring something like this to market? I know. I mean if you look back through the history of crypto, there was an era where these kind of offerings to retail were much more popular. And then there was a lot of problems and regulatory gray area from that time that is starting. I feel like to be a bit more clarified, but maybe you could talk about the time.

Scott Shapiro (170:08)

Yeah, there's a couple of things here. One is just our ambitions have gotten much broader in terms of becoming what we call the everything exchange. So being able to offer every asset class at every stage of its development. And what I focus on is really making that tailor made for the retail community all around the world. Second thing is the regulatory environment is much better. And so where a company like Coinbase was being not, not so favorably looked upon by the SEC a couple of years ago. That regulatory environment has improved to the degree where we feel much more comfortable offering this type of product not just to the US community but in dozens of other countries around the world. And that's a really new thing for crypto.

Tyler (170:48)

Yeah, it makes sense. What do you expect the volume of offerings to look like? Monad is going to be the first. Is this something that's happening on a weekly basis, monthly basis? What are the plans there? What can you share there?

Scott Shapiro (171:04)

Probably more like monthly than weekly. We're really not trying to maximize volume is definitely a quality over quantity play. So it really depends on the types of issuers and the depth of those teams involvement and really their willingness to do this in a way like the Monad team has agreed to where they're not just going to turn around and sell all of the insider allocations right away, but they're looking to develop long term incentives and hold themselves to a standard of, of longer term lockups and longer term vesting schedules that really puts control in the hands of the retail investors. And you know, you look at the past, a lot of these token sales on backwater types of markets have not done that. And so we think that if issuers are willing to do that, we'll engage with them.

Tyler (171:48)

How does, how does pricing work? Is it, is it a function of supply and demand or is an issuer, you know setting evaluation and a specific allocation amount? Like what can you say around that front?

Scott Shapiro (172:02)

It's exactly the latter we described. So the issuer sets the token price, they set the allocation to what goes into this primary sale. We make sure that it's a team of high quality and that they're willing to be transparent about their unlocks investing schedules and that they're really committed for the long term. And then it's really up to the retail audience. They can invest as little as $100 or six figures paid in USDC of course stablecoins to be involved in the sale.

John (172:35)

If I'm doing, if I'm starting to sell tokens through this process. Are there like ad units around this? Like when we go to an IPO in New York we'll often see taxicabs will be wrapped with. We were at the Klarna IP for example, there were pink taxi cabs everywhere at Figma. They really went all out. There was a DJ outside, there was a lot of celebration. Big massive canvas that gets hoisted and there's a lot of attention that comes to it. And the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ too, to some extent. Sort of offer effectively marketing packages to celebrate the moment. Is that something that you'll have an analogy to in the digital realm at some point?

Scott Shapiro (173:21)

I love that idea. I worked in ads for a decade in Silicon Valley before coming to Coinbase.

Tyler (173:26)

Follow my crypto passions.

John (173:27)

Thank you. Honestly powers the modern American economy. Yeah.

Scott Shapiro (173:33)

Sheryl Sandberg used to say it's the Lord's work.

John (173:35)

Is the Lord's work back in Facebook.

Scott Shapiro (173:38)

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

John (173:59)

I think that'd be fun.

Tyler (174:00)

What has any details released on. On pricing?

Scott Shapiro (174:06)

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

John (174:34)

Fascinating.

Tyler (174:34)

That makes sense. Well, very interesting new product and I'm sure, hopefully we can get the Monad team on as we get closer to them to learn about the protocol and what they're working on.

John (174:47)

Yeah, that'd be awesome. Thank you so much.

Scott Shapiro (174:49)

Thank you guys.

John (174:50)

Have a great rest of your day.

Tyler (174:51)

Thanks, Scott. Cheers.

John (174:53)

You know, if you do want to take out an ad, you got to go to adquick.com.

Tyler (174:57)

That'S right.

John (174:58)

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable a efficient, seamless ad buying across.

Tyler (175:07)

We're cooking on some new billboards.

John (175:08)

We're cooking.

Tyler (175:09)

We're cooking. We've heard your complaints. Not enough TVPN billboards. Haven't seen one in a while.

John (175:14)

The funny thing is we actually have been getting that complaint. Very silly. We have Lawrence Allen from Terranova in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra.

Lawrence (175:23)

Done.

Tyler (175:23)

Lawrence, look at that. Look at that flag. Look at the Suit.

John (175:27)

The flag. The suit.

Casey Hanmer (175:28)

Wow.

John (175:28)

Royal flush.

Lawrence (175:29)

Isaiah looks so dapper yesterday, I figured I had to put a suit on.

John (175:32)

You look fantastic. Give us the news. And then I want to go into.

Tyler (175:35)

What, the floor to ceiling flag?

John (175:38)

Yeah, this is, it's amazing. This is a great time.

Lawrence (175:40)

Some of these flags are just too small, you know, it's like hard to even tell if they're. They're real or not.

John (175:45)

I'll let you in on a secret. If you want to win the game for the biggest flag, you got to put it outside. Go on the roof. Everyone's putting the flag inside the factory. If you hang the flag outside the factory, also the world's biggest flag, they bring it out at like the halftime of the Super Bowl. Every once in a while there's one of them. It's like the huge. And you can get it for like 500k only.

Tyler (176:08)

500K?

John (176:08)

It's not that much. Right. If you, if you got 7 million.

Tyler (176:11)

I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of flag.

John (176:13)

It's a lot of money with a lot of flag. Anyway, sorry.

Tyler (176:16)

It's great to have you. Great to have you on the show.

Lawrence (176:18)

Weirdest office ever. And the outside of the part that's my bedroom is painted rainbow. So I was thinking we'd just, just repaint it. American flag.

John (176:25)

Okay, There you go. Sleeping in the office too.

Lawrence (176:29)

Absolutely. You know, I think it's becoming the standard.

Tyler (176:33)

You're Gundo.

Growing Daniel (176:35)

We are not.

Lawrence (176:35)

We're in Berkeley.

John (176:36)

Berkeley, cool.

Lawrence (176:37)

The flag would be a little smaller in Gundo because the price is like 320 a square foot there.

John (176:42)

Oh, yeah, Great.

Tyler (176:44)

Bringing American dynamism to Berkeley.

John (176:47)

Going on the offensive behind enemy lines.

Tyler (176:50)

Anyways, great to have you on the show. Congratulations on the launch yesterday breakdown. Maybe give some background on yourself and then let's talk about the company.

John (176:58)

Yeah, sure.

Lawrence (176:59)

Yeah. I'm a recent Berkeley grad. Dropped out of Stanford grad school. I worked at SpaceX before and I am CEO of TerraNova. So we just launched out of stealth. We probably had the longest stealth mode you've seen and we. How long?

Tyler (177:16)

How long?

John (177:17)

There are companies that have been stealth.

Tyler (177:18)

For like a decade longer than you've been alive.

Lawrence (177:21)

Maybe not the longest you've seen.

John (177:22)

I mean, humane, humane, humane. No, but how long stealth for like seven years.

Tyler (177:26)

Yeah. How long?

Lawrence (177:28)

I've been working on this since I was at SpaceX, which is like late 2021, so I was in school until under a year ago at Berkeley.

John (177:35)

I stand corrected. Serious stealth Mode.

Tyler (177:37)

Serious stealth mode.

John (177:38)

Serious stealth mode.

Lawrence (177:39)

But you're out, so we're officially out. Proud to announce our $7 million seed round led by Congruent.

Tyler (177:49)

Great hit.

Tyler (standing desk) (177:49)

Thank you.

Tyler (177:50)

Great hit.

John (177:51)

Congratulations. I was excited for that one.

Lawrence (177:53)

And Outlander as well.

Tyler (standing desk) (177:55)

Awesome.

Growing Daniel (177:56)

What.

Lawrence (177:58)

Funded Valor and also Ponderosa and Gothams.

Tyler (178:03)

Very, very cool. So what are you working on?

Lawrence (178:07)

Yeah, we're building terraforming robots. So usually when you hear about terraforming, it's some in the sky stuff like what Augustus is working on at Rainmaker here. We're talking about very physical on Earth terraforming, where we are lifting land physically out of flood zones. I think this launch video captures it very well. But we're basically injecting really, really large amounts of material underground to just directly lift land. So this would be really useful for you if you are currently in a coastal area. I think lots of places all over la, even parts of Gundo, have this issue where you were just too low. Long beach was called the sinking city for years. And the reason is because it just sunk about 10 or 20ft due to subsidence. And from that subsidence you have flooding. So it's not just sea level rise. It's usually petroleum extraction or groundwater extraction or being built on fill. So cities all over the world are facing this issue and there's just really not much you can do about it. It you already have the infrastructure in place, what do you do? You know, there's no way to lift that infrastructure up. You can't put it on some little stilts. Like you can do a small, you know, single story house. You can put a giant seawall in. Usually you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars for things like that. Sometimes Levy systems will work, but usually what's happening now is they're just demolishing the infrastructure, putting a ton of filter on it, waiting, you know, a year, year and a half for it to compact and moving around dirt on the surface to make that happen. And then they're rebuilding that infrastructure. And so, you know, maybe that's fine if you have, you know, some inexpensive property, but we're talking highways. These are, you know, $8 billion projects for Highway 37, which is, you know, a few miles north of here. You're talking about mass displacements when you're doing this to whole cities. I'm from San Rafael. We are facing this problem. San Rafael has about 60,000 people and they're facing a 500 to 900 million dollars bill for the seawall system that they need. There's just no way they can afford that. And so we took a super first principles approach. How could we save our hometown? And this is what we came up with.

Tyler (180:11)

So you're injecting dirt and rock into the ground in order to effectively move like an area or a facility or a town higher. How much, how much dirt, how much mass do you need to do that effectively?

Lawrence (180:32)

Yeah, you wouldn't believe it but dirt is actually way more expensive than what we're using. We're using wood. So wood chips are free delivered in whatever category you want. You can get this anywhere in the world. It's abundant. It's usually free delivered because it's such a large waste product. And so we're taking this wood chip slurry, pumping it directly underground. It compacts in about two hours to pretty much the full consolidation. And then you were just three feet higher or whatever you wanted to be. At the end of the day.

Casey Hanmer (181:04)

It'S.

Tyler (181:05)

Hard to wrap my head around how much wood chips you need to raise a city in height.

Lawrence (181:11)

Our shipping container sized to process 20 semi truckloads of wood a day. So you're basically moving 20 semi truckloads of wood chips through our system. We have a bunch of robots that run around the site that it deliver that final fluid underground and then that processing unit that we call our arc. So the Prometheus system, that's the robot, we call it that because it's bringing something fundamentally new to the world, is delivering that final injection pressure and you're basically just moving as much material as possible underground. Because really what you need is volume, not mass or something like you'd expect.

Tyler (181:49)

These wood chips, what, what is the primary source? This is a waste product. When people are getting trees removed from properties, manufacturing processes, where, where does it actually come from?

Lawrence (182:02)

Lots of sources. You know, if we are going to do the San Rafael project, for example, there's a place called Marin Sanitary right across the street from the place that floods the most. They ship eight semi truckloads a day of wood chips to be burnt in biomass energy plants which are subsidized by the state because they're non economic and they would way prefer to instead of, you know, polluting the air up in Stockton to just pump that right underground so you can get it locally. You can also get it from sawmills, you can get it from fire trimmings all over the state. Obviously we have huge fire issues here in California and so they're doing massive clearing of forest and then they really just don't have anything to do with that wood.

Tyler (182:39)

Okay, so goal is to save San Rafael or save them from this massive infrastructure bill. How do you start small and prove that the company can execute on this type of operation? Are there specific sites that are much smaller scale where you can kind of start proving out the thesis?

Lawrence (183:03)

Yeah. So I just got this text from our team. They are all at our pilot site right now doing some drilling, doing some pumping. You can see we use like auger drill bits and, you know, big injection machines to do our pumping and have our shipping containers. So we are deployed. This works. We've been doing this for about a year and we are looking for more commercial projects to do right now.

Tyler (183:27)

So what site, what site are they on specifically? Is that like a testing ground?

Lawrence (183:31)

They're undisclosed site near Sacramento that is primarily a testing ground, but they also have huge drainage and subsidence issues that we are fixing.

John (183:40)

Huh. Fascinating.

Tyler (183:41)

Wild. So what's like the dream customer right now?

Lawrence (183:47)

Yeah, we would love to do, strangely, some wetland restoration projects and also some new home development projects. So things that don't already have a lot of infrastructure in place are very ideal. We've seen a customer willingness to pay slightly higher there because their risk appetite is a little more. Because there's not much to go wrong. We feel ready to do some roadway projects as well.

John (184:08)

Sorry, break that first one down. It's basically like, I have a bunch of land that's undeveloped. I'm thinking about putting a bunch of houses on it. But there's a problem because there's like a marsh in the middle of it and you can kind of get rid of the marsh. Is that roughly correct?

Lawrence (184:23)

Not quite. So in the bay, it's usually you've diked or levied off an area and then because it's organic, it's subsided. So there's an example. It's an 80 acre parcel right on the water in Centerfell near the target. This has subsided 2 meters. And so because of that, if you were to break the dike, it'd be under sea level, of course.

John (184:44)

Okay.

Lawrence (184:45)

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

John (185:10)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Tyler (185:12)

How long until you have. You're getting death threats from conspiracy theorists.

Tyler (standing desk) (185:19)

Yeah.

John (185:20)

Modifying the world. Easy.

Tyler (185:22)

Yeah, people, people. You know, obviously Augustus has been on the show.

John (185:25)

You get blamed for earthquakes, that's what's going to happen. Like there's going to be an earthquake.

Lawrence (185:28)

We actually think we're going to help with earthquakes as well. We haven't been publicly claiming this because we're still doing testing, but this dramatically better. This underground looks very much like particle board. It doesn't look like wood chips. It's compact. And so this is better than normal Earth. This is very controllable. It's very physical.

John (185:46)

Get ready to go on infowars, buddy. Because. Because no matter what the science says, you are going to get blamed for earthquakes because people are just gonna be like, they were doing something and then the earthquake happened.

Tyler (185:59)

Yeah. Well, you have Augustus as a model. Augustus was in the hot seat, but.

John (186:05)

He'S done a great job. And I think there is a path for communicating with all constituents, not just tech, not just Twitter. Augustus has done a great job getting to AM radio listeners and random shows that do not break through in tech, Twitter. He's done a great job there. But yeah, communication across all the constituents has to be really important for this business.

Lawrence (186:27)

I think it's important to say this is not like a blue state solution. This is very much red and blue. We this all over Florida. Of course, Miami faces some of the worst flooding issues. And this is also not just a US problem. This is something that's happening all over the world. Southeast Asia is particularly bad. You've had ministers from Indonesia, from Cambodia come here. They're saying, like, I'm moving my entire capital city of Jakarta. Help me. This is very much going to be the fundamental way that you solve large scale flooding problems. And so I hope the conspiracy theorists don't come for us. We definitely are willing to show them what's happening. This kind of looks like a black box underground, but actually we have systems where we can measure this to like a 2 millimeter level precision. And so you can have a very good idea of exactly what's happening.

John (187:14)

That's amazing.

Tyler (187:15)

One more question, just because I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale. How many truckloads or shipping containers worth of wood chips would you need to, let's say, raise a square mile, like call it 5ft?

Lawrence (187:35)

I will do that math for you right now.

Casey Hanmer (187:36)

Now.

Lawrence (187:37)

So let's do acre to square mile. So basically you need 20 truckloads per acre foot. Which is actually much better than fill because with fill you're an acre.

Tyler (187:51)

An acre foot is an entire one foot. Like picture an acre and then one foot.

John (187:56)

Okay, so one foot deep, acre wide, long.

Tyler (187:59)

Yeah, yeah.

Lawrence (188:01)

So you want.

Tyler (188:06)

We're doing math on tvp.

John (188:08)

Well, while he's doing the math, let me tell you about wander. Find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade menus, dreaming beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge services. Vacation home, but better. And maybe in the future your wander will be on terraformed property. We might be increasing the number of vacation homes.

Lawrence (188:26)

Absolutely. So a square mile lifted by five feet is a lot. Of course you know that this would actually be 64,000 truckloads.

Tyler (188:35)

Let's go.

Lawrence (188:36)

However, as much as it sounds, there.

John (188:38)

Is way, way more than that.

Lawrence (188:41)

Just in California we could absolutely source that much. We looked and it is very straightforward to source 1000 semi truckloads a day in the Bay area. So that would maybe be a two month project if you were really about your logistics and maybe a two year project if you were. You didn't care quite as much.

John (188:56)

Okay, fantastic. Well, we're looking forward to.

Tyler (188:58)

Yeah. Taking something that people want to get rid of and saying we'll take it.

John (189:02)

Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by.

Tyler (189:05)

Yeah, this is fun.

John (189:06)

The chat was mentioning you. How are you guys not talking about this? And we did sort of miss the announcement but we're really happy to have you join and really appreciate.

JD Ross (189:15)

Thank you for having me.

Scott Shapiro (189:15)

John.

Lawrence (189:15)

I've been watching you since you're making YC videos instead of tech startup videos.

John (189:19)

That's amazing. Well, well thanks so much.

Tyler (189:23)

Well, super exciting. Congrats to the whole team.

John (189:25)

Good luck. We'll talk to you soon.

Tyler (189:26)

Talk soon.

John (189:29)

Before we move on, let me tell you about Bezel. GetBezel.com your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

Tyler (189:37)

And in tariff news, yes, Switzerland has been making moves.

John (189:43)

Oh yes. The luxury watch market might be in turmoil again. We might need to call us get.

Tyler (189:48)

Them on the and Switzerland are working on a deal to slash the 39% tariffs and try to get them to 15%. Rolex got Trump a one of one desk watch lock that has been photographed on Trump's desk. That may win him over and yeah, one of one Rolex and win a lot of people over.

John (190:11)

That's pretty cool. Didn't Barack Obama get a Rolex as well? I believe he Got some sort of watch from his Secret Service agent. His Secret Service agent.

Tyler (190:22)

Probably an Omega.

John (190:23)

It might have been an Omega, might have been a Speedmaster, but. But it became the watch that he wore. He wasn't a watch guy then. One of his Secret Service guys was like, you got to wear this watch. And he did.

Tyler (190:32)

Yeah.

John (190:32)

Very cool.

Tyler (190:33)

Did you see this post? Jeff Davies in 2016 a lot of posts from 2016 these days. Jeff Davies in 2016 said Apple should buy Nvidia and lock up VR, AI and autonomous car tech for the next decade. Look back 10 years from now and great use of cash. Apple would be a $10 trillion company basically.

Casey Hanmer (190:58)

Wow.

John (190:59)

Wild looking. Also back this Fireflies is this AI notetaker. Someone was talking trash about AI note takers today on the stream. I don't even remember at this point, but so Sheil Monot says this is wild. It's about a Screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Sam Udotong, who's the co founder and cto@Fireflies AI. This is an AI note taking startup. I think they're doing very well. I think they've raised money recently and they said came across this post on LinkedIn. Turns out the first version of Fireflies AI, the AI meeting assistant doesn't even have AI. It's just founder joining the calls, taking notes manually and sending a summary back. Sounds crazy. And that is exactly what Sam wrote on LinkedIn 10 hours ago when this screenshot was taken. Said we scaled flyerflies to a $1 billion valuation after six failures from our original crypto food idea food delivery idea. It's hilarious.

Tyler (191:59)

If you're working on a crypto food.

John (192:01)

Idea, pivot to AI note, get to a billion dollar valuation. And so he says this is the key segment. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as Fred from Fireflies AI. We'd sit there silently taking detailed notes and send them 10 minutes later. After taking notes for 100 plus meetings and falling asleep in many, we were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750 per month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point where we said let's stop and automate everything. And so this is being put in, this is being put in like a dunk because they're saying like oh, this billion dollar AI note taking company doesn't use AI. It's like yeah, this was in 2015 or 2016. Like I actually, I actually knew Sam at the time and I DMed with him. I was a customer and I was completely Fine with this. Because I was like, this is awesome. I get somebody to take my notes. For me, it's basically like an outsourced note taker, but it's being sort of, like, reframed as, like. As, like, this is how they would do stuff now. And it's like, no, obviously, it's been a decade almost since they did.

Tyler (193:08)

I think if you're a customer and you didn't know, you have the right to be frustrated that you were just inviting a human. And. No.

John (193:17)

Hilariously scrappy. Hilariously scrappy. But yes, they were.

Tyler (193:20)

And as long as they were being transparent with VCs at that time, that, yeah, we're just using a couple guys to do this.

John (193:27)

It's so crazy. Looking back on this conversation with Sam in my DMs, he just says, like, hey, I'm working on. I needed notes from something. Can you send in and transcribe everything? I'd been using Rev, this manual transcription service that would take an audio file and just give you a text file back, but it was done by humans. And so here he says, you can add Fred at Fireflies to the calendar invite, and Fred will join.

Tyler (193:57)

Give it up for Fred.

John (193:58)

Let's give it up for Fred. I was like, hey, just got my first transcript. Pretty solid. He's like, how comparable would you say it is to Rev? I said lots of ums and uhs captured. I know the exact comparison in a day because I sent the recording to Rev earlier. So I was doing, like, AB testing, actually seeing, like, what was. What was useful, what wasn't. It was just funny, like, actually seeing this company grow so much and having been an early adopter and then. And then see, people get the story wrong. So, you know what, if you're using Firefly, of course they're using Whisper. Why would they be using humans still? It makes no sense. The technology is good anyway.

Tyler (194:35)

Tim Sweeney is landmaxing.

John (194:37)

Oh.

Tyler (194:37)

What he did behind Fortnite has bought over 40,000 acres of US wilderness. Not to build, to keep it forever wild.

John (194:44)

Forever wild. I love it. Where else are you in the. In the timeline? Are you deep in there?

Tyler (194:48)

Mr. Beast says 2% of human time is now spent on YouTube.

John (194:53)

Well, thank you to everyone who's been spending.

Casey Hanmer (194:55)

At least.

Tyler (194:56)

We spend way more than. We spend way more than that. Oh, yeah, because we're doing, like, 15, easily. 15. 15 to 20 hours a week.

John (195:02)

Oh, yeah.

Tyler (195:02)

50 weeks a year.

John (195:03)

Yeah.

Tyler (195:04)

And, you know, that's. We're getting. The goal should be to get into the double digits, right? Yeah. For sure, somewhere around. Somewhere around 7 or 8%. Now, Dean Ball had some support for your take yesterday. You said, I don't think you should just throw D cell at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology that's not necessarily decelerationist. Dean Ball says it's heartening to see such eminently reasonable takes making their way into prominent protect new media. There's something very. Well, we're actually neo trad media, to be clear. But he says there's something very old man about the terms of AI policy debates and per. And perhaps this is because it has been largely old people who have set them. When I hear certain arguments about how we need to let the innovators innovate and thus cannot bear the thought of resolving negative externalities from new technology, it just sounds retro to me, like an old man dimly remembering things he believes. Milton Friedman once said, said, whereas anyone with enough neuroplasticity remaining to internalize a concept as alien as AGI can easily see that such simple frames do not work. Ron DeSantis says we might have to see if we get Pelosi to run Florida's pension fund. She's showing this is pretty incredible. Generated $133 million of profits and a 16,930% return.

John (196:29)

I don't believe that number. That's 16,000%. I mean, I guess this is since 1987. She was probably making money and adding to it consistently over that time.

Tyler (196:42)

What if she just invested? Like, she just invested once and then.

John (196:47)

I'm very skeptical of that second number.

Tyler (196:49)

You don't believe she could just 10x it and just 10x that again and.

John (196:52)

Then 10x that again and then 16x that last time? It's possible, but it's like, I don't know, I would just imagine that you're adding to it every year and you can't just like, take the current net worth and divide it by the amount of money that she had when she started investing. Right. Like, what is 133?

Tyler (197:12)

Anyways, that is a good place to end the show. We will be not be getting into the fifth hour today. So sorry to disappoint everyone, but tomorrow we have some fun guests. We have Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot coming on, also a partner over at Sequoia, and then Fei, Fei Li from World Labs. So very excited for all of that. And we hope you have a wonderful Veterans Day at home, wherever you are. And we'll see you tomorrow.

John (197:49)

See you tomorrow. Goodbye.

Tyler (197:50)

Cheers. Thank you.