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now we got a great show for you today uh we have a whole bunch of guests our cash is joining we got his book here he sent me the PDF I printed it out did out of respect out of respect uh but if he doesn't if he doesn't come on the basally manuscript if he bails on us you heard it here first I'm going to Tweet out the link to the PDF piracy's back folks napster's being sold for and I I
it's a threat honestly you could just upload it to chat GP it's easier people can just qu it's a fantastic book I highly recommend going and picking it up stripe press never misses the folks over at stripe are fantastic we have another stripe press author coming on the show we have a bunch of uh incredible thinkers and Founders and investors lined up uh little bit of a AI Focus day a little
bit focus focus on geoengineering today uh Casey hmer and Augusto will be coming in talking about solar and also cloud seating so has been accused of being a part of the deep State he's breaking his silence and he's breaking his silence yes on tvpn uh so we should have some fun with that obviously uh but it is kind of getting to a serious point with his with his
drama where like I think that the the tone needs to shift and hopefully we can be a part of that um but first let's start with um a great post by Delian advocating that Trump should just the video Yeah was just so bad uh and so we're going to go through Trevor Milton is the founder of Nicola a electric vehicle company that zero emissions trucks uh went to prison over a fraud case and we'll break it all down
uh Delian says my God can you be more narcissistic maybe take some responsibility for your fraudulent Behavior yeah it's not a good signal if Trump pardons you but doesn't post about it oh yeah because if he was going to get positive attention from doing it you'd think he would you know even if he knew he was going to get some negative attention but I don't think anybody it's
hard for me to see um you know prison is a sad thing yep but it's hard for me to see uh sort of whatever the argument is uh around freeing Trevor given what seems to be pretty clear cut pretty clearcut totally but let's uh read The Wall Street Journal article on it and get some facts and then we'll make and then we'll give you our take um so Trump pardoned Nicola founder Trevor Milton
Milton was conf convicted of fraud in 2022 for statements about zero emission trucks um uh Milton said in a video posted to social media Thursday that he received a call from Trump who spoke about how much of an injustice this all was done by the same offices that harassed and prosecuted him uh the greatest comeback story in America is about to happen added Milton the White House on Friday
confirmed the pardon had been granted a federal jury in Manhattan convicted Milton in 2022 on one count of Securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud which is kind of always the framework for these uh anything that any anything that goes wrong in business it's all either Securities fraud or wire fraud um because you're making statements that lead to someone buying
or selling a security that are false uh during the trial prosecutors portrayed Milton as a con man who duped investors including in podcasts and on social media about the company's sales and the capabilities of its vehicles in one instance prose said he created a video of what appeared to be a truck driving normally the famous video of the truck going down the hill but really it was an
inoperable prototype rolling down a hill um and that that video always got me because I just feel like such a skill issue there like can't you just build one prototype truck can't you retrofit a truck even if it was a flat Road I mean kids that are like engine swapping Miatas right now and you can't like engine swap a truck and put an electric power train like it doesn't seem that
hard to get something functional the hard part is actually the scaled manufacturing like that's what Tesla is good at and that's why Tesla is so impressive like the first Tesla was impressive too they kind of but even with the first Tesla it was built on the Lotus Elise and they just chopped it up and extended it and stuff it was like it was very much like the criticism was like that's just a Lotus elase with an
electric power train and it was impressive and it's great for all the investors that saw that but it was never misrepresented Elon was never like oh yeah this design like you might might think it looks like a Lotus elisee but really we designed it no he just said like yeah we used the body from a Lotus Elise we paid them they're happy we're happy and that's why the Tesla Roadster
the first one looks like a Lotus lease it's fine and and that's not fraud that's just actually doing the important parts of your business and Outsourcing the ones that aren't important Calder in the chat says put him back in jail and don't let him out until he's built a truck yes this is our thesis yeah yes I want to see I want to see breakthrough biology writing from Elizabeth Holmes
want to I want to see a truly trustless ZK proof Network cacked together by SPF in prison he's moving prisons by the way not a full story but just an interesting fact uh his morning routine now includes getting woken up at 3: a.m. yeah the real by the guards the real uh sort of you know crypto protocol is one that you could build and launch from within jail right it's just pure code you sort of
get it onto one of the library computers and then it's just out in the world I mean SPF was telling that story of like I'm the Jane streak guy I'm this genius I'm this like amazing like you know hacker and it's like okay show us show us build build the chain build build something build the chain write some code uh what's the what's the code Russ that they all use or something I forget
I don't know uh it's a hard programming language like programming for crypto is not easy and so if you could drop some some amazing some amazing code some decentralized Network or something uh he would win a lot of fans back instead of just being like ah I was you know oh it's all talk yeah and here's something campaign Finance records show that Milton and his wife donated more than
1.8 million to a trump fundraising Committee in October wait like from prison I guess you can do anything from prison that's what we've learned going to prison you can do podcasts you can tweet apparently you can make political donations like what can't you do in prison yeah you would think that from within prison there should be some guard rails around sort of uh this type of
thing but yeah oh I mean also uh uh Milton's lawyer is Brad Bondi who's the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi uh and so clearly cozied up to the Trump Administration as uh things got worse for him unclear if he was connected to the Trump Administration before all of this happened um but if you're running a fraud um probably pay us to you know start making some friends in Washington
you know also if you're not running a fraud probably need a lobbying group anyway the is have friends in Washington yeah I guess no matter what yeah um and so uh Milton maintained his innocence and he said he acted in good faith accusing uh prosecutors of cherry-picking his public statements to build their their case and of course there is an argument that this company could have been successful and was just
kind of Faking it to you make it but there's always this question of like when is to fake when are you faking it too much and there's always this like fine line I think I think a a decent amount of Faking is actually acceptable like it's fine to put up a CGI render of what you want to build and just say hey this is my goal it's not here today but it's so it's so different y for it to be
CGI or even a hype video versus a demo totally demos faked demos are wrong but even Google has got in trouble for this is why there there's anytime you see these uh uh hard tech companies that won't be named on X creating what they they sort of blur the line between hype video and demo yep and I believe that that is wrong right totally you got to kind of like draw the line around is
this an advertising for a future state or is this the current state yep and the reason for that is if you're putting something out that you're sort of positioning as a demo but it's not real and then you're using that to raise money that's wrong yeah yeah I do it is interesting like Google had an AI demo where you could just take a use your camera to kind of communicate with
Gemini and use voice and it was a very cool demo but people dug into it and found out that part of it was sped up and so they had done some light editing so it wasn't a completely unedited video and they hadn't disclosed that but they hadn't said that it wasn't edited and so it was it was more just like a bad day in PR world but you could imagine that if the stock had sold off a lot there
could be a Securities fraud case but we'd still be like 25 steps away from the founder CEO in jail uh the Nicola case is like much more you know like just way way more red flags and so um milon is 42 years old he founded Nicola in his basement in 2015 he took a public at in 2020 at a valuation of 3.3 billion he resigned from the company later that year after a short sellers report
alleged he made misrepresentations about the status of the company's vehicles and the production of hydrogen fuel needed to run them so it wasn't even an electric uh vehicle it was it was hydrogen I remember um Nicola whose market value briefly eclipsed that of automaker Ford uh before the fraud case against Milton filed for bankruptcy last month everybody everybody has they they
put uh Ford squarely in their targets right Adcock clearly wanted to raise at a bigger valuation to Ford otherwise why would you price the round you know exactly uh1 million above it or whatever but Ford is Lindy I think I think we're going to be driving Ford GTs in the year 3000 there just not they're not going away it's it's too great of a company Henry loky goated yeah 100% I was about
to say many people said why don't you just attach a motor to the horse you know robotic uh why don't you make robotic horses yeah teleoperated horses he said we have to wait a while till you know robotics can get there but for now we're going to make cars but hopefully the horse makes a come back hopefully you know all this humanoid Buzz with uh with figure and Optimus we know we want the robotic horse first I
want to be Galloping to work the self-driving horse the horses are self-driving you can literally train a horse to hey go home and you can just be kick him on the butt and he'll just take you home yep who needs a whmo yeah who needs a wayo that's right let's let's bring horses back uh Milton had sold roughly $400 million of stock in Nicola wow that's a lot of secondary uh Dlisted his chair it shares
from the nasda back a few days ago two weeks ago Federal prosecutors asked the judge from Milton's criminal case to order him to pay back nearly 661 million to shareholders the SEC sued Milton in federal court in July of 2021 alleging he committed civil Securities fraud that case which was on hold during the criminal proceding proceedings remains active court records show the SEC
declined to comment so this is interesting like he he got 400 million they're going to ask him to pay back 66 61 million but in the meantime he's spending that money and making campaign donations what happens I mean he will just be personally bankrupt right so he can so basically has 400 million that he can just spend and he can just give away and if there's no way to claw back like if he
buys a house and then he goes into bankruptcy they'll force him to sell the house and then the house will go to the shareholders or the or the Mone the proceeds from the house but if he donates it he's out now he's also he's he's he's probably got another 30 years years of his career in hardtech I could easily see him running something back come back you know I mean I'd love to
see it I I we've always maintain that um it's always sad when people go to jail and we always believe in restorative justice and we certainly hope that he gets back on the mechanical horse yeah the video to Dean's point it just makes it feel like you know maybe he doesn't um maybe he doesn't actually feel bad at all yeah you know it's odd odd anyway Trump issued a raft of Pardons since
taking office and has pledge to crack down on what he has described as the weaponization of the justice system Trump was twice indicted by the justice department after his first term and separately convicted of falsifying records in the state court of New York both Federal cases have been dismissed and Trump is appealing the state conviction earlier this week Trump also
pardoned Devon Archer the former Hunter Biden business partner who gave Congressional testimony about their business dealings Milton Archer and Silk Road founder Ross olrick whom Trump also pardoned were all prosecuted by the uh the US attorney's office in Manhattan the justice department has also asked a judge to drop a bribery case against New York city mayor Eric Adams so oddly like
you know a couple of Democrats getting pardoned couple of Republicans getting pardoned a couple of seems like apolitical people who have maybe just you know asked politely getting pardon I think the future if stuff gets really really political will just be your when you get sentenced you're in prison when your is out of the office and then so you get un you get pardoned as soon as
your guy gets into the White House and then you get UNP Parton on day one of the new Administration and you just in and out of four years exactly yeah I think that's the future yeah and you're just donating to your to your team while you're in you know while the person's in prison to try to make sure like your team win otherwise it could be an 8e st shinger prisoner both in and out of the
Clank dark but uh you know a lot of people made money a lot of people lost money on Nicola if you were buying puts probably did pretty well yeah those short sellers report yeah yeah they probably did really well we should actually have them on I wonder do you think it was uh Hindenberg that did it I wonder who did the actual Nicola short seller report um but anyway if you're
interested in going long going short you got to do it on public Investing For Those who take it seriously multi-asset investing industry leading yields they're trusted by millions folks go to public.com sign up the best in the business and there's a new stock that you can trade on public wait before that uh yeah Nicola in 2020 yeah had uh a some coverage from Hindenberg research
not the firm that you want to get coverage from nope how to Parlay an ocean of Lies into a partnership with the largest Auto OEM in America that doesn't sound good um so um anyways sounds a little rough actually hindenburg's kind of retired now yeah um anyways out of the game out of the game but maybe there'll be a new viral short seller that emerges soon I think it's scy yeah he's doing it yeah he's been
doing pretty well yeah he's like he actually realized you don't need to uh do a report you just need you just need a post yeah just post just post but yeah he's been he's been good um anyway new stock coming to the market everyone's talking about cor Wee's IPO and we're going to go through the information report on the winners in the cor weave IPO and why VC's missed out uh we had t
on the show and he had a great quote he said cor weave is the web three to AI pivot done right so it was originally a crypto mining company and now it's an AI data center potentially the best to ever do it the best to ever do it truly truly uh and and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic outcome it looks like it's going to price right around 40 uh up from five cents a share in 2019 not
too bad and so we'll take you through who invested when they invested and how much money they made uh let's kick it off with the information reporting from Corey Weinberg he says cor weave's IPO which started trading today had a rocky path to the market but delivered a windfall to magnetar Capital the investors big bet the the investor bet big on the AI data center startup but
prly protected itself from the risk of big losses and if you want to pull up what cor is doing on public I'd love to know like how is it trading right now because this is the IPO day today's the today is the IPO even boom we got IPO news folks I'm pulling it up right now I'm going to need some soundboard from you I'm going to need some public.com data from you I'm going to need a lot of
Stu crazy I actually realize yeah well there's always this trickle of like the S1 comes out and then there's gossip articles will they go out will they not go out will they scrap it well they went out uh it started trading today it had a rocky path to Market but delivered a windfall to magnetar Capital the investor bet big on the AI data center startup so but they also protected
themselves from Big R risk of big losses it seems like they sold at a certain point uh in the secondary market so magnetar invested when in cor weave when others wouldn't touch it and that helped it get favorable terms that turned 850 million in equity into 4.3 billion folks let's hear it based on the $40 per share IPO price that's a good return uh and they weren't exposed to significant risk
magnetar is the biggest of a handful of winners in the offering which priced Thursday night at a lower price than expected so cor weave has been long been controversial it borrowed billions to build data centers that serve the huge demands of artificial intelligence that debt really scared off silicon Valley's big Venture firms and none of them will be celebrating one of the biggest Tech
listings in recent years a lot of VCS have a blind spot said Nick Carter former guest of the show a venture capitalist focused on crypto startups and he made an early investment personally in cor weave we had him on to talk about that we'll have to reshare that clip today um the the conventional wisdom as a VC is you don't want to invest in capital intensive businesses this is something that we've seen again
and again they're harder to underwrite and they did quite the party round oh yeah uh if you look at some of the friends and family uh there's a Russian poker player an Italian music producer a new york-based plastic surgeon and a Sesame Street voice actor that's exactly what is kind of what you want to optimize for in the early stages you never know one day you might need some as a founder found surgy next
a it's diversity of thought want diversity of around the table Yeah the next day you might say you might be down to your last 100 Grand need to take it to Vegas multiply it got your russer help if you can get him into the country that's helpful you need to make a jingle and yeah the Jingle the Italian music producer uh the big one the big one sing core weave jingle in Italian voice
what's their tagline core weave big Big Data Centers highly leveraged yeah I don't know if this is accurate but their debt to equity ratio right now is 800 over 811x let's go that doesn't seem that doesn't seem possible I don't know if it's right but um when cor we started investors were betting on uh more of the canniness of its Founders uh Michael inator Brian venturo Brandon MCB then on
their business plan the first business of cor weave ethereum mining became worthless after ethereum holders essentially cut miners out of the process in the fall of 2020 that of course was the merge when ethereum went to proof of stake as opposed to proof of work I had mentally written off the investment Carter said I thought they were going out of business instead the
founders repurposed chips and Computing equipment they used to mine ethereum into other uses like Graphics rendering and Ai and of course uh cruso energy also did something similar they were using peer plants and oil and gas extraction just the extra energy that's sitting stranded on the grid can't use it to power homes you drop a bunch of server farm right where the energy is
super cheap or maybe even free and you start mining crypto and then over time you start uh training AI models so let's go into magnetar Capital magnetar which turned a $50 million loan to cor weave four years ago wow into a multi-billion dollar stake is set to be the largest beneficiary from the IPO so it sounds like sounds like they were they know what doing yeah they knew I mean absolutely insane uh former Citadel
Traders um magnar is cor's largest investor and has continued to back the company through its most recent private fundraising yeah its name is mentioned 157 times in the company company's IPO perspectus more than twice CEO as often as the CEO I mean you look at this chart it's like they came in with a convertible note in 2020 at $2 a share they did the series B at 5.5 uh $5.5 a
share $558 a share and then they also came in the series C $38.95 A share and then they did a tender offer at 47 a share and so they have they have done just again and again and again been involved in this business so this was cool so uh the the managing partner of magnetar David Sniderman says sometimes the Stars just align I think we were the first firm to get comfortable lending
against that asset called high performance compute she's referring to cor's inventory of high-end chips produced by Nvidia y to power AI products some of magnar's Investments came in the form of loans that turned into Equity this is the convertible note uh facility uh yeah if if it was a convertible note it's sort of it's not it's sort of confusing to just say this was I I I I think they did all of the
above yeah I I I think they did they did do just straight up with warrants on top and they converted those because it went went well it also vacu vacuumed up shares from executive selling privately in secondary offerings but it forged an agreement preventing Founders from selling more than 20% of their shares uh in the year following the company's IPO remember uh T was telling us that there
was a lot of secondary action by the founding team I think they had sold hundreds of millions of dollars um and so that they they've they've created this agreement that hey the founders won't sell more than 20% of their Stakes but because the company so big it's still like a huge amount of money and huge amount of liquidity in you know a frothy AI market like this is a this is
an important IPO because um if it does well and it becomes a really strong business incredibly bullish for the entire indust but at the same time like there is a lot of debt it's a early stage company like they've only been in business for a couple years um and so I just hope that the angel investor that's the Sesame Street voice actor was able to get some liquidity and I think they
probably did fantastically I mean Nick Carter did great so why why would the Sesame Street actor not not too not Doo well as wonder I wonder if they were able to prevent a lot of dilution just by being able to fund a lot of this growth through through the debt offer yeah I mean it seems like it seems like it was kind of 5050 because they did take a lot of delution from the penny
warrants right that's why magnetar is mentioned so many times in the IP perspectives but um you know probably less than if they were just trying to hey we need $50 million to buy a bunch of uh a bunch of chips and and build a Data Center and we have no revenue and so it's a $10 million pre money and we're going to give up 80% of the business or something like what what is
the alternative if you're not doing debt at this scale as Cory grew magnetar lent another $730 million collateralized against magnetars oh oops where am I um magnetar Capital um collateralized against core's contracts to sell computing power to Microsoft and Nvidia coree has paid $66 million in interest so far on those loans so less than 10% uh and these mature by the end of the
decade uh magnetar was the second biggest investor in cor weeds fundraising last year putting in another 350 million document show magnetar and Tech investment firm kotou uh were able to hedge their bets they got a put which allowed them to sell back their Stakes to cor weave if the stock fell two years after the IPO that could become an important investment term because investors in the round paid $38.95 a
share meaning they stand to lose money on the deal if cor weave stock goes down much after the $40 a share IPO of course they might not exercise that immediately they might wait it out but see where the stock is in in a year or two but they do have that that put option for a while if investors were to exercise the right it would mostly it would be very costly for cor weave the company said in its filing
spokesperson for C2 and magnetar declined to comment they're not talking because they're in a quiet period of course um several funds are underwater on their Investments cor weave at in core at the IPO price investment firms Jane Street Fidelity mcquarry Black Rock newberger Burman and others bought $650 million in stock last November from early investors moment of silence for
this moment of silence is brought to you by public.com um uh they bought at 47 a share 15% above the IPO price uh magnetar best known for winning bets on dodgy mortgage loans before the financial crisis these are former C Citadel guys after all they know what they're doing uh is now deep in the AI investing frenzy it's expected to write one of the largest checks to openai also a core weave customer in
openai is10 billion funding round this month Bloomberg reported uh magnetar launched a VC arm to leverage its relationship with corv by investing in new AI startups in exchange for access to the Nvidia chips cor weave owns and cor weave put 50 million in that and we've talked about these like VC funds attached to startups before you said you know maybe it doesn't make sense for
perplexity but in cor weave's case it's like they have the underlying data center you know they have something that's like very complimentary to an AI company an AI App application layer company and so maybe it makes a little bit more sense in this case and if you're building an AI application company and training or inference is one of your most most large um like expense line items maybe it's great to actually
have that relationship really tight and take some Equity I think it makes you know once you're maybe past the10 billion stage exactly or at least a billion dollar of Revenue do your VC fund yeah like it seems like Cory has product Market fit right it's a pretty basic business it's they build a they build a a Data Center and then they sell access to that data center yeah and uh
they're they're doing great and interestingly uh Dylan Patel just put out uh semi on semi analysis the GPU Cloud cluster Max rating system how to rent uh gpus in the US I'm going to try and refresh this but I believe the cluster Max I believe he gave cor we a very a very strong rating and actually uh rated a a few um let me see if I can go to semi analysis you want to keep reading
uh the article's mostly over I can cover uh a little bit from viia yeah so uh so semi analysis rated every single neocloud cor weave cruso together AI Oracle Azure AWS Lambda Google Cloud um and interestingly cor weave got the highest ranking they are the only semi analysis they they're the only one that won the semi analysis Platinum tier uh in the gold tier was cruso together AI
nebus leptin AI Oracle and Azure but AWS got silver and Google Cloud got bronze which is something that most people wouldn't expect from a hyperscaler but you know we've seen with Google Cloud they just had to buy um they had to Shell out $32 billion uh for upping their security and you you know even though they are known as the greatest you know hyperscaler in many ways there's a little bit of like maybe they
were behind the ball on uh on specifically running AI workloads in the cloud for uh for other companies uh whereas core we've built their Cloud specifically with AI in mind for the last few years kind of had a fresh start maybe Green Field project and did very well and earning High marks from Dylan Patel over at semi analysis um anyway um there's there's another interesting line
in here about um Les Wexner he's he's in here he he owns 3% of cor weave he he invested $1 million through a trust and that's worth something like $800 million now of course Le Lex Wexner is couldn't happen to a nicer guy a controversial figure he's been linked to Jeffrey Epstein and uh he uh um also um in here he used to uh he used to own Victoria Secret um and so again uh not your
traditional AI data center investor but someone who got on the cap table early and rode that stake 700x so Banger Banger uh never thought we'd be hitting the seis gong for size is size size is size though size is size uh Nvidia is also in the deal uh probably silicon Valley's biggest winner from the it's good to see them get a win to be honest finally finally yeah Jensen needed it
they've been sitting on the sidelines yeah they really did need like an AI narrative for them they needed like a something to really pump the stock uh so they're of course the dominant chipmaker they uh have made a crucial supporting role as one of cor's largest investors it owns about 3% of the company fully diluted after having bought about a100 Million worth of shares in the series B
in early 2023 which was you know that chat GPT moment was just taking off and scaling laws were just kind of becoming popular strange that Nvidia and Lex Wexner have the same ownership that is crazy cor yeah narrative violation so Nidia owns about $700 million at the ior secret Jeffrey Epstein guy yeah has the same ownership levels as Nvidia one of the greatest companies of all time in
cor weave one of the highest profile I mean it really is like just a bizarre company like they're they're doing amazing stuff you can see from Dylan Patel's analysis like the product that they've created is clearly topnotch I believe that Dylan Patel is very objective in his analysis and and he's not because of the nature of his business he you know there are some
lists in this industry that you can more or less pay to get on I don't believe that Dy Patel's is exactly and so um well it's 11:30 oh it is and we have a special guest we do and I believe they are in the waiting room let's bring them in what's up guys hey how you doing there he is what's going on good to see you guys it's great to have you good to see you I heard you've been doing uh
space repetition to practice uh for interviews so I I I've been doing it it says uh your name is dwares Patel you have a podcast and you interviewed somebody named Mark who owns a website called facebook.com can you tell me about that yeah in fact I um I made an entire eny dag just for you guys for pring no way we H how's how's the book launch been going how's the Press tour how are you doing
today it's been going good um the people have all kinds I have a book out called the scaling era and it compiles the interviews I've been doing about Ai and um you know people like as you mentioned Mark and Demis and Dario the heads of the AI LA but also researchers and engineers and philosophers and economists about uh and it's been really interesting because AI is one of those
topics where there's so many fractal questions you could ask about what is its impact going to be how are we going to train it how do you even think about a super intelligent so um been dealing with a lot of different kinds of questions uh which has made interesting it's great uh how contentious was the was the sort of book process did you know you wanted to go with with stripe I
imagine you could have had your pick of the litter in terms of like Legacy Publishers that promised you all sorts of things but you happen to own you know sort of your own distribution so maybe it was just about picking the right sort of underlying partner for it it um it honestly was never a matter of picking a publisher the H the main question was whether I should do a book in the first
place and so some folks at strip press reached out and if I was was going to do a book it would be with them because um as you know their reputation perceives them uh and so then there was just like deciding do I want to do the book or not and I I I think retrospective was the right call I think I'm really delighted with how it turned out uh I want to talk about acceleration are you feeling the
acceleration like mathematically we are not accelerating GDP yet although technically we are today I think GDP ticked up just a little bit which means we're technically accelerating but it must be your podcast yeah to and hopefully we're responsible but you know energy use is not is not accelerating even some of the benchmarks are kind of saturating we're not seeing acceleration
curves we're seeing solid growth but at the same time it feels like we're on the precipice of acceleration but what does it mean to feel the acceleration for you um I I think it's a really good question because we have these models which we think are smart and we as you say we haven't seen them even automate the things which we like when we're having a conversation we'll be like oh
the call center workers they should be really worried and um there they still have got their jobs right so what's going on um there's as you know people have been talking about what we need to um make the models cheaper when DC came out they were like oh it's going to be Jeff's Paradox and uh we'll be using them way more and that they're cheaper I think the real bottleneck is just we got
to make them smarter I don't like they're already so cheap it's like 2 cents per a million tokens or something ridiculous I think the the real bottom L for me using them more is not their price but them being more useful being able to take over more parts of the economy yeah do do you think that intelligence is all we need uh uh Andre Kathy was talking about the importance of agency talk to other people about
maybe it's all like what makes humans effective it's not just intelligence it's also agency it's also coordination friendliness networking Tyler cow talked about like do we even need to map the different parts of like the skill tree that humans have like Charisma wisdom like underrated is like these like the AIS are getting more intelligent but they're already like maxed out on wisdom
right but do we need to think about a different taxonomy here or do we just need to max out intelligence and everything else will come no I think you're absolutely right I think um you need a lot more skills there has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is and in fact in retrospect it's clear that it was only a
beginning so the big example here is when deep blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess um people thought that this was like a big breakthrough in intelligence in general because we thought that what chess required was the general intelligence and you might have heard this concept of AI complete problems where if you solve this problem then you've solved intelligence so
people said that on self-driving um the touring test was supposed to be to AI complete we've gone through all of these subcomponents of intelligence and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to it um the thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se although that's a part of it I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this Global hive mind
where the reason we can make iPhones and we can make uh buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency it's the fact that there's so much specialization there's so much um Capital deepening people are just like doing things trying different ideas uh AI need to be smarter in order to do that they need to have more agency in order to do that but once they can you
just if you have millions of a running around trying different things that's that's when we get the real acceleration and you'll feel it in your blood when when you say like millions of AIS you've said that you think there will be billions of AIS running around like what does that actually mean like how can we Quant are we just talking like chat GPT daus are we talking about individual
threads because you can inference multiple threads on a single ship like like how how are you thinking it when you think it sounds more concrete when you say there will be billions of AIS but is that really just like there will be a hive mind that is equivalent to billions of people are we talking about like one or maybe each model is like one entity but then there's sub threads how
do you think about like that concept of like billions of AIS honestly I don't think anybody knows I think it'll just like depend on how the tech tree shapes out sure um I have heard like these wild ideas in some of these interviews where um one person at J coacher mentioned this idea of The Blob and the blob is right now now you know um it's really hard for if you have
an institution or organization company it's really hard for the person at the center to have that much awareness of what's happening in the company to control it to any great extent um xiin ping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain as any other Chinese person or any other person in general and um in the future you can imagine that look the thing at the center just has way more
compute and it's not clear whether they think about is like more copies of AI xinping or AI P or something but um you you you could just have this like huge blob that's uh constantly it's like learning more things it's like writing every single press release that company releases it's reading every single poll request it's answering every single customer uh response um that didn't know I don't
know if that at all helped answer the question yeah it's just it's a very weird question of like how this will actually play out will like like do we need to recreate the concept of like an individual brain and then copy pasted a billion times or do we just need one really big brain uh it's unclear to me I don't know Jord what do you got uh how did you feel on uh Wednesday the sort of like GI gibli
moment a lot of people were saying oh I can't even go on X it's just all slop and and my takeaway was this is not slop this is beautiful this is like actually the most beautiful the timeline has ever looked and the most powerful thing about that moment it was the first time that you like I felt that the entire world could get consist consistently perfect outputs without any sort of like prompt
engineering and basically just oneshotting these outputs in this sort of very scaled way are you are you um so to me I get very excited about it because it's like having any human be able to create beautiful images out of text is fantastic and I think we should be excited about that but what how how did you kind of react to some people saying like you know oh this is bad or
or like I'm going to log off forever right you saw people that were just like okay like I'm going to delete my account just leave X now it's over how many times have those people said that exactly um I think that's a very zero some people were saying things like oh you're like eating up the like this F you know fossil fuel which is like our affection for gibli somehow by making
these things I think it's just a very zero some view of the world where there can be a limited amount of beauty there can be a limited amount of Joy um I just don't think that and can can I be honest like the thing I I was feeling when all these gly images were coming out I became more of um I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future um where like look you're get
you're getting a glimpse just from these like early images of how cool and beautiful the things AI makes or helps us make will be just imagine this scaled up like 100x 1 THX integrated into all our senses maybe even into our minds um integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth uh yeah I'm just like the future could be really beautiful I agree yeah I'm
wearing like a VR goggles and it's making everyone beautiful it's really rose-colored glasses right yeah to begin with yeah yeah how how do you feel so Manis AI is apparently doing like a road show in the United States right now sort of raising uh for American uh VCS potentially I saw some people pushing back on the timeline saying like you know bad look to to any American VC that
does that uh H how do you feel you know you know and the criticism would be like you know we're in this sort of AI you know Cold War uh American you know Venture Capital dollars shouldn't be sort of funding uh companies that are potentially competing with UA US AI Labs or application layer companies what's your sort of broad take on this sort of like cross border investment um in
AI yeah it's a a um I was in China a few months earlier and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture Capital system their felt and the tech ecosystem generally because after the 2021 crackdowns people are just like really pulled back and it sounds like after the Deep seek moment that that sort of changed at least in the AI uh at least in AI because now the state you
know the city funds and whatever are more willing to push in um yeah and how how should people react to this I I'm up to Minds cuz one I do believe that there is like there could be an intelligence explosion and you really want to be ahead of that and you don't want to help them get ahead on that um so I think like the export controls and whatever are wise as for just Mana seems like in the Middle
Ground here where I wouldn't want to just generally try to harm China by terrifing batteries or cars or something um this is an application of AI and it's complimentary to American AI Foundation Labs because they're using the Claud model right so um I honestly I don't have a strong thing what do you guys think I don't I I don't I'm exactly in the same position as you I don't have a you
know uh if American you know I did find it a little bit weird that some American Venture capitalists were just like cheering on uh deep seek uh just like you know blanket statement like you know open source is good this is good when it felt like the way the launch was like rolled out and announced was done in a way to potentially sort of harm uh American financial markets but I mean my
take has been that just just on a pure investment Finance level uh like investing in a Chinese company just can be difficult to get your money back at a certain point because the money just get kind of stranded there and then depending on who's in charge of America at the time it could be very onerous to bring that money back um but wait I want to stay on China real quick I I thought
I mean fantastic piece I don't even know what you call a video essay essay but uh the one of the things that really stuck out to me as a Creator like yourself um was the was the lack of a Chinese Joe Rogan basically uh and and I was wondering like have you have you thought about that more have you unpacked that more like you would almost expected even if all the crazy censorship is true why
is there no power power law winner and there's a Joe Rogan who just spouts propaganda constantly like what is going on that's driving the lack of these like longtail like you know world like country renowned country famous people yeah I feel like you guys might actually have a good persp on this because somebody might have said why doesn't Tech have their like jogan equivalent and you guys started your
podcast Network and I think somebody could have said before you guys started your podcast Network why doesn't something like this uh exist already um uh I I I honestly I I I don't speak Chinese and I don't this is a secondhand stuff I heard in China I feel like reluctant to make Grand conclusions about Chinese culture based on like why don't they have a Jan and because like this is Chinese culture
is like this or something um the sense I got was that they are more concern like whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume is often more focused on practical matters um and if you listen to Joe Rogan it's very much like let's just shoot the about whatever uh I get the sense that it's like that is just not that uh interesting at least people I met yeah
yeah it's it's less practical stuff I wonder if there's also an effect where um just some of the first social networks probably accelerated more quickly to these highly diffuse algorithmic driven Tik Tok feeds that allow for smaller micro celebrities essentially whereas we in America we've been building up this celebrity culture for so long that we have this more of a
power law Dynamic I don't know I don't really have a thesis on it that's that that that that's super built out but it is fascinating yeah that's that's interesting that's interesting have you been there uh I I was there once on a layover but did live there for a while I uh uh in 2016 I worked at a uh I I went to Fudan uh which is like it was a little hch fun called high flyer yeah no big deal uh no I I just
studied abroad there so I was there for a semester and and I I worked out of China accelerator which is like a CH startup accelerator uh so very very interesting experience that that I I don't I mean the scale is crazy I was in Guang Joo even just for a day and the scale of the buildings there just it really is remarkable like you need to see it in person because the pictures
kind of compress everything you don't really understand until you're there the one the one thing that I found that was weirdly fascinating is I would I for some reason I don't know if it was the iPhone camera at that time but I found it very difficult to get high quality images because it was so polluted that like something about like your own eyes would be able to kind of like you know I
don't know but I would take a picture and I'm like that's not what it looks like I and and uh I realized over time that it was just like certain areas were so heavily polluted that the iPhone camera would just kind of bug out but I had a question for you uh I you know something from this week that I thought was uh funny was that sort of like we were all kind of like holding our breath
for the next like chat gbt moment and then it was also you know chat GPT uh with with their image generation product uh do you do you think we should be holding our breath for sort of another company to sort of experience um this sort of moment like that where it's just M full you know complete takeover of the Mind share right because um mind share is just so important right now the sort
of benchmarks come out and everybody in our corner of the internet is like hyper fixated on it but the average consumer you know one of the things I thought was fascinating is you know John and I had a couple gibli posts each that sort of broke containment and a lot of people were quoting it and saying all right like tell me what this app is everybody like what's the joke like they just
still didn't know like chat gbt or anything like that but yeah I think it would be amazing for the industry if another company could have you know a moment back that big uh do you see something like that happening you know this year um or have we sort of reached yeah even like the the agent stuff like flight booking you could see that like there's some application that would go
real broad is there any like next uh next Milestone that you're waiting for if somebody did get a reliable agent to work I think that would just be like that would have a similar break the internet in a way that you personally could use and you could just like log in and um I think it'll probably be one of the foundation lab companies people have been for years trying to build agents um
and they just haven't worked and it makes it it makes me think that that's a fundamental limitation of the current models and so it'll just be the company that is building a future model that is geared towards computer use and so forth um that is what I'd expected to be I mean I I was thinking the other day remember when Sam got fired and people were posting on Twitter oh
there's something what did seear yeah yeah yeah um I I don't think that's why he got fired but it is notable that in retrospect if you were following the qar rumors you actually would have been in a good position to anticipate tot you know that there would be this like reasoning breakthrough that's kind of what they were talking about at the time similarly gbd 4.5 and Gro 3 being not that much better uh if
you were following Twitter and six months ago you would have seen oh pre-training my plateau but we'll have to go with inference scaling or something y so maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's going to happen I mean I remember at the time I was just like ah these these idiots on Twitter are just like they don't know what they're talking about like a rumor
mill and R I'm like yeah kind of like I mean you know you like take it with a great of Sol but they kind of had the big picture there's like no secrets yeah there was always this funny Dynamic where people were criticizing Sam for launching chat GPT without telling the board but then at the same time people were criticizing Sam for like being non-technical and not driving the
product forward and I was like no matter what you think of Sam like those two things cannot be true simultaneously like you have to pick a side here you can't criticize them for both like not innovating and also innovating too fast um but anyway um I want to talk about uh like a like a flip side of the P Doom argument that I've been kicking around um basically like we've seen these like
accelerating Trends before nuclear energy energy to too cheap to meter has been talked about before and we have hit stagnation our society and all eom align to say hey you know what nuclear energy is not going to double every couple years and it didn't and I'm wondering like what is your P stagnation like just your probability that something happens maybe people freak out maybe there's just you
know one world government or something but we actually see AI stall for a significant amount of time like 50 years there's no intelligence explosion purely for stagnation reasons do you think that's a possibility like 10 20% oh um I think there is a dynamic I talked about earlier where we in the past we have underestimated how much it takes to make a coherent intelligence that has
agency and so forth right um that could be part of it another is that there is no intelligence explosion so sorry I mean the the most important thing here is look we can keep increasing compute that we're putting into these systems for maybe the next 5 10 years um because Compu is just growing at this ridiculous rate where in in three years we're going to have 10x the amount of global AI
compute that we have right now um but at some point right now we're spending 2% of GDP on compute and data centers and stuff like that you can't just keep like 10 Xing that forever um so if somehow this whole deep learning paradigm is wrong and we just like totally miss the boat somehow then I can happening that's I give it to 10 20% otherwise if we do get AGI I'm of the opinion that we're
not it would just be so hard to contain it like it's an incredibly powerful technology even if there's no intelligence explosion even if it doesn't help you make an ASI or something just AGI alone sure is like would just make the economy explode and all kinds of crazy I I mean on the on the like there's there's a little bit of a force of d a like the GDP question but also just I've had this idea that
like no matter how intelligent you are you can't break the laws of physics at a certain point you need to like get the sand out of the ground and turn it into silicon and like at a certain point just moving the sand around fast enough even at light speed you're not 10 Xing every two years and so it feels like there could be a slowing down even as we're having the robots do basically
everything it's like the robots are still maxed out by physics I don't know I was thinking about this this morning actually um and the intuition I was uh thinking about is so since 1750s we've had 2% economic growth in the world before that it was like a tenth of that right 0 2% if you were around in the 1500s or 1,000 and somebody said there there would be like 2% growth I think
you might given your reference class have been like look it just takes a long time to learn how to um artificially select crops and how to build like new structures and aqueducts and whatever it just that that like that is a process that takes a while so why do you think you're just going to be going through like increasing that 2 3% a year um and in reg it is like a really weird you
look at the last 100 years of History um we're discovering all this new things in uh physics and chemistry and so forth last 50 years we're like we start with the transistor and now we're talking on this magical screen um and that was just like physics didn't bottleneck that I think like you get another 10x and I don't see any in principle reason why at the next 10x to physics is like just
would not allow the robots to move fast enough yeah I mean certainly on the GDP question I I I think the energy question is like maybe a little bit murkier but then there's probably other ways to optimize and and still get those GDP lifts even with uh even with energy growing at like a more reasonable less explosive rate so I I think I agree with you there uh I'm sure you've talked
about this in other interviews and and with some of the the individuals that are sort of leading initiatives at these companies but uh what's your sort of broad take on on Apple's position and how they've been approaching uh everything in AI you know it's sort of like I I've seen uh you know they've sort of LED with like gen mooji almost as much as they've LED with like you
know uh everything all the potential of what you would want out of sort of AI assistant um but how do you think these uh you know companies like Apple and Google sort of like figure out product development and like proper distribution of these products because I feel like that's been the big critique uh it's just like they have every every possible Advantage such talented uh you know team
members and it has to be so frustrating it should be a sustaining advantage or sustaining Innovation if you're looking at the innovator dilemma framework and yet it feels like it might wind up being disruptive I don't know yeah um they're not AI failed you know like if you treat it like another feature uh well I mean even if you treat it like another feature it's like mysterious why Siri doesn't work on my
phone but um uh but like it's like it's like more people basically and if you take that seriously you're not just going to be like oh and the 25th Department in our complex is about uh making Siri better at speaking or something no it's like this is this is the future yeah and then that's is that the that that then becomes like the giga case for safe super intelligence meaning
like none of the features or like consumer applications really matter at all today and you shouldn't even release them and you should just sort of accelerate towards the the end goal that enables all the other goals that's that's an interesting point um I think maybe somewhere in between where like if you didn't release chat gbt you wouldn't have been able to just like know that this is a feature people
really wanted and that they would get a lot of use of as compared to the other things people were using GPD 3.5 to do um and I wonder if other things that other like features of AGI will be similar where if you don't um if you don't deploy it to a bunch of Engineers on cursor you just like won't know what would actually make something a good coding bot the counter argument to this
and I think what the SSI people would say is that they actually are deploying but they're deploying towards the one thing they care about which is accelerating AI research and they don't need to do that externally they can just do that internally um and so the basic question is can you get this like closed loop where you build the AIS which are helping you accelerate AI research dot
dot dot super intelligence um I'm like 50-50 on that question um so but that other 50% is like a big deal yeah you you mentioned AGI pilled is there a difference between AGI pilled and Asi pilled and why do open AI co-founders seem incapable of starting anything but an a foundation model company yeah I always wondered like I just want one of them to be like yeah actually I'm
starting a travel company but it seems to be like going to be traveling a lot after their JS are they only know one thing like they're all one trick ponies I mean I love them all but like it's just funny that none of them started anything else it's the only thing that matters maybe yeah I mean I think you're right I think um some people I wouldn't even put it as ESI because even if you don't believe in
this like Godlike intelligence that going to control the world I'm not sure I believe it either MH I think um there's AGI pill and there's like transformative AI pill where you say look even if they're just like humans if they have the advantages that AIS will just intrinsically have because of the fact that they're digital which is the fact that they can be copied with all of
their bra all of their knowledge right so think of the most skilled engineer in your company like Jeff Dean or alas you can like copy that person with all their task and knowledge and everything you can merge different copies and scale and distill distill agis those advantages alone and the fact that there will be billions of copies as we increase the amount of computer in the world that
alone is enough for transformation in the sense of going from you know like what we were like before the Industrial Revolution to the Industrial Revolution pace of growth and so I think somebody can be AG pill in the sense they say like yeah I expect like human level intelligence to emerge in the next 10 years but they still don't take that seriously as in like okay well what does
that imply about what is happening through the economy does that just mean like oh you've got a smart personal assistant or does it mean like no we're in we're in a very different growth regime last question two last questions I guess uh for one question so are there any people in the book that you feel like uh in the fullness of time uh are are sort of very under underhyped or not
getting enough attention people that are unsung heroes that maybe don't post a lot on X today but when we look back you know 15 years from now we'll be like you know those were the people that were doing because there's this this weird phenomena right now where like if you're just loud on the internet like you just like you know you get you suck mind share and attention and maybe there's
somebody like a building over that's doing more impactful work or or really at the Forefront that isn't posting at all because they're actually on to something that's a really good question um I think a lot of the people I've interviewed have subsequently or you know at the same time like are well known right so um even if you're not a lab CEO so if you're like a Leupold or you're a
scho or a Trenton people know who you are on Twitter as well the person who I think might be underrated still is an interview I did that we only released in the book so we have two interviews that we kept for the book um one of them is AA kotra and she is somebody who has been doing this really interesting um like since the 2010s these really interesting analyses of how much compute
did Evolution spend in total in order to like over the billion ions of years Evolutions been going like how do we model that as a computational like pathfinding exercise and using that as an upper bound on how long it will take to build Ai and then like how much computers a human brain use how much how much like time do we spend learning as kids and how much Compu is that to in
total compared to how long it takes to train these models what does that teach us about how much better these models could get given this overhang um that has informed I think a lot of oh sorry that this is the wrong answer although ja is excellent and she like she's also underrated the um the one who's like also super super underrated is uh Carl schan okay and I think I don't know if this ring name rings a
bell to you this man is like you would not believe the amount of ideas that are out there in the AI system from like the software only Singularity basically the intelligence explosion kind of stuff to these like transformative Ai and modeling out the economics of this new growth regime to like so much more it's like this one guy it all came from him he doesn't like to write that much so he
um he like tells other people his ideas I had him on my podcast and we put his stuff in there and he what like he just has all these Galaxy brain takes like one of them was he looked at the research on what changed between chimpanzee brains and human brains and he's like oh there's like the there's a a bunch of structural similarities it's just that the human brain is bigger So
This lends Credence to the scaling hypothesis all kind of gyin stuff that's amazing I have one more question then and then we'll let you go by the way uh X is down I think you broke it or we broke it together we broke it but uh but yeah we're still live on um but uh how how do you think about uh more on like the business side because I've just I think everybody's been fascinated with
your journey when when you started your podcast everybody would have said like there's enough podcasts like we don't need you know we just don't need more of them that that clearly is not true there's plenty of white space and your growth is a proof of that but how do you think about uh value capture and what you're doing because I'm sure you've had people come to you and say like heyy
look like you know just just come keep doing the show but we're gonna give you $50 million of of sort of like shares and you don't have nobody no nobody has coming to me with that well well they should I think um but yeah like how do you think about kind of um I think there's this General fear in the Tech Community right now where it's like this is the last two to three years where you
can like you know accumulate wealth and then like it's over and I don't believe that that's true but how do you sort of balance like you know you're doing something you love all day long which is just like talking to interesting people and like thinking about the future and you know Humanity's potential and technology and all this stuff but you know how do you balance how do you
balance all of that that fear and and you know wanting to capture value from your work uh but also wanting to not be conflicted right and being able to just be sort of this independent um actor yep um I actually am very curious about the answer for you guys because even though you're the the sort of the the network you're starting now it like just it started with with a much bigger bang
than my podcast are started out with so I I assume you actually got a bunch of these kinds of offers right as you're like oh this is like new and exciting yeah we care we care a lot about you know being like Switzerland but specifically from like the investor the investor side right like longterm we want to have any sort of investor be able to come on the show and talk about
what they're doing and I would imagine the same thing for you like you don't want to be like you know so tied in or have uh to to one you know Foundation model you know company that you can't talk about the incredible things that someone else is doing right yeah yeah um I have had like different podcast networks or whatever reach out to me in the past and I've seriously considered
them um in one case I was like close to saying yes and in retrospect it was like this was many many years ago before like the podcast had grown that much at all and it was like we'll give you um we'll edit the show for you and we'll produce it for you um and all we ask is 50% of the revenue you earn through the future [Laughter] um you're 50% of your lifetime earnings 5050 um but I uh I had a couple of
friends who uh I was like they were like dude it's like working just do it yourself and I'm glad because also another thing that might have influenced your decision as well is Talent is so key um talent in the sense of I think it really matters to have one or in this case two in your case two people who are like we care this is our vision and we are going to instill it rather than this
is an institution where I'm the face of it but secondly what I was going for is like Talent as um your editors your um other people on your team for me I've just been super delighted with the people I get to work with there and it just like the care and attention to detail they have just would not be replicated with here's a team of editors of this podcast Network it's like
instead of the people I've sought out and I love working with and I give them detailed feedback and they give me detail feedback and you know yeah that that that that's that's also what makes it special yeah to the specifics around do you think the the general uh techn you know uh techn capitalist fear of you know like you know basically like uh I think a lot of you know 22 year olds
right now are coming in to their sort of careers and they're saying like Well everybody's going to be paper clipped in a few years like you've got to sort of like create value and capture it now so that you're okay in the sort of like AGI future I do feel like that's maybe sort of common fear throughout history right where there's like people have this sort of pending sense of Doom uh sometimes
but do you think that's like you know uh what would you say to somebody that that had that sense um I I think like I think the way to model out the next few years from a career trajectory is you'll just have 100x to leverage but um you wanted to be in a position where you can use that leverage there's a common thing and I'm sure you experien this now as well is that as you advance
in your career before you're like I've got a bunch of time but I don't know what to work on and after you're further along you're like I have no time but there's like a thousand different ideas I have for um things that would be super valuable or I think would go really well or something so that I think what you should do is just get to a point where in whatever you think is interesting or
care about you're at the frontier and can see what the problem space actually looks like if you care about I would really recommend moving to SF and then just start working on problems and um you know use the leverage that AI gives you and if we end up getting paper clipped it's like look what's the point of like you personally what's the point of that you like not doing anything worrying about
that in the 80% of Worlds or 90% of Worlds where we don't get paper Clift um you will get to say you worked on something really cool at a time that was really important in the history of humanity that's great well said thanks for coming on this is fantastic this is fun guys we got to have you back this is really really awesome make it a regular thing I enjoy and super bisher on you
guys I mean like uh you're like well your previous thing is a couple months in but this is like a couple weeks in and you're already killing it that's that's awesome thank you so much we really appreciate you coming on and for for for the record uh we're not building a network it's sort it's actually a head fake it's a head fake uh it's just a show so it's just a show forever we'll
never we'll never come to you and say give us half for for editing you know uh you want at least 75% exactly uh great having you on great you excited to get you know everybody to get access to the book yeah go get the book I I printed it out buy the actual thing yeah so strip press the scaling era is here cheers thank you guys so much for having me on bye see yeah by
and we got Casey hmer coming in we kept him waiting sorry about that Casey hopefully you're still here with us because we want to hear about terraform we want to have you seen his office he builds from a castle in Burbank it's it's like some guy built this these Crazy Castles uh it's a fascinating company uh boom hey Casey how you doing hello very well can you hear me yeah we
can hear you great are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else where are you I'm I'm in the castle um I'm behind a a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year but yeah I the the castle windowless wall is right by me here so very cool can you can you uh give give me just a little bit of intro explanation of the company and then I I mean I do want to hear the story of like
how the castle got built again because it's a funny story sure well let's start with terraform so three and a half years ago I I rage quit my job at at NASA JPL and um Incorporated uh terraform Industries to build cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air and um we've been at that three and a half years now and we've we've made a lot of progress it's super exciting the castle
itself was built in the 80s um by by the the Bandy family who built many of the industrial buildings in in Burbank and they worked with a a general contractor who who was down to do crazy stuff and it turns out if you're building from cinder blocks you can make him any shape you like so yeah that's how we got yeah yeah it's amazing um can we uh can we start with this uh this quote tweet that
went Mega viral this week uh you said I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now don't me uh it's a video of Elon Musk Landing a a rocket and uh and I think Elon quot tweeted you and said uh just read the instructions uh but can you give us some more context on
like unpack that like what what exactly is the outside context problem what what's going on yeah it's a bit of a a geeky deep cut so the outside context problem is a a concept popularized in in and Banks's culture novel Series in particular the the novel accession which primarily deals with um the culture coming in contact with a with kind of a previously unknown uh Alien I mean
this the whole books are full of aliens but this is like an alien alien intelligence um that that's um modality is very reactive and so the their usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming Force um uh and and then just read the instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in uh in in mx's novel so
in this novel there's millions and millions of of fully sentient very very large spacecraft that fly around basically looking after Humanity um the the deeper point is um I think elon's a very interesting person I think he's obviously very underestimated uh has been throughout his entire career for whatever reason um and um is he and I think you know convention sorry sorry to interrupt but is he underestimated in
corner of the internet or or just sort of broadly you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon you know Fanboy I think even then um yeah and and I think you know conventional wisdom a year ago was like oh Elon is getting involved in politics he's going to you know shoot his feet off and I think yeah he genuinely took a big risk um backing Donald Trump for the for the election um
you know if if if kamla had won I doubt it would have gone very well for him but um uh but you know now there's a person who a year ago we hearing all these ophe heads like oh he doesn't understand politics you know still hearing he doesn't understand politics he's taking a huge risk he should just focus on Mars what is he what is he talking about Etc he's now in the White House like
literally running the it modernization process of the entire federal government which is code for he has Rude access to the entire government um and uh I think ultimately I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for United States you know obviously there's going to be some some some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way um that's always been
clear from the outset I wrote a blog post about this last year saying you know why do we need a department of government efficiency um but uh I think overall we should probably regard ourselves as extremely lucky that someone of elon's caliber has taken interest in fixing the processes that affect all of us not just you know Finding finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies or
or like you know skirt around certain regulatory issues that just the normal normal way that you deal with these things um but uh you know I'm I think conversation needs to be had here and my general complaint is that the is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the Doge process are not constructive because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on um and I
think you know this is a process that would be improved by constructive and and high quality criticism and and uh and suggestions and you know better ideas flying flying into the system um I think that's always always the case um but there's an out outside context problem because most of the people who are jumping up and down about you know the various legit outrages that Jo is
committing do not understand what's going on um it's it's beyond their context um which is not a huge surprise but um you know it is it is a major problem it's interesting uh particularly for their interests you know and I wrote a I wrote a post about this as well in the context of California like California I live there I love it it's great it's a great state but it's not the state that anyone
wants to be like right now and that's a real problem for the future of the Progressive Movement you know like it s Francisco needs to be a shining City on a Hill yeah I agree uh I have a sort of a random question but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it uh do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep Tech or hard tech
investors after years of SAS and sort of web 3 and and now it's sort of the hot thing I mean even you started your company in 2021 uh even then you know it wasn't you know there's sort of the meme right which is you know uh uh deep Tech would have loved zero interest rates right but like uh there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being you know there were plenty but there was not
as many as there are now so do you have advice to just sort of venture capitalist broadly about how you're evaluating you know if an if a you know bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible like how how do you actually you know how how how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that because like it just seems
like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed but like they're doing like very real work uh and you know very likely will will have dramatic impact question yeah thanks for that um I mean one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about you know acquiring the necessary expertise
to make you know better than random uh judgments when it comes to potential deep Tech startups but you know the reality is it's extremely Capital intensive it operates on a different set of both physical and you know legal laws than SAS um and that that actually makes it you know significantly less efficient I think um in terms of the health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem
in this case um but instead you can look at like well what are the Contemporary and historical cases where you know major Innovations were successfully you know brought at scale into the market and in almost all cases it was actually LED within an organization so you have an existing organization that has existing you know Capital relationships and projects and and in particular a
large team of of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value and then you take that team and you you throw the one a new kind of problem and a new kind of problem and so on and and the most Salient example in the recent past is the Elon industrial complex where you know Elon has this family of companies that that are doing things that everyone
else you know really struggles to even kind of wrap their heads around in most cases um and uh but but you know history has replete with examples and I recently kind of gone very deep on Kaiser who founded more than 100 companies built the H Dam built 1500 ships in World War II you know stuff that we regard as impossible today like oh how can we fix American ship building he just stood up
a shipyard from scratch in like less than two months uh in in 1941 like they didn't they didn't have computers back then it's just insane stuff um so uh so yeah there there are historical examples of this happening and I think one way of thinking about it is that Capital allocation in hardtech has a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money um and uh and and probably the the
optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already you know proved their proved their worth um speaking Yeah speaking of organizations is uh you said you Rage Quit NASA uh is NASA's best work behind them or uh if you know now that Elon has root access you know could we see uh uh you know the the organization sort of revitalized at some
point I I very much hope that um that the Doge team will will devote some efforts to helping NASA recover its historical um capabilities which we have to remember within living memory were the Envy Remain the Envy of the world um but unfortunately my experience it's personal experience I didn't see all of it obviously but my experience in NASA was that um the organization is uh you
know it's still stuff to the gills with brilliant people but most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work like actively being blocked and in hinded and uh and and punished for for going above and beyond which is not how we should be running a space program competing with China like China's program managers in their space program
they fear the consequences of failure and NASA's program managers do not and that is the key difference talk a little bit about uh stagnation um the you know what what happened in 1970 there's a whole bunch of different theories is a culture issue do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset I've always been tracking energy we that's the point where the energy growth
kind of broke from 2.7% per year to 2% it feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear maybe it's this Doge stuff that's going on will it be political but how important is unstaggered priorities ities for actually seeing increased human flourishing economic growth energy all the all the proxy metrics that are important well you you hit on the most
important aspect there which is we can measure this right at the end of the day we either have total Factor productivity growth or we don't and if we do then our children will have a better life than us no matter what and if we don't then they won't no matter what it doesn't matter how Innovative we get about you know social programs and red redistributive spending and like various sneaky forms
of Communism at the end of the day we're either growing the economy or we're not um and I think that you know what the hell happened in 1971 is overdetermined in some ways um you know Henry Kaiser died in 1967 uh you know various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so on occurred um we had the passage of NEPA and and secer in the early 70s as well um you know all of these things I think well
intentioned or or kind of contingent at the time but but since then we've I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moos law and improved Computing capacity we would have been much more dire straights as far as economic stagnation goes but I'm also extremely optimistic that we're going to we're going to turn this around first of all because we seem to have gained the
ability to talk about stagnation first of all and like to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding for example the fertility right um and the second thing is that you know obviously AI will help um but we've also got this incredible technology in in solar power which is allowing us to convert in a sense we're going back to
the land converting sunlight into energy about 100 times more efficiently than plants do and electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn um so I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem you know this decade um we might have take a good crack at the pering problem at least in the west this decade as well um and I think those two things combined plus you
know some intelligent AIS will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve can you talk more about solar why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear there's a lot of chatter in both everyone loves both right now but why why is solar what you've chosen to kind of make your life's work here yeah at least for now I mean to be clear I'm not bigoted against nuclear
power I'm not worried about nuclear radiation I taught Nuclear Physics of celtech for a while um uh it's a fabulous technology but but again like we can theorize about it or we can look at at history and history shows us that nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted uh by various navies for operating you know clese you know underwater vessels that need air independent power supplies or uh nuclear
carriers that need the ability to outrun uh said submarines um but other than that you know even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power the surface Fleet and I think if you you know want to honestly understand this you need to to kind of dive into why that is the case um at the end of the day nuclear reactors are steam engines and steam engines operate on What's
called the BR and cycle and there are certain irreducible costs associated with you know steam turbines and so on that that drive the cost up um and that's even if NC didn't exist tomorrow right even if even if you could buy enriched Uranium on amazon.com it would still be the case that um that that just the sttion component of it is going to cost no less than coal um solar on the
other hand is fascinating because sunlight Rains Down on the Earth every day for free the there's a fusion reactor up in the sky um due to some like weird Quantum effects and again silicon trickery it is possible to convert that into high grade energy in the form of electricity with you know a layer of a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper considerably thinner than a sheet of
paper um that that silicon is is enormously abundant on the earth we've gotten really quite good at making it there are factories worldwide now turnning turning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down if anything production is increasing 30 to 40% per year which is just bananas uh it's it's it's it's a sort of growth rate you'd like to see
for any technology um and uh and and the reason this is occurring is because there's a a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off right so we don't have to theorize about well what is it going to take to get to you know first of a Kind second of a Kind hundredth of a kind you know start getting those economies of scale down in solar that's already happening it's a commoditized product it has no moving
Parts you don't need any special you know skills or labor to install and operate it uh it's even easier to do than planting corn you just put it on the ground and it spits out power which in our discussion about 1971 you know electrical power is basically wealth it's a it's a free money printer you can put on the ground and this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated
about uh the various tariffs and solar panels I think if if China our geopolitical adversary is attempting to to to harm us by uh giving us uh solar panels subsidized at their taxpayers expense uh we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even even worse uh and I pave
Nevada with them or something like we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track um but yeah B basically that's the key yeah some batteries on the side and the problem is solved yeah speaking of like Paving Nevada uh what does your what does the future of Earth look like in 20 50 years is it solar panels all over in space is it solar panels all over the Earth is
this is it going to feel cyber Punky or will there still be trees around at all like am I just in a matrix pod and but but my total Factor productivity is going up so I'm happy uh what does the long-term future look like for you or in your mind I think it's a bit hard to say um I'm quite optimistic um you'd have to be to start a hardware company and I think really what the future looks like
comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build yeah right like if you want a great future go and build it um in terms of energy uh we can we can give every man woman and child on Earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year um with something like 6% of Earth surface under solar which is it's a it's much
much less than we currently use for grazing or for roow crops or for forestry wow it's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities but um but it's it's quite a bit less in agriculture that's that's not for everyone if you like the the the scenario the previous call you were talking to dakes about like getting paper clipped we're not going to get
paper clipped what's going to happen is the the net present value of land uh for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season but for solar it's about you know1 to $200,000 per year um now if that's power powering an AI a artificial superintelligence data center which is a thousand times more economically productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain which has to sleep eight hours a day and
uh you know browse Twitter um then then obviously you economically speaking our Farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to St to death and like that's the that's the the true AI Doom scenario um so again something we should be aware of and something we should should figure out how to how to forall we will obviously have a lot of solar in space
but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space I don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the Earth anytime anytime soon is that just because the economics don't work out I've seen a couple of these companies they're using mirrors or lasers yeah the mirror one is interesting actually um because because it kind of exploits the fact that like
you're if you're a solar array owner you have no other way of getting more power um other than paying someone to reflect some more down to you which is super cool don't get me wrong um as far as solar cost goes the the stying constell is solar it's inbit itates consider more than the space station doely obviously umbe 100 times more than the space station uh and most of that power is
used to um amplify radio signals and transmit them down to Earth where they're received by our antennas um and the revenue per per water of electricity used to transmit microwaves through US atmosphere to the consumer uh because it's you know uh chopped up and turned into internet data uh as opposed to as raw power is about a billion times higher like the revenue per watt is a billion times higher with
it being interet at a few hundred Watts or whatever uh transmission power than it being you know attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down for power plants where we pay you know 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that um now starlink is actually fabulously profitable and I'm super proud of the team there I just I think it's absolutely incredible what they've done
but there's no way in hell that their profit margin is 10 million per. right so like it's just it's just not possible so I don't think that space based solar power is likely to be a thing do you think that the average seed stage deep Tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough because in almost almost every uh sort of question we've asked you you've had sort of economic
sort of rationale behind your answer and I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that uh you know there's sort of this like sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing and then what's waiting for them is is potentially a a product that like is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product but then there's sort of um
you can't actually get any value yeah I've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model and they did the thing but it just didn't it wasn't competitive on the grid at all yeah that's the nightmare scenario yeah no I mean like at the end of the day if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you
think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you then go give it a give it a shot right you don't know I don't know like customers and consumers they like they like weird things we don't we just don't know like that's the fabulous thing about capitalism it it just fire hoses options and potentials at at the market to see what sticks and if you think back to
when we were children there's no way we would have known that like the the stable attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this that's not that's not how they work back then so um for the younger listeners uh just like quiver in fear we didn't have cell phones When We Were Young um uh so so you should give it a go on the other hand if you are trying to do a hard Hardware Tech thing at massive
scale M you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you you cannot fight capitalism you know to to get to massive scale you have to massive value gra mystery economics yeah exactly would you would you rather have them on on your team or against you and and I just see this this mistake time and time again which is like well this technology will work if we can bring about some like
massive uh behavioral change in the entire Market or something like probably not going to happen but if you can produce a product like an iPhone where when the new one comes out hundreds of millions hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by a thousand of cash in their wallet and they just they just like Shut Up And Take My Money uh then then you've done
the right thing right you're you're thrilling people you're giving them something that they they'll happily part with their hard earned cash to receive and um yeah I mean it's not like this is a mystery one last build something people want I have one too okay uh uh go f yeah uh the RS project is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project um I think it's there's a
certain kind of person who really likes to curate or curate and organize information and um and I think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical Origins impost and I think that's worthwh uh you mentioned briefly the sort of AI doomsday scenario where the AI just realizes that it should blanket the Earth with solar panels and to uh you know feed itself uh what else scares
you in the world to end on a high note um I I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since 1930s and so we've we've literally allowed billions of people to die painfully lonely uh in old age when if we' just had enough insight and enough effort we could have figured out how to
stop that a long time ago wow interesting well hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree well unfortunately we used all the gpus to make gibli this week so maybe next week we can put it we put the AI to work on extending Our Lives thank you so much for joining this fantastic I really enjoy this yeah what was that I was going to say one one last thing like one of the major problems
with doge is that like we have these entitlements costs of Social Security Medicare Medicaid and so on like 1% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis right these are all diseases of old age MH right if we can just increase human lifespan by 10% we cut that whole trench trillions of dollars of of annual spending by 10% because 10% for your people die every year yep like and and
they also get to not die this seems blindingly obvious uh and and yet you we spend less than 0.1% of our of our national health Budget on anti-aging research that's L that's wild wow well we'll have to dig into that more thank you so much for stopping by we would love to have you back on maybe we'll come over and we'll we'll do one in the in the castle at some point yeah i' love
to be great thank you so much this is this is a fantastic conversation really enjoyed it have a great rest your day have a great weekend talk to you soon what a brilant what a brilliant mind yes uh Scrolls enjoyer you always get good stuff with Scrolls enjoyers scroll guys the scroll guys uh we got to have the whole the whole maybe should do a Scrolls day Scrolls day uh but back
away from Scrolls we're going back to books we got Nadia asparuhov coming in the temple of Technology uh she has uh just announced a new book called anti-emetics um she's a former strip press author in the the in the the Hall of Fame of authors in my opinion if you publish on strap press you're if you can publish there you can publish anywhere if you can publish there you can that's
what people have been saying yeah it's really it's really the NFL of publishing yeah like it's it's uh anyway super excited for this let's see thanks so much for joining we're having some fun uh uh yeah thanks for joining can you give us I'm surprised that Delian didn't join by the way because pava was about to have his he was about to have this you first do not send Delan the link he will
just bomb interview he does have the link don't let him know that he can use the link because he good he's a great hype man uh anyway would you mind just a brief introduction and and and give us a little uh high level of the book sure um I'm Nadia uh writer and research um I just published this new book called antiemetics why um ideas resist spreading and it's about this idea of
anti-memes which are self-censoring ideas so um ideas that we find really interesting and compelling in the moment but for whatever reason they kind of resist um sharing or being remembered um so I think we usually think that if an idea is good or interesting or compelling it's going to find a way to share be shared or or spread on its own um but there's this whole other class of
ideas uh so things like taboos forbidden ideas stuff we don't really talk about in public um cognitive biases so stuff that um we are sort of like blind spots about ourselves that we don't really realize um all this kind of forms this class of ideas that are anti-emetic and don't spread super easily even though they're um interesting important ideas so that's what I want to write about how
much of mimetics is just actually compressing the idea down I was thinking about how Lulu's going direct Manifesto has this really pithy phrase going direct founder mode same thing with the network State kind of two words that really hits versus uh Leopold Ashen brener wrote a fantastic essay about AI called it situational awareness we don't see people using situational awareness
as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going is it just a packaging problem or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an anti-mimetic property yeah I think some of it is a packaging problem um like ideas themselves have these inate qualities that are memetic or antiemetic some of it is just about like how the person receiving them or receiving it is um
like how do they interact with that idea so you can think of certain ideas that are spread really really easily in certain networks but not in others um conspiracy theories are a good example of this uh so yeah I think it's it's a mix of both it's partly about the idea it's partly about the person that is like sharing it or receiving it sure Jordy um well one I want to make this
segment like the most beautiful ad for your book so I'd like to go like through a number a number of the of the ideas um I did want to uh a book had been going viral and I got a copy of it I wanted to get kind of your highle take on it it's funny there there was uh this was maybe released in 2021 there is no anti Medics division it sort of went viral a little bit last year but then it is no longer
like for sale or I guess you can buy it or the paperbacks or trading is is that the on eBay right now yeah so I have one I should probably you know just sell it and buy like 20 C keep holding keep holding sitting on something but it's I just thought the great irony of like you know they were they maybe going after like you know something similar to what you've been researching it but but the
but then it's not even available anymore so it's like not not not uh do you have any sort of like uh I'm curious like and more more broadly like uh in researching this like what what's the full breadth of what you were kind of like looking at right because I imagine you were researching and and finding like for bidden PDFs and books in a bunch of different areas right of like this sort of esoteric
knowledge that uh Humanity ignores for some reason yeah U for I'll give a a big uh plug for Quantum who wrote there is no antimemetics Division and um he actually coined the term antiem like back in the day and it originates from this fiction uh like horror sci-fi kind of online Wiki um and so yeah he published that book and I think 2021 um it's a horror science fiction
book and it's about uh antimemes as this sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are kind of like these black holes they destroy everything they touch they consume everything that comes in contact with them but for whatever reason we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them and so there's this intelligence unit um that is trying to fight anti-memes but like can't even
remember that they're doing it hence the title there is no antimic division super cool book um highly recommend it and all of his writing honestly and that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic I had never heard of the concept of anti memes before this um and uh yeah I was reading that book kind of like depths of covid uh yeah 2021 sad dark times but
like also you know kind of everyone was doing stuff in like group chats and they were doing stuff um like Clubhouse was a thing and i' had been working at substack and so I was thinking a lot just kind of about like how does this concept apply to the real world and um like where antines show up in in the rest of our life so it was definitely direct inspiration for this book um but
yeah I wanted just kind of like non-fiction treatment of of the concepts totally it was not practical in any way it was just sort of like you said a sci-fi horror exploration of it um can you talk about yeah can you talk about like I feel like we're in such a weird time like our generation was sort of like not born on the internet but we sort of like gained Consciousness on the internet and
the internet is something that just like circulates ideas both like fact and fiction like extremely rapidly and so in many ways like conspiracy theories and these like sort of forbidden potentially truths or maybe it's fiction you know you don't know there sort of like I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't you know like yeah the only conspir like the only conspiracy theory
I believe is that there are just like many many many many conspiracies going on all sorts of things at all times right so can you talk about like um yeah I think like what what can people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like process uh information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that or something that's factual
or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just antimimetic and it doesn't want to be known or it doesn't want to be identified as as truth yeah um I thought about that a lot while I was writing this um just because I think there's a lot of Doom and Gloom about kind of like where the internet is right now or like social media didn't turn out to be what we expected and I really didn't want to write that kind of
kind of a book um and because it is partly about this transition from you know once upon a time it was you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about like getting you know trolled cancelled attacked whatever um and a lot of people I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of just you know wanted
to tune tune out all of that um but I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other it's not like oh you know Twitter or whatever is over and we're just going to all like go back into our little caves only talk to our friends but like both these things actually feed off of each other and uh you know all the things that get Workshop in the group chats kind of make
their way back out into public channels and vice versa um and I think like there's there are things about that they're are good and bad um maybe to your point just about yeah not being able to even tell what's real anymore but uh like group chats aren't really like a safe haven from whatever is happening in in public channels because they end up uh kind of like becoming
these super incubators for crazy ideas and so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshopped by like a small group of people um and so in some ways they're kind of like mutating and making ideas even even crazier um but yeah I mean not to be like overly defe about it but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it um and like where we decide to direct our
attention what we decide to focus on that is what your reality becomes and so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore but I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about then life is not really so bad so yeah and like you you compared like you know
what's happening in sort of the the Town Square like something like X and then what's happening in group chats right like oftentimes like we're in this world where there's sort of this like fiction appearing on the timeline and then the truth is like racing through group chats and on a long enough time Horizon they intersect right CU like they almost like an idea uh can be like put out there and
maybe people agree with it in the moment but then eventually sort of what's happening in the sort of like private group chats like actually does Start Spreading and sort of like breaking containment um and in in many ways it feels like that's happening faster than ever right yeah I I wanted to ask a question about uh kind of like practicality here I think a lot of
Founders and business folks think about can they align their company or their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condense it down obviously the the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of like what Lulu does and it's helped her business as opposed to in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy um is it possible to do the opposite to
take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti-meme so that uh the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss interesting interesting um yes definitely uh yeah I do talk in the book about uh this idea of like obscurantism um which Nick Bost coin but uh the idea of like can you make things boring or can you kind of hide them um as a way of
sort of suppressing them so if you think about like suppressing ideas people often think about like putting a hard uh like a hard lock on it so that you know make it forbid and make it password protected whatever but that often makes people more excited to figure out like what is actually going on under there um but if you make really really boring and really uninteresting and like or just
like really difficult to parse people kind of just lose interest and wander away and that's definitely a that would be like an anti-mimetic information Warfare tactic I guess I've seen this where um I've seen people chirping at each other on X and I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation so you post you know I like SpaceX and then
I quote tweet you and you're like SpaceX is terrible but then if you quote Tweet back with something that's just like an say I be like H I'm tired I'm I'm out and and you kind of win by defa and I've also seen the I've also seen these attempts to take uh you know a legitimate attack vector and then and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right and so if you're
being attacked by someone you can say oh well like that's an idea from forchan or that's an idea that's from The Communist Manifesto so we should disregard it and and put it in the Forbidden category even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on and so I don't know it's it's a fascinating topic can you can you talk about some of the differences between anti-mimetic ideas
and anti-commercial ideas and anti-commercial I would uh put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where oh yeah nobody makes money if people eat less right like like it's sort of this idea that like there's there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting which is like big breakfast was like came in and they're like you got to eat a big breakfast and like there's a bunch of people that
benefit from like the big breakfast you know uh uh you know complex uh and then if you start going around and saying like hey you know you can just have coffee or water and like just eat lunch like it's hard to monetize that right it's not like I can be like hey don't eat food and also like you know pay me to like teach you how to not eat food and and some people have done that but
like I feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are antimimetic and like just don't spread for one reason and then stuff that's maybe like slightly more obvious but it's just like not spreading because there's no like sort of economic or commercial interest that's like trying to spread a certain idea yeah that's super interesting I actually thought about that yet um yeah
I think like there's still plenty of ideas that can spread mimetically even without sort of like a commercial engine behind them so yeah fism aphorisms things like that uh but you're right that uh having especially I think in like the realm of like health related things I'm just thinking about like a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that where people kind of have to
like bumble around and like find their own answers to things and it's partly even if they're like you know chronic health issues that tons of people are facing and dealing with there's no like clear answer to them and I think sometimes when the answer is something that can't be yeah uh monetized or or sold then it's it it uh if we think of it as just like another engine for driving the spread of information if
that engine is missing then um something kind of Might languish and and not reach everyone that it should so yeah that's super interesting how do you think about uh elon's positioning with xai around the sort of like truth seeking AI like is it possible that a you know properly trained llm could be more inclined to spread ideas that that are sort of anti-mimetic within humans yet like the
machine is just like you ask it a question it's like well obviously like this is like you know what you're dealing with whereas a human would tell you uh you know you know some other you know answer that that uh maybe was like more correct in some ways H I think it could be really useful for uh like ideas that are antimimetic on an individual level like I know some people will use
AIS for this where it's like tell me based on the conversations we've been having like tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize and maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might kind of not be super honest um that could be useful I still think it's like really hard to spread
things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas um through a network so even if one person really believes it and and yeah is is totally bought into an idea like how do you get it to actually spread from person to person and um yeah it's a little bit harder to think about like how that that takes place well I'm super excited for the book congratulations yeah we should do what like once we get a full copy here and
it's like actually ordering we'd love we'll we'll do a deep dive on it and uh we're going to try to yeah we'll have you back on and we'll we'll help the audience figure out how to make money how tos the theme of going spread what's really going to get the book uh you oh my competitor no one's ever heard of them now all of a sudden no one can remember them they just disappeared from
the internet because we put anti-s to work in capitalism uh fantastic having you thanks so much for coming on the show and congratulations two Time author now fantastic incredible uh we're going uh the opposite direction we're going straight into the uh the AIS SDR Scandal that's going on we're going back revisiting 11x you you might have heard about it earlier this this week uh 11x
there was a tech crunch article said that maybe the uh ARR Figures were inflated maybe they were using um uh customer logos who had churned and they hadn't been removed from the from the website quickly enough we have the uh the founder of rocks on um who is here to tell us all about sdrs AI SDR technology agents and uh a whole lot more but I'll let him introduce himself welcome to the Temple of te technology
great to have you here uh how you doing today I'm good I'm good thanks for having me on John Jordy nice to meet you um Sam connected us so excited excited to join your ramp sponsored yes this is a ramp sponsored segment Sam seriously like I went to ramp and I was like okay there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry but there's probably something that's working like just tell
me what you guys use and they were like well we use rocks and it's great and so uh they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here and want to learn more about the product genuinely because uh it's not something that we're using yet but in the future we imagine that you know millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day encouraging them to listen to
the show encouraging them to to uh you know download rate US five stars and apple podcast we want a really intense million AI Salesforce and we're hoping you can help us with that we want to swarm we want a swarm the amazing but anyway uh what do you actually do yeah absolutely so we're show pretty early most of it is all word of mouth as yet so there's a big launch coming in a
couple of months and we actually have a sales and marketing team so um we buil the first Enterprise ready agentic CRM so it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you so rocks system like in Ram gets installed it unifies all your customer data in one place keeps it in in Rams environment and then feeds a swarm of agents and our agents are designed to supercharge the
max preman the S of the world like how do you supercharge the highest compensated Frontline kind of winners or or killers in go to market love it and the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work like and that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow like ramp are going to have
supercharged Builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully rocks so that's that's what we do I love it I have a ton of questions I mean it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the front line actually writing copy hitting send and maybe we're more in the Centaur era where a human with an
AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone is that how you're thinking about it right now even if in the long term you're going full the AI will actually send emails yeah and kind of going off of that specifically I think everyone can see why back back office work is getting sort of automated perect for L and you know cursor can have an amazing NPS even if it has like
a huge error rate yet front office work when you're interacting with customers like everybody's experienced this at some point you know either uh the individual themselves or an employee of the individual like sort of messes something up with a customer and it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost Revenue versus like a lost five minutes like
correcting a bug so balancing that sort of of front like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower yeah absolutely as Lulu kind of gave me the best advice like we're building bat suits not Butlers and the core idea comes from I've held a bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before we're not at a
point where you can completely go FSD for your largest customers the core idea is how do you supercharge a Sam or a Max or Eric with AI but they're the ones who are orchestrating or QB the system where they review and send because the cost of really messing up is in in my kind of the small term feels like a bad email but you would degrade trust through the brand through the person and that's what
we focus on is how do you build an gentic system that you could use today it's not vaporware things you can use today but how do we supercharge the kind of Front Line kind of back carriers I think over time like there's going to be dramatic seat compression or or if gencies to be had where people who support those back carriers which is kind of 80% of the employee base they
will have to kind of evolve to thrive or or kind of risk basically not being relevant uh can you talk about the innovator's Dilemma sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation Logan Bartlett on his show said that you know if you go back to mobile the the the Salesforce of mobile was just Salesforce and his thesis was that maybe the Salesforce of AI is just Salesforce but um and they're
obviously doing stuff in AI but at the same time we're seeing apple drop the ball on product development Google's dropping the ball on product development it feels like there's more fertile ground than ever so how have you reasoned through that and why are you taking this bet even though there's some people that are saying hey it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it
together 100% like Ben's the goat like he's the goat of all goats and let's hear for Benny off folks Legend yeah like I I grew up not in the Bay Area like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration so if you look at service now and and Salesforce they have a massive Advantage because they have distribution but also data like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in
working with the intelligence providers and being earning the right to be the custodian for Enterprise data and bringing in public data so our position is what we're arbitraging is what some somebody who holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage the users they don't want to use them they use new tools but they've also lost data data is
now in the warehouse so if you 40% of the data in in in a software kind of data warehouse like a snowflake is actually go to market data interesting so when we think about kind of building these new systems incumbents A3 billion dollar kind of income it has a massive Advantage but what we're focused on is how can we a earn the eyeballs of the Sams and and Max freans of the world but
do it in a way where we're doing a rug Pole where build a system of record which index is a data that's not already in the system of record right so Ross gets installed indexes everything in the warehouse brings in you can connect all the other sources and I think the winning com kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right
to be the next kind of default platforms talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other um other companies specifically in San Francisco around you see these companies coming out you see these Revenue charts right it used to be investors it used to be and seriously in 2021 I remember saying investors would say you know sort of best-in-class companies are getting to 1 million AR in
9 months Y and now it's basically like okay best-in-class companies are getting to 10 mil in 3 months so if you're and so what the the the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like well if I want to win as a company like we need to put up you know just the ridiculous numbers that you know and anybody that's built a company knows
that like in uh like Revenue ramp is not necessarily uh like always connect you know tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that so I'm I'm curious to know like do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is is forcing people to make sort of like short-term decisions or riskier decisions or or in some cases even like you know misstate
uh facts yeah yes I think it's ultimately the founder psyche like I've been around the block but I would I have to say two things this time around is makes me the most insecure like all of us are very insecure right my wife's listening in obviously like we're all insecure monkeys in some way so two things one is I think this this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of
kind of Revenue curves the way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy so we focus on strategic like the seams of the world Enterprise customers like reddis and mongod DB and ramp like how do we land there how do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses
which will generate enduring Revenue over time as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own Revenue so that's how I internalize that I think the game is going to be at quality about enduring revenue and there are businesses like VZ and data dog to be built now it's just that data dog and Wiz although they were rocket ships they always focused on essential kind of uh solutions to really
really large businesses and that's what we're focused on the first part of the psyches I I think is not spoken enough is the fact is and consumer expectations are in this invisible asmt to where they're expecting Singularity like consumers because they've been sold Singularity and are using perplexity and chat GPT they expect all work to be done by software so that is actually the one
that keeps me up in mind like how do you deliver your genetic experience which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations and then that's where I think the winning products are going to come from so the revenue stuff kind of really really hits but I kind of process it out but the consumers and their expectations there some stuff that kind
of keeps me up 247 is it is it uh internally are you thinking with the team like how do we achieve the sort of like chat GPT moment for the Enterprise right like you could imagine like there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that like you would get that cognition kind of had that where they launched Devon and it was like this
viral sensation even though it was an Enterprise agent for coding um but it's a great question yeah like do you think that that's do you think that that's like maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize hey we have something magic here we're not going to talk about it we just going to like you know it's antima you know we just yeah you're spot on so we're in the
boring space of Erp and CRM the most essential but also the most lucrative software market like we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer facing knowledge workers so we focus on building something that's a land expand land with the Maxes and the S of the world but grow into 200 plus kind of active users at ramp like that's kind of the core motion I think that
agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in day out and so we optimize for like internal like post land V reality so there is no seats you land rocks and everybody uses it and I think that's that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product obviously it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse the
snowflakes of the world uh it sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations is there a rocks app like how does a salesperson actually interact with rocks day-to-day absolutely pure ramp like kind of cracked engineering shop so we build product we pragmatic product Builders and we work with the platforms so we have a web app an IOS app um the guy
build ramp and Robins here we have a slack app we have an email app so we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of Agents working for you it's powered by our own Warehouse uh Native CRM so it's running in your warehouse and it's a two-way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot right so that's kind of our core idea got it um in in kind of large sophisticated organizations were already winning like
the mongos and these folks like we would definitely integrate our API into the internal Tools in most of the rest we want to build an application that humans actually want to use um and then hopefully get two to 3x more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of 10 times more productive love it Jordy you got anything else that's all I got this was great well
this was fantastic we'll have to have you back B news I hear there's big news coming I want him back when he announces it I want to hear it here first absolutely one short story I'm a sports nerd I grew up in India getting up in the morning seeing sports center to see like Jordan and the Wizards that's that's when I started watching it so congrat all the success hey we talked about this morning
like there's going to be a one name entrepreneur for AI B2B SAS and you could be that you could be that guy so you could be LeBron you could be Kobe of B2B SAS we're rooting for you wilt Jordan well thanks for coming by Che all congrats right well we got another one name entrepreneur coming in the temple of Technology any minute now August Augustus you don't even need to know his
last name you might know him by his uh Augustus former the rain maker former Roman Emperor former Roman Emperor the yeah yeah accused member of the deep State accused member of the deep State we're here to confront him put on the tinfoil hat break it down I promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the internet is watching and this will be CLI go too crazy Augustus I I really appreciate you
taking uh taking a shot and taking a chance on this crazy no I mean the man has no fear he faces his um he faces his vocal appoint opponents uh daily yeah he really is good at duking it out on the timeline never lets them get to the last quote tweet uh he's having fun with it too but it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy and we got Augustus here to break it
down for us he is welcome to the Temple of Technology Augustus wow I feel like your hair grew an inch you must be drinking a lot of like milk or whatever to to stimulate that uh hair growth I'm I'm drinking Justin May's bone broth bro there we go kevn fire shout out shout out former brother brother of the week former brother of the week Justin Mars uh can you give us just set the table
for us for those who haven't been following the drama what's going on uh how do you wind up in this situation is it frustrating is it hilarious a little bit of both and it's great it's it's the same effect as like the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like your attackers are like he is the most powerful man in Silicon Valley he controlling the weather we yeah yeah
the hit pieces have gone direct now like you're getting the puff pieces in the in the mainstream media and then the decentralized media the citizen journalists are coming for you so break it down yeah yeah no dude what my favorite so far has been the guy that was like this is clearly a CIA scop to make weather modification cool he's backed by Peter and the same cck of the
same cabal of VCS as all these things um the the state of the union is 29 States this year have proposed legislation to cart blanch all weather modification and Atmospheric engineering and so these bills they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about Chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management um Chemtrails it's a suspicion that the
government is like what you see is contrails long streaks in the sky they suspect that's just like poison probably not I haven't seen evidence of that yet but open to being convinced um and then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the Earth to cool the planet down so it's this climate intervention um and then cloud seating kind of just gets
lumped in cloud seating is what rain maker does and it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing but because nobody knows the difference they're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that we're some sort of like agenda 2040 anti human globalist initiative um and so surreal as it's been um I'm both in the trenches
in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the union a lot of them I haven't testified at because I realize that actually drums up a lot more craziness than maybe is good um but we're in this we're in this public knife fight with uh the government of Florida and Tallahassee just trying to you know that tweet that that iconic tweet where Trump says like I just want to stop the
world from killing itself um like I just want to bring people water that need it um and I think that if you ban cloud seeding you're basically Banning like rocketry or fision and so that's what we're trying to stop right now can you talk about water scarcity I think people it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out and it's
not that expensive yeah water comes comes from we're here in Los Angeles which is you know one of the most you know sort of Aid you know parts of the United States it's only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to like reroute the river like 50 years ago right yeah yeah uh well there's one the Owens Valley situation so LA County basically had to like send
out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between like the Owens River Valley and then redirect the water um and then there's a couple water Barons that like you can't even say the name of or you'll be like disappeared in California um but the the California state water supply strategy like from the Department of Natural Resources says that half a million Acres of Farmland
have to turn into desert by 2030 in California in order to like maintain water supply for the cities like Phoenix Arizona is Banning new Housing Development because there's not enough water Salt Lake City people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up and there's not enough water and then you know like the wildfires that go on all over the country that's because
there's not enough water on the ground and in the case of Florida a lot of people have told me like you know what listen I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that that is a desert but Florida we get plenty of rain like why do we need to bother modifying the weather here well 14 million Acres of Farmland in Florida
is currently in a drought and then 30,000 Acres of Miami Dade County just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water because there was a drought so like if if mayor Suarez is listening um please save us we uh yeah we just want to bring people water and and drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential Than People realize like if you want to make America healthy again we have to to grow
food domestically and if we don't have enough water to do that then it's going to be some Kookie GMO like Chinese stuff that get shipped over the ocean or like soilent green product not to I hear you deep cut yeah that's that's where we're at right now with respect a drought no no uh yeah a lot of dis what are these uh is there anybody besides you uh fighting to save uh you know uh the the private
and public uh just private and public groups from being able to do uh cloud seaing like is it is are you the The Last Man Standing uh or do you have a team so well I've got a great team at rain maker and I'm really grateful for that and we've had a bunch of farmers um that are beneficiaries of our program go to bat for us because like they previously had to tear up their
pistachio ranches or their pistachio Orchards because they didn't have enough water for them and now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that were doing um but you know that that part where or that like famous Stanford speech where teal says um you know you should go after a really small market like if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late well
I'm not like the last man standing I'm kind of like the first man standing um so it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members I have at rain maker running around the country um it's it's uh Augustus dco v a couple States 30 States yeah um and and and what is that yeah like how do you even balance this sort of simultaneously you have uh
you know your you're a company you generate Revenue you have expenses you're sort of planning timelines and you're also potentially fighting like legal battles and you're also dealing with like technical risk in the business like right like what what you're doing is very hard it can be done but like that's also a challenge like as you know as an entrepreneur you know how do you
kind of balance all those things and it feels to me like you know the the sort of legal risk is like the most asymmetric you know risk you know you can always launch an you know create a new prototype you know take another flight Etc but then if there's sort of these like blanket bands uh that that feels like is that like taking up 60% of your time now just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in
five years well so not not quite I mean it's definitely like a large double- digit percentage the interesting thing with respect to the political Dynamic though is this it's not really like a right left issue so much as it is like an east west west issue because the West doesn't have water so Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the US are like oh this is sick I would
love to have water and the people that have as much water as they have conventionally needed and aren't as subject to Drought they're the ones more wary of it um so I'm not worried about rain maker domestically um at a state level uh just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet like Nevada or Arizona Iona or New Mexico um I do think that the Domino
Theory thing holds true to some extent so yes we do have to focus on it um the super like uh funny crazy outcome is that I just like if rain maker was totally banned from the US then we just double down on Riad and then we like camp out there for five years and come back weathered and and you know wearing desert Garb um but uh Ira lawence of Arabia Mode Mya my Dune my Dune they're going to send you to
I watched I watched Dune 2 in theaters five times bro a religious zealot comes to turn the desert Planet I love it yeah it's great yeah so no I trust my team a lot I have really can you talk a little bit about um just like the general fear around cloud seating I think that right now with health and Maha there's just this general idea that like anything new is risky fertilizer are having a Heyday
yeah market and lism for sure uh but I mean at the same time like you know you eat too much salt your doctor will tell you that's going to hurt your heart and there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level you take it up by 100x and it gets bad and there's just all these balancing and then also we do the mice studies but does that really transfer and you know
what happens when someone's like you know vaping pink liquid for you know 50 years like we we don't really know and we're kind of figuring it out right now um H how what what gives you confidence about the the low impact of this so you know I I really sympathize with people that are worried about this because it sounds on his face like crazy to be modifying the weather and to be
dispersing chemicals but um to your point about like vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcomes like cloud seating even though rain maker is very Innovative even though a lot of new things have been done in academ I that we're implementing in from like the last five years cloud seating is 80 years old dude this was invented in the United
States in 1945 GE has the first patent from 1946 people have done 80 or 30 or 50 years depending on the Watershed studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil and after Decades of operation you only see parts per trillion of this stuff like you need Super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place um and so there there's been
no negligible Health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment um and those studies they've been done and like should rain maker replicate those should we continue to do it just to prove it out further totally agree but like it's totally safe and if you think about the like ld50 like the the lethal dose of Sil it's less than Salt it's less than table salt it's
milligrams per kilogram uh with salt and then it's 2,800 for silver iodide so this is this is like a resoundingly safe material um to be using and and the data from decade shows that can you talk about uh a little of the history of I feel like when it's easy to look at the Chemtrails thing and be like okay well like the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's like literally
like mind control and it's like we're such we're so divided in America I don't know the Mind Control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do um but there is a legitimate criticism that like when you fly a bunch of planes around those contrails are emitting pollution and your your skies get dirtier and I remember after 911 all the planes were
grounded it was the clearest day in the skies ever and there is some sort of like lowkey harm and and there's always these like uh KnockOn effects I'm sure with the solar radiation management same thing uh we we have been experiencing global warming but we've also been experiencing global dimming and those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way can you just talk
about some of the history of these things and and how you think about worrying about the the second and third order effects of cloud seating yeah yeah totally so um with respect to weather modification and climate engineering um like the the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years yeah like you build a
city then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation precipitation patterns if you have a a coal plant or a steel plant or a Nat gas plant the Steam and the air Soo you emit reliably creates more more clouds and precipitation like tens of miles down wind as well um the EM the emissions from our cars right like those have pollutants in them um apart from just like CO2 considerations so we we do
modify the weather unintentionally all the time yeah rain maker thesis is that like we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unfuck the Earth as it stands or make it more Lush and abundant once we've done the former um when it comes to knock on effects um the common question is like you know if you're making it rain more here is that reducing precipitation downwind there y
totally reasonable question like I think on its face that that logic makes sense unfortunately the system is pretty complicated um it turns out that only 9% of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States precipitates over it the vast majority is either recycled by the oceans precipitates over the oceans evaporates away and never condenses again over the
US so um if you just increase the utilized water in the atmosphere then it's purely positive sum and you can select to some extent for which clouds aren't naturally going to precipitate with the appropriate radar and probes um the evidence of downwind drought is totally uncompelling nobody's provided reliable data there but are people concerned about it are they rightfully
concerned about it sure totally um and then the last thing I'll say with respect to contrails um you know there's this funny thing that people realized where if you fly a bunch of planes early in the morning um and then develop contrails you'll actually cool that area locally in the planet to some extent because it'll reflect sunlight before it warms the planet up with the light of day and
if you fly bunch of planes at Sun set then that will retain the Heat and kind of act like an insulating layer um and and keep the Earth warmer so like just plane flights you know American Airlines Delta whoever they are doing weather modification unintentionally apart from any chemtrail um I'm just hoping to give a little bit more sanity to the ways in went for modifying the weather uh earlier this
week there was a video that went viral of a uh very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested uh do you think you'd have an easier time in the public eye if you were just planting trees or is is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue regardless and do they have to do cloud seating in addition to that or are they just using traditional irrigation like how does that I wanted
to talk to you about that that Chinese uh video that went viral because it was so striking and it was like for me it was like I want that here for sure um but I don't know how other people took it yeah it looks like you get like a thatch roof in the middle of the GOI totally yeah it felt like this idyllic like little preserve you put a ranch house on that the golden retriever's
running outside you're taking the horse down to the local uh golden retri R mode yeah to the local uh Saloon and it just seems like like it's the it's the West right again you have new land that people can go live in and that's just like a land of opportunity and I think that'd be so cool but uh yeah what's your take on it dude I mean that's what the Central Valley was the Central
Valley used to be deserts and swamps and now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet it produces like 30% of all of the fruits and then the majority of like the red fruits in the United States um we used to terraform all the time like the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the West yeah I think that like people that you know like maybe it's a last man
problem maybe it's lism um maybe it's just like General like well no I won't say that um but like we've just lost the desire to be great I think in the United States we've lost the desire to like build the future and see the future through um if I was just planting trees yeah for sure it would be easier um you need the water though so unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems which China
largely is and cloud seaing in addition to that it's non-starter um there's a couple Technologies you know I mentioned last time like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water that would be good um but uh you know trees they emit dust that creates like a a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation cloud seing like it mimics that natural process it's just
with the material that works a little bit better um so uh yeah man like I I plan to plant trees in the future um I plan to make as many things green as possible I hope that people like get on board with the vision to make deserts green and great but um it's gonna take a minute uh I had a funny experience at hereticon there was a guy talking about terraforming I'm blanking on his name
but he put out this like amazing Thomas quero Thomas huero uh made this amazing presentation it was like 40 minutes long showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be and one of the places that he highlighted was the salt and sea and how you could like theoretically like divert the Colorado River been there with Augustus we went
out there and and Ben and then I went up to him afterwards and I was like this is an amazing project I would love to make the salt and sea like Dubai with just like you know it's it's a it's a Jordy comes up how do we make money off this uh no but I asked him I was like how how we actually do this you know I was thinking like the way to do it is through a hyper commercial project that
says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxic surrounding this sort of evaporating sea like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the salt and sea that's now very depressed and then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen like it feels like you need like like he I asked him how how does this get done he was like I have no idea like somebody should
try it but like I don't know how they would actually get it done um is it is it really just like one person caring that that sort of like makes these kind of projects possible Right like in in the case right now there's like a good chance that weather you know weather modification cloud seating Etc just would get banned if you weren't like flying to Florida frequently great man
theory of History great man theory of History um but but but yeah like like it feels like in this ER in this sort of Doge era like if we do enter a period of like deregulation in some areas like some of these projects you might be possible but um yeah how how do you think about the salt and sea opportunity and then just like you know if we're even capable of doing projects at that
scale anymore so um a related thing interestingly enough is like I think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employ um I promise this are related um I'm going to wait until q1 or Q2 to do this but um we're just going to stand up a land fund and we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't aable primarily in Arizona and California because the same acre of land
that's worth like six grand in either of those places uh has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does that would sell for like 70 to 500,000 um like we we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity and to get LPS involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an AG asset that is only made viable because of the water that we bring um it
has to be a commercial interest I don't think that we you know may maybe America at one point had like maybe there's this idic previous America that existed I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit um or because it was cool um now yes it has to be cool but moreover like there has to be commercial interest and um yeah I'm going to do exactly that and I hope that
somebody beats me to it for the sake of all the benefit that'll come from it but um if they don't I'll make a lot more money because of them this is hilarious because uh you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land because Casey Hanmer we had him on the show earlier he wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a parking lot and you're gonna be like no like I
I'll pay a dollar more per square foot but uh I I I I do we can have the auction we'll have the we'll do the auction yeah Au he $5 $5 have $6 have $6 uh I I do have a question about uh the cloud seating stuff it feels like I mean it all of this stuff has somewhat Zero Sum like we're not really creating new water we're kind of moving it around uh but desalination seems awesome I was
looking at it pretty intensely a year ago and it seemed really difficult honestly but uh desalination like what is your take there and it just feels like we have you know I would expect a a gundo company to be doing this like we have people working on nuclear now we have people working working on solar you're working on cloud seating like like desalination if I heard like oh
yeah there's some hot guy hot startup who's working on um on desalination I wouldn't be like oh this is breaking my mind right now I'd be like of course that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the Elsa gundo because like they've kind of checked the Box on everything else uh what's the state of desalination and what's your take yeah um diesel is great I'm not anti- Dell I
don't think that we step on each other's toes um it is a modification of the water cycle right like whereas whereas they are taking salt water out of the ocean making it fresh and usable we're taking Cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable um it's it's relatively efficient right now I think there's a lot of Promise in um catalytic desalination um
I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently Innovative in the space but I think that probably shows more promise than R um it's it's relatively efficient as it is the the problem with desalination for gigascale American projects for a lot of the world that is currently under supplied with respect to water is conveyance um we can set up a huge diesel project in La sweet no dice for
Colorado doesn't matter for Nevada barely even matters for the Central Valley because you have to St hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists um and it's doable like the California state Water Project is evidence of conveyance working but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes into shipping that
water so should California be more reliant on it totally um could we like with tariffs or something strong armed Mexico into giving us like the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona maybe um but if you're in the interior of the United States the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky um and that's that's who were primarily trying to serf this was
uh Blake Master's point that I really enjoyed he said um you know how do we get water into the interior States Nevada Arizona New Mexico well we're going to reroute all the water from California into those States and then California the future of water in California is nuclear power desalination and he said that like 10 years ago haven't heard anyone try and build it maybe he should have stuck with
venture capital and and and back that company because I want it to happen uh but maybe it'll happen soon that'd be great no diesel no cloud seating boiling the ocean nuclear boil on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly Inland oh interesting okay so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river atmospheric Rivers right many people have wanted to boil the
ocean but not literally so we need more literal ocean boilers sure uh I I have a more personal question how how are you doing with all this uh I care about you know I'm lucky to be an investor in Rain Maker but I care about you you know even more on a on a personal level I think your prefrontal cortex is like you know about to maybe fully develop right but like you're under a lot of pressure for
being like you know in your mid 20s like I I you know anybody who's had a post go viral or sort of break containment knows what happens like your your message requests on every platform are probably like you know very dark um and uh you know are you are you uh you know you seem like you're handling it incredibly well but uh does it ever does it ever get to you that's really that's really
caring thanks for asking man um you know like I uh I view rain maker as the best means by which I can serve God in my lifetime um and I owe everything in my life to Jesus Christ because of all that he's done for me in this life and then hopefully in next um so this this situation that I'm going through uh no big deal at all like if if it ends up on the other side with you know ideally me
having um gotten to educate and convince some people and bring them more water in places where they need it I am happy to take the punches and the death threats and the in and um even if it didn't work out uh you know I'm GNA give it my all and I was a high school debate kid so I I live for this kind of dorky do not mess with the high school debate kids they will go to war with you
on the timeline yeah I we kind of predicted like uh like the rise was so quick the mood would shift but I didn't expect that this was the instantiation of that mood the shift around the vibe of the company right yeah and I just have to say like there's so many people rooting for you right like you really are uh you know you're your critics that call you an industry plant uh you know
in many ways like you are uh you know you are a product of of of of our industry and and uh there's just a lot of people uh you know rooting for for your success so uh proud of you for for not not letting the uh Never Back Down Never Back Down always claim victory always claim victory don't let the haters get to you and uh I would say you know like have a good rest of your
Friday but I'm sure today is basically a Monday for the rain maker rain maker team job's not finished uh yeah I I I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go uh how are you getting Fitness in these days then that was that was tragic dude um I I am walking to and from the office cuz I live four blocks away in gundell and um otherwise I'm going hard skinny priest mode I'm Big Skinny Prest skinny
priest mode you've been the muscular Warrior I I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly Merchant it's gonna happen you're gonna you're gonna IPO the company sell it all and become a private Equity guy rolling up the rest of the farmland or something yeah the poor Merchant is the future for sure no I'm excited to uh I'm excited to have you back on when when when you're
doing some of the land stuff CU like that that does feel like you know verticalized and like capturing the full value that that you guys can create over time is just like very obviously like you should own the land that you're raining water down on and and you know gain uh you know the full economic benefit of the work so uh it's fantastic having you on yeah this is great as
always thanks guys our WEA our weatherman our weather man we needed a weatherman we got it start forecasting for tppn yeah yeah you should it's it's you can't do for like forecasting would just be too easy for you because like yeah there's going to be rain like in that square mile over there yeah we need the the zoom background like the green screen and it's you and like the map of
uh next time you're on fake Zoom background with the with the map of La and you can tell us where it's going to rain uh this weekend I'll have you on Friday hang out be fun anyway great hanging we'll talk to you soon talk soon that's great and so uh next up we have uh Mike nup uh from uh he founded zapier he also founded uh uh Ark prize which we've talked about in the show before so
Arc prize I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them so Arc prize is a uh AGI eval an evaluation that is designed to be hard for AI but trivial for human beings and so uh they look like Puzzles and there's a grid of squares that are different colors and your goal is to is to uh recreate the pattern or understand the pattern it gives you a whole bunch of references
and then you are tasked with uh creating the solution to the puzzle and it's been very very difficult uh for ai ai has struggled with this even though it looks like something should be uh able to be one shot um and Mike is in the studio now welcome Mike how you doing hi guys thanks having me I'm doing good how's your Friday going uh it's great how's yours uh quite excellent spent a lot of
time with the research team oh awesome uh can you give us just a brief introduction your background and then how you wound up working on Arc prize and kind of what you're excited to announce most recently yeah so uh I'm I guess probably best known for co-founding zapier about 15 years ago uh automation company this what I've been working on the last 13 plus years um and
you know I had sort of like call me AI curious uh I got I went sort of all in on AI early January 2022 when the Chain of Thought paper first came out all these like LM reasoning benchmarks were sort of like spiking up in performance and it got me really curious like are we on path for AGI or not and uh this ended up leading to zapier deploying I think a lot of AI products really early into the
market and there was this trend I had seen and heard I spent you know probably hundreds of hours talking with customers around you know playing AI agents st's been to playing it for a couple years now and the the feedback was always consistent like hey I I get the I get the hype but like they just they're not reliable enough yet you know they don't they don't work two out of 10 times and
that just doesn't work for these unsupervised automation products and this was sort of in contrast all this like egi hyp hype right that I see on Twitter all day long yep same thing I'm sure you guys saw you know in the 2023 2024 era and so I try to set out to figure out how do I like explain this because like I have two sets of lived experience that sort of don't match and
uh this is how I discovered France's Arc Benchmark that was originally published in 2019 um and I sort of expected to have gotten kind of beaten by this point you know first looking into probably again 2023 2024 surpris that basically hadn't and and not only hadn't been beaten there basically been no progress on it uh which I thought was really fascinating given the fact that we've
like scaled up these language model systems by almost like 50,000 times over the last you know three four years prior and um so that was kind of the Genesis of me leading to meeting franois and kind of pitching with idea of like hey I think this is literally the most important unbeaten AI Benchmark in the world I think it makes a really important statement that like pre-training scaling alone is not
sufficient to get to hii and more people should know about this fact and so we launched dark price together try to sort of raise awareness of The Benchmark and just honestly Inspire more people to work on new ideas again towards AGI and can you talk about a little bit about the prize money and then what happened with Arc prize one and then what's happening now with the second iteration
yeah so when you launched last year um you know like I said there've been very little progress ress uh towards I think GPD 40 was scoring 4% on The Benchmark four years in five years in and and again like a like a like an eight-year-old should be able to do these it's yeah especially rg1 it was it turned out to be in retrospect quite quite simple a very binary sort of fluid
intelligence test yeah um and yeah like you know all the knowledge you need to solve this Benchmark are doable by you acquire the knowledge very early on in childhood development um you can take the tasks in fact if yourself if you go to Arc price.org we have a big player you know I think what's what's special about Arc is that it is a um it the sort of design uh concept of it is it targets
something that's quite straightforward and easy and simple for humans but hard for AI and this is in contrast to every other AI Benchmark that exists today which you're trying to like challenge this like PhD Plus+ Frontier you know like Frontier math or you know Humanity's last exam uh you know these are sort of a benchmarks that you really do need to be like PhD level plus to be
able to even solve as a human and in contrast Arc makes a very different claim that hey there's still a lot of like very straightforward for human capability that these Frontier AI systems don't have um and so that's why we launch shark prize during the contest uh the I think one of the things our price 2024 will be noted for is probably the introduction of this like test time adaptation method that was some of the
papers that came out from uh the the contest we had a big million-dollar prize uh in order to beat The Benchmark to get to 85% um no no one did uh you also have to do it with a very high degrad of efficiency and we kind of expected that was going to be the case so we also this paper track track where people could submit new ideas and push the conceptual forward Force which is
where most of the coolest progress came out from from last year uh and then at the end of the year obviously last fall we started seeing things like 01 and 03 and uh these are this is a very big um this is a very big update I think uh because systems like 01 particularly 01 Pro and things like 03 are not just purely scaling up language models these are not language models anymore these
are really AI systems they have a big model as a component of the system but they have some sort of sort of synthesis engine on top that's allows them to like reuse their existing pre-t turning knowledge at test time to recombine the knowledge and that allows them to make significant progress towards Arc and we saw it with three in December you know score a pretty high degree of efficiency
solve Arc a which you want 75% so not quite at 85% um and then you know open a tested an even higher uh compute version of it that probably was probably a couple million dollars uh to test they got 87% I think it's crazy um and so that was kind of where we we wrapped up uh last year uh we've been part of work over couple years quickly while you were saying that uh fantastic setting the
table uh I went to Arc pri.org playplay I did the daily puzzle I still got it I'm still got a job uh you can do it at home if you want Arc pri.org playay do you think uh with all the billions of dollars flowing around the ecosystem do you think Arc prize is capital constrained in any way like would we have seen you know better results to date or is the sort of social stat status of just like you know achieve
Achi kind of like scaling are we are we compute bound here or is it algorithm bound right now I think Arc AGI 2 that we just introduced this week on Monday uh is pretty direct evidence that we need new ideas still to get to AI um we shared I don't know if we can throw it up or we can put in sh notes or something sure um there's a chart I shared on Twitter that shows the scaling
performance of even Frontier AI systems like o Pro and3 against the version one of the data set that we been using for the last five years and then version two that we just uh introduced this week and basically it resets the Baseline back to 0% language models uh Pur LM systems are scoring like 0% now again on uh on Arc B2 um single Co systems like R1 and o1 score like 1% and uh the sort of
estimates we have right now for the frontier systems that are actually adding pretty sophisticated you know synthesis engines on top like 01 Pro and3 single digit percentages on their efficient compute settings so um I think there's a very interesting point that like you know we kind of moved from this regime where people were claiming oh we're just going to scale up language
models right more data more parameters we going gii and people realize I think that's not quite the story now and then there's a new story that's emerged over the last like five months which is oh we're gonna scale up this test time compute and that's gonna get us to Ai and I think what V2 shows is that that's not quite either we we still need some structural new ideas in order to like
get to a regime where we can scale up to actually reach human performance on this stuff do you think uh like with how much how much uh human capital is sort of concentrated in San Francisco like do you think that is uh in many in in sort of like Geographic concentration of so many of the brightest Minds in AI is sort of like potentially even holding back like new random ideas and that's
why Arc can potentially sort of uh if we need new ideas like maybe they don't come from the sort of the center of the AI universe and maybe they come from you know some random uh kid on the internet who's just like you know has has the time to think you know completely independently and Scrolls adjacent where you you put this idea out and a bunch of people can take wild wild swings at it
and you get just new idea generation I gotta say thank you to not fre you talk about the pus challenge literally I was very inspired by what the aable div accomplished and that was one of the motivations for actually running the prize in the way we did um I think yes part of the goal of running our prize was to specifically to try and reach independent researchers and team
and like give them a problem to work on that they could actually make meaningful Frontier progress on right I think the especially in Academia in the last maybe five years there's been this disheartening belief of like hey can we really Advance the frontier because like you have to have this you billions of dollars in funding to scale up these language models and I think Arc shows
that like yeah there actually are Frontier problems that are unsolved that individual people and individual teams can actually make a difference on today um you know that part of our whole goal of launching our PR was researchers to work on things like this and bring new ideas to the fold I um I remember when uh when chat GPT got a computer and it was and it was able to write some python code then ex execute
it is there are there restrictions on kind of custom systems that are llm or reasoning model driven but fine-tuned to help with the execution of Arc prizes is that is that breaking the like the the rules or is that something that is actually encouraged and fine how do you think about like I guess it all it all um boils down to like overfitting on this problem but uh it seems like even
with the incentive to overfit it hasn't really happened yet yeah um AR this is one of the reasons arc1 lasted five years was because it was it had very good design original design built into it with a public test set and a private test set sure and that private test set really ented folks from being able to sort overfit on it um and um so there's actually two tracks for the arc price
foundation we have the the contest track this is on kaggle this is the like big grand prize all the prize money is attached to this uh kaggle graciously donates a lot of compute to allow us to host there and on the grand prize is basically to get to that 85% within kaggle's efficiency limits so this is about get about $50 worth of compute per submission that you send in um and this
is like a pretty high bar for efficiency and and in fact this is not an arbitrary bar we do think that efficiency actually is a really really important aspect of intelligence you know you can root force your way up to intelligence but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff that's the contest when we launched last year uh there was a lot of
demand from just the community the world on like hey I okay I get that like I can't run my big language model on this you know in kaggle but I really want to know how to Frontier a systems do and so we launched a second track that's hosted on AR pr.org where we Benchmark and test all the like Frontier commercial systems to show what are they you know capable of doing basically these existence
proofs that I think will eventually you know filter down to higher efficiency Solutions and open source solutions that can be run on something like kaggle um and even there like within the sort of same efficiency you know accuracy specs we still haven't seen any Frontier AI system beat rj2 let alone rj1 yeah so there's still a long way to go what does that track actually look like is does
that mean that like the team from open AI is writing the specific prompt are they doing prompt engineering or is it your team is just taking the API and and giving everyone kind of the same goal is there any standardization there there is we so we Arc price does most of the testing today ourself uh like we basically we wait for API access either get Early Access or you wait for the
public access and we have um a GitHub repo where we just have a standard very simple prompt that we use to Baseline across all the sort of Frontier systems that that we test open the eye situation was a little different because they had reached out to us and said hey we think we've got a really impressive result on the public eval set and we'd like your help to verify on the semi-private set
which is what we created that data set to be able to do um and in that case uh there was really you know very little prompt engineering at all it was very mostly just a verification of what we' what we'd seen from them um so yeah the in all these cases the the amount of prompting that goes into these is extremely minimal or basically just giving it the sort of grid with numbers
and asking it to solve and it directly goes into it very cool can you talk about uh consumer AI agents we've talked about on this show like it feels like you know once a week someone comes out and says they're building the consumer AI agent that's gonna like book you a hotel or book you a flight or like do do these things that sound really simple and then like nobody's delivered to our
knowledge like a truly magic agentic consumer experience to book a flight even even you know you could use like open ai's operator to do this but like even when you're sort of watching operator work it's like it feels like you're using it doesn't feel like truly magic yet and just you know given like in many ways like uh zapier is just like the like such a foundational company when it comes to automating anything on
the internet I remember that was magic to me as a kid where I was like oh data you know a kid i' say like in like college right it's like wait data came in here and then it just went and did this other thing or like I did this one thing yeah it feels like a superpow right like toally and so in many ways it's like criminally like underrated in ter terms of getting to that sort of
like you know agentic internet uh but like why haven't people been able to like uh I even saw like perplexity like was saying last week like we're building you know consumer agents that's going to like book your flight so like and Apple's promised this and everybody's promised it but we haven't seen that magic experience yet and I'm curious why you think that is we've been trying to
deploy agents for Te years it's tap here um and this was kind of what led me to sort of originally get bit interested in Arc is uh you know it's it's this reliability problem language models fundamentally are stochastic in terms of how they work um and so you're just never going to get that 100% accuracy directly from the model without adding a lot of extra additional guard rails so
we're like processing on top we've done some of that for zapier the way that I kind of think about it you got these concentric rings of use cases that kind of get unlocked as reliability and consistency goes up and today we're pretty much still in the con in and this is true at the frontier um we're pretty much still in the kind of concentric ring of like personal productivity and
team based automation where the risk to failure isn't very high uh right if if you're going to start deploying one of these like completely unsupervised agents into the wild you're going to have a pretty high bar right if there's a sort of high degree of risk if this thing goes wrong you know I'll burn customer trust or brand trust or something like that um so that's what
we've been kind of seeing is companies and users sort of slowly increasing those concentric rings as the progress as the technolog is improving um I actually think we're going to start to C Ag and start to work this year uh specifically because of progress in Arc I think there's this is an underappreciated fact like people always ask like hey don't Arc looks like Puzzles like what what's the economic
utility of this stuff one of the most important things that our tests for is your ability to adapt to problems you haven't seen before that's really the spirit in the essence of what it is it's it's saying hey can you solve problems you didn't just memorize but you actually have used knowledge you did memorize to like solve new things that you've never seen before this is
fundamentally the same aspect like thing we're testing for in terms of generalization and reliability with with agents so I think because we're starting to see AI reasoning systems that are able to make progress against ri1 albeit relatively inefficient ly um but the capability is sort of now existing there are AI systems out there that exist some degree of fluid intelligence that's
going to start increasing the reliability and more and more of those concentric rings are going to get unlocked I think starting this year I want to talk about um just like AI AGI ASI metrics I I feel like Arc prize is a fantastically important Benchmark I agree with you on that um Ray kwell has been benchmarking against just like flops to human flops basically he's put the singularity at
2045 he kind of nailed the Turing test date I believe um but I've I've been kicking around this idea of like maybe the real test of like AI hitting some sort of like Tipping Point is just like how much economic value is being created by Ai and once that hits some sort of like 10% of total Global GDP or 50% then we've reached the AI Singularity or something uh are there any metrics that you're looking at for
kind of this like intelligence explosion ASI AGI but outside of like an individual moment or you know application use case Benchmark something more uh Global and like human relevant you know PR pragmatically um you know I think the the definition that I use for AGI these days is basically when we stop being able to easily find tasks that humans can do that AI can't do we've got
we've got AGI um and you know I think that's like I said a bit of a pragmatic answer uh one of the things that surpris to me about ri2 was the relative degree of ease by which we were able to create it oh right given this like big moment in December of like O3 beating rg1 um you know was actually not too hard for us to come up with tasks that we were able to sort of verify we actually did a
controlled human study to make sure every task in the V2 data set was solvable by at least two humans on the same rule set um and we're able to find that relatively easily so I I think that shows we still have ways to go um I think once we hit that bar though when the gap between like easy for humans hard for AI is zero I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to like
argue the opposite side that like we we don't have AGI um I I'm not I don't find the economic like measurements quite as useful for understanding the capabilities of what Frontier AI does I think it's a good measure of impact and I have no problems using it for that point but I think if you want to use like an economic measure to make a statement about capabilities the challenges it obscures and there's
multiple ways to get to that outcome and this is one of the challenges with like language models like language models generally work in like a memorization style regime where they're right learning lots of data they're able to apply to very similar types of patterns that they've seen before but not novel patterns that's what RG rgi shows um and like those have economic utility it
turns out that like intelligence that's just memorizing actually does interesting things for us uh as a is making money with the current regime of AI today and so I think if you really want to like understand capabilities of Frontier AI systems to make predictions based on those capabilities you need more precise narrow like wedges on that capability and that's really what rgi
tries to be is this wedge on you know do do do to these AI systems have the ability to actually adapt to problems that they haven't seen before and acquire skills you know rapidly and efficiently to apply to new things that they haven't been done before uh a little a little more fun uh question what was your reaction to uh this week's sort of gibl moment it felt like uh we talked about this on the
show earlier but moment the funny thing for me is like so we had a couple posts each that sort of like broke containment out of like traditional like teapot or whatever uh and you know there were there was a lot of people quoting like normies people quoting our posts being like all right The Jig Is up like what Happ what filter app did you use for this so like there's still people out
there that like you know are just like completely unaware of like progress R but like for those that sort of use these tools every day It Felt Like This Magic Moment where people are just one-shotting uh these sort of image generation models and getting these sort of incredible um outputs but but uh and yeah just felt and one they very excited about like I guess my my question to you
guys is you know do you think that um the degree by which we saw like the you know gibl isation of like Twitter and X over this week do you think that was uh the degree of Baseline interest in that like series and movie prior to this week or do you think like most of the people that were posting that stuff were this is the first time they've ever really got exposed to that kind of content yeah
I I I kind of ran a test on this inadvertently because I posted both a scene from Oppenheimer gibli it got like 30,000 likes uh and then I posted an actual picture from Spirited Away a real still from the actual movie 24 likes and so there's a little bit love the fact you're running experiments that's fantastic yeah and so there's a little bit of like okay it's not just the
filter it's this recontextualization um I I I thought a lot of it was like the there's a reason we're using Studio gibli specifically because there are other art styles that you can recreate with style transfer for a long time but Studio gibli fits this like perfect it doesn't quite go into The Uncanny Valley and then if the AI if if you say hey uh I want you to recreate
a picture of me but use a Hollywood VFX pipeline to recreate the 3D model and then do exactly what they do in the Avengers and take it to the top level it'll just look like a photo because VFX has now become photo real and so you you can't go full photo real or else it just doesn't look like a filter at all and if you go to stick figure it's unimpressive and so you need this like perfect art
style that looks clearly different but still recognizable and the level of alteration that happens in studio gibl animation style is that perfect intersection where it feels like impossible to just create with a vanilla style transfer or like Edge detection and just pixel manipulation you're not just recoloring it's not a filter but at the same time it's not just oh so it's
so photoreal that it's just like oh yeah you took a picture of me like this and then it looks like this and it's like that's impressive but it just looks like you took the photo like this I don't know that that was my take I guess like I just get you know my my own answer to that is like I think it significantly increas increased the awareness of like this art style this media tot I I I don't I I I
don't know by how much but clearly like people are doing it who've never even like seen Spirited Away or heard of the director or like anything like that and so I do think that there's really important you know thing around the E use of the tools you know actually gets people like uh I think exposed and empowered to actually like do this stuff on a very Mass scale and very rapidly I
think is the other thing we sawt saw this week actually really matters for Mass adoption on this stuff yeah um yeah I think I'm very exced to see it comes back to the human like the human creativity like we had basic like AI image generation for a while and then we got the Harry Potter Balenciaga video and that was clearly like AI generated but the idea to combin Harry Potter and
Balenciaga which are these two very orthogonal Concepts like that creates the humor and that came clearly from a human and so I'm I'm excited to see like where this goes to where I will see a gibli or a or gibli inspired video and be like oh wow this is like actually entertaining to me not just a tech demo Jord what was your take so I'm curious to get your take so you know if you were
running an image it was a bad week to be running an image generation model Because unless you're you're having your users prompt and get that quality of output that consistently uh and and there's just sort of like a distribution effect too where like you know I'm sure they're they're you know even just like the the user base increased uh you know dramatically just off of this one sort
of meme cycle like uh where do where would you you know if you were running one of these sort of image generation models where would you go and do you think that some of these players should be thinking in a more weird way like kind of trying to generate these new ideas versus making like sort of derivative Foundation model um efforts there's an interesting tie into things like Arc
that we were talking about before and trying to assess capabilities and pushing new ideas forward right like um is s steering the conversation a little differently from how you sort of framed it there but like you know one of the you know risks of like a sort of Frontier of AI that is sort of dogmatic in its view of scaling up is going to produce systems that end users using
that all look the same and have the exact same capability and um you know AR is like hey there are still Frontiers that are unsolved for there are interesting things here's a benchmark that shoes that you can kind of go measure against and actually you know direct progress Inspire folks towards um that potentially could have like some sort of large step function change in
capability of what these systems are are actually able to do you want like people I think pushing and exploring that Frontier and you know measures of benchmarks I think are actually good ways to you know help direct and guide guide research attention there and I think I don't know the full details on how the new image generation from works but like at a high l it does seem quite structurally different from the
diffusion approach that even Dolly 3 and a lot of other you know image generators are using they're doing some sort of like tokenization like system decoding system um you know they're like clearly have tried something new that like doesn't exist that didn't exist before this week that's allowing them to get these like Frontier results um I think we want to see basically that mindset
continue to get pushed across like the entire field both on you know media obviously but also on the sort reasoning and AI side I think that's going to unlock a ton of use cases that people have sort of written off AI for today they're like okay I think I I think I know what AI can do and can't do and you know now I'm comfortable in my sort of you know what my my job or you know the
the things I'm gonna ask it to do um and like I think there's still a lot that we want it to do can't yet and things like Arc are hopefully useful measures towards towards those tasks yeah my my reaction was just generally like if you have a hundred million do in a bank and you were in the bank and you were trying to do what open AI is now doing like remarkably better than you are doing
than like maybe you need to focus on like you know true Innovation and trying to create these sort of like novel approaches to do said thing otherwise it may be different or maybe some unique distribution or something we talked about the priz I had this hot take like a year ago I was like I think anyone who's like just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on
fire uh if you really want to make a unique difference especially if you're a small startup like a Founder like you got to go take an orthogonal approach you got to try something different than what everyone else is doing that's the only way you're going to be able to potentially like I think capture attention and provide a lot of new value to the world yeah wait talk talk uh I
know we're probably over time but like there there's no Capital constraints in early stage AI right now right and like with zapier like I think the number one one of the number one reasons that I would like see you guys in headlines is like another story of like oh zapier raised X you know single digit millions or whatever you want to hear the funny quick quib on that about a million bucks
back in 2012 uh we never spent the money by the time we actually got the round closed figured out who we wanted to hire got the payroll started like Revenue had caught up and so literally I think you could trace every dollar we raised all the way to so there's sort of an like it's potentially a problem right now that people aren't forced to be hyper creative because they just are like oh
well we have $30 million like we might as well like we we're supposed to spend it and like spending money to be Innovative is different than like you know like being Innovative because you are constru Tred on the capital side yeah I I have a followup here uh how should we be thinking about Gary Marcus these days he wrote deep learning alone isn't getting us to humanik AI he's been
an advocate for uh symbol manipulation he's been kind of on the outs in inner AI circles Rich Sutton wrote the you know scale is all you need the the bitter lesson of course um but we're in this weird scenario where we're like we've done the scaling we're still bullish on scaling we are going to build bigger data centers and do bigger training runs but then we might also need new algorithms so he's like kind of
right how do you interpret uh maybe not just his legacy but just the the puzzle of how scaling fits into all of this I generally think he's been more right than wrong I think if you like just take a limited fiveyear view on this from 2020 up until 2020 end of 2024 you know I think it was a generally right like he was making the right ideas uh you know I think one of the reasons I personally
find things like Arc more useful um is they provide a direct way to do sense finding on this stuff you don't I don't have to like rely on my trust of another individual or another human in order to make like um statements or build my confidence or Intuition or my model personal model of the world based on like trusting someone else's analysis I can just look at reality Arc is a
contact with the reality moment we can have ai systems I could go try to do this stuff have humans try to do it and measure the difference and actually look and like I've always found that that's a going straight to the truth is like a much faster way to get to the frontier of if you really want to know what's true or not you kind of just have to look for things like that that measure it as
opposed to like you know relying on proxies like like other folks but yeah I would say Marcus has generally been more right than wrong and for what it's worth I think actually the bitter lesson is somewhat under like I think often gets misinterpreted you know makes a statement about search and learning is these General per for methods of of scaling um but son also makes the key
point in the in the paper that that hey like these are the thing that we are actually applying search and learning on top of is an an arch that was invented by human in the first place the core idea of the thing that we were scaling finally came from from from a person from a human and that's still to do true today still and I think that is very inspiring even in the current regime we find oursel here in March 2025
where yeah I think we actually do need some idea changes I think we need some structural changes in terms of how the architecture how the algorithms work here um in order to you know certainly beat something like rj2 the high tog efficiency and yeah there's going to be a scaling component to it but like uh don't miss that like ah yes there's actually an idea component too that
often gets like kind of brushed over final question uh who do you want to highlight that you feel like is doing important research in AI That's maybe underhyped but uh and not super online but you know whether they're attacking Arc uh or or just generally doing work because there's a lot of people that love uh you know the sort of hyper commercial approaches to AI you know
going and working at the labs but there's it's totally valid if you just want to like do research uh somewhere and and just like focus on that probably a few individuals that I think are sort of doing really interesting work in and around um program synthesis which is a sort of a parallel paradig AI Paradigm to deep learning um actually don't think either is sufficient I think some merger
of the two is what's necessary to get AI story for another day but there's quite a few people that are sort of working in this alternative Paradigm that are doing some interesting work on Twitter um this is uh uh not this person is extremely online but Victor talin's a really good follow uh on on on X and Twitter um been working on the sort of alter Al alternative like a system called hm that
does this like crazy like enumeration of program synthesis really quickly there's a couple academics that I respect a lot um Josh jom and MIT Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute are two folks who've been really deep in this the arc world and the program synthesis World for for many years and have sort of cultivated and stewarded some of the community over the last five years for
its working fors new ideas so I I really do respect and appreciate those folks for that I have one last question and then we'll let you go uh would you recommend against learning to code and do you think it's possible to try and build an arc prize for programmers a a task that a pro a novice or reasonable programmer could do that no AI could solve uh yes in fact U let me answer the
second first Arc is that challenge itself so um one thing that is uh uh uh somewhat maybe confusing is like we present the puzzles very visually for humans to take right they they look like grids you like draw on the pixels when these challenges are presented to computers it's not an actual image processing challenge at all it's it's just a 2d list of numbers it's a matrix of numbers that represent the input
grade is just Z to nine for the each number represents a color and then you get an output Matrix for the output and your job as a programmer is to write a program that Maps the input sequence to the output sequence and that is absolutely a challenge that every prog human today could do because they'd be look at this you know look at the pattern and say okay I'll just write the
program that transforms this I can figure out the rules because I'm like a smart intelligent human I have like the capability of adapting to problems that I haven't seen before um and this is actually a like program synthesis challenge you literally are asking a human to write a program to solve it and that's the same thing we're asking AI to do as well is to produce a program that
can solve it and things like O3 are kind of unique because they're like language programs right they have this Chain of Thought you know you can think of a Chain of Thought as like you know a program in that in English that transforms the input to the output uh but yeah literally Arc is is the second thing that you that you ask for there uh what about on the first question should
you learn to code um like I haven't like I guess thought super deeply about this my hot take is like I guess yes you should still learn to code uh like primarily because it's been it gives you like Leverage over technology today um and yeah like I I I don't see that leverage over technology going away anytime soon particularly if you want to work on like the Frontier of this stuff
um and so you know I sort of think that the Arc of Humanity's history has generally been to like produce tools that give individual humans more leverage over the universe around us and I still think code is is that thing today um you know I think AI will probably Eclipse it but like I don't think code is gonna go away in that future got it well thanks so much for joining this was a fantastic
conversation we'll have back I know that there's going to be more developments with Arc priz 2 I want to stay a breast of them so please uh come back when there's big news thanks guys arc.org if people want to enter the contest yeah go check it out cheers have a great day thanks for coming on bye bye I mean I I love I love Arc prize I think that they should uh take out like
a huge billboard for it go to adi.com they should be doing out of home advertising especially with adquick they could make it easy and measurable they could say goodbye to the headaches of out of Home Technology only I have an idea let's donate them enough money just to run a billboard with ad quck that'd be fantastic I want everyone working on uh on Arc prizes it's a it's a fantastic
project it's very very fascinating we'll have to have franois cholle the creator of the actual uh uh the actual test as well on the show at some point um and maybe we can get them to pick up a watch on bezel because they have over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by bez's team of experts and you know if if uh any company running on ramp will save time and money and then
can sort of actually you know potentially do more distributions and then the shareholders would actually be able to spend more money on bezel oh yeah which is one of the many reasons to use ramp that's great and and I mean if they're doing all that like where should they stay when they're on vacation I would find your happy place find your happy place book a wander uh with inspiring views
Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 con a service folks it's a vacation home but better uh do want to do any of these uh in any of these timeline posts before we get out of here it's already past two uh we've done a great job this week I think we've streamed a lot I'm excited to get home and just sleep on my eight sleep because there eight sleep brings you nights that
your best days you can turn any bed into ultimate sleeping experience go to as sleep.com tvpn I love the I love the head fake oh should we getting some content oh back to another another ad baby do it and uh I mean there's a there's some other news we should cover cruso raised $225 million in debt to buy more Nvidia gpus uh and they're using current Nvidia gpus as collateral and people are saying this
is very circular but it makes sense I mean Nvidia gpus have uh have value and of course uh they can be priced and lever up do it again 10 times you know just Just One hand washes the other I love it you know uh we have we also have a post that we should we should shout out to Rob Schultz over at snagged they're officially launching domain sales and brokerage service we're
starting with a list of 50 Plus premium domains like try.com tusy.com geeks.com and bcom tusy.com Rob no but here's the real story Rob got us tvpn did.com and he did it in a shockingly little amount of time it was like a lot of people have been like oh tvpn kind of a mouthful it's a lot of letters but I'm like okay think of another four letter.com that we could get very quickly and we have the
four-letter handle on X and uh and so I think that there it's underrated to find one of these one of these short single word domains single acronym domains and then build your brand world around it and I think um even though it it's been it's it's probably harder to get people to remember TBN the first time they hear it after they hear it at about 10 times it has the chat GPT effect where you're
like oh yeah tvpn it's a weird thing but it just it stands for what it stands for um it's great uh anyway uh also Sean ping advocates for stable trade at Beijing business meetings this is a bigger story I'm I'm sure we'll be digging into later um but the Chinese president sejan ping engaged in a series of meetings with global Business Leaders and foreign dignitaries in Beijing
highlighted by his discussions with representatives of the international business Community C emphasized China's continued openness to foreign investment he's saying let's open the floodgates let's get some capital in here let's build some tech we'll see how it goes and we'll close with an Elon Musk post that you were alluding to earlier uh KY he's he's quot tweeting kitsy who says
Finishing Touch is uh we need more compute uh to cure cancer right and uh you can see that the image is loading a uh looks like uh Simpsons character and so it's very funny wearing this weird that do you think that loading effect is is uh just to make it more addictive it's not I think it actually does relate to the change in the algorithm or technology because we're no longer using
pure diffusion where it's all random noise and then your D noise it iteratively at the whole Image level which is what you see on Mid Journey when they're sending you those updates uh now it is more going line by line um because it's a token based system so there's some diffusion that's going in but there's also some tokenization and I think open AI uh you know the giif
foration kind of drowned out the technical discussion that should follow uh Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit I'm sure there will be other deep Dives and I'm sure there'll be open- Source versions of this like every time a new you know Manis came out and there open Manis and uh and people always love to dig into even though the papers aren't released you know this is not an
open source technology I'm sure we will see an open source version of this technology uh within six months to a year probably two weeks if we're being honest because uh as soon as people see this Tech they they want to build it they want to figure it out and so that's the story anyway thanks for listening fantas go leave us five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify uh and stay tuned we
have a bunch of stuff lined up for next week already going to be doing more special days we had a really fun time with defense day today kind of turned into AI author day there was also some terraforming day in there um but we're very excited for it it's uh you never know what you're going to get you never know what you're going to get so stay tuned follow us we are excited for Monday already have a great