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[Music] look at AI right now billions of dollars being spent the flurry of all of this benefits us as consumers always and everywhere just wait and they'll compete and compete and it will accr to us as users how do we create an unfair
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advantage in a world of AI I think the limits to human intelligence are rooted in our biology AI over time will understand us in many ways better than we understand ourselves we can still beat computers in chess done we can
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still beat them in go done we can beat them in video games done okay but we still have creativity done all these things have been trained on the sum total of all human creation and now they're being trained on the sum total
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of human creation plus artificial creation I'm absolutely convinced that we are going to have machines doing science 24/7 I just think it's going to be part of the total Overture over of creation and I think it's a beautiful thing [Music]
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start with what you're obsessed with today what's on your mind uh well uh first and foremost kids and family trying to be a good dad good husband technologically obsessed with so many different things we were just in a partnership meeting and probably the
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most interesting thing at the moment is thinking about the speed of certain Technologies like the actual physical Technologies and where the bottlenecks are so in biology you've got all kinds of reactions nature figured out
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Evolution figured out enzy and catalysts and things that can speed up reactions but you can move faster than the speed of biology now you think about AI totally different field but the same sort of underlying philosophical
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principle if you've tried Chachi PT operator it can only move at the speed of the web and at that it's sort of with latency a little bit slow so we're thinking about what are the technologies that can accelerate these things that have these natural almost
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physics limits and even if those limits are biological or digital so that is something that at the moment I'm obsessed with in part because I have ignorance about it and when I have ignorance about it my competitive spirit
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says how do I get smart about this how do I get some differentiated Insight how do I know what everybody else thinks and then find the sort of Whit space answer so that's one big thing obsessed with geopolitics it is the great game uh
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everything from us China competition to uh Iran Israel access of religious conflict the sahal and mreb in Africa which is not an area that a lot of people talk about or think about that I believe with low probability super high magnitude
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import is going to become the next Afghanistan that that region in the sahal all these coups and Cascades of these coups of failed states where you have Russian mercenaries violent extremists Chinese CCP coming in with infrastructure and influence European
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Colonial Powers being kicked out against this backdrop of brilliant scientists and engineers and technologists that went to HBS or Stanford and worked at meta and Google that are going back and particularly in like Ghana and Kenya and
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Nigeria are building businesses so that continent is going to be a truly contested space for future and progress and for utter chaos and terrorism so yeah it's a widespread of stuff that I'm probably currently obsessed with let's
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talk about all those things let's start with sort of uh diving in you mentioned chat gbt operator yes and the limitation sort of being we're moving at the speed of the web at what point do you think that we're those systems are all
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designed for humans what point do they become designed for AI first and then humans are using them or do we just have two simultaneous interfaces I think it's going to be both I think that there there's always this like ignorance Arbitrage where somebody figures out
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that there's an opportunity to take advantage and improve a system while people don't understand it and so I think that there are people that are probably going to laun redesign businesses where they say we will optimize your web pages just like
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people did for search engine optimization when Google rose that you had to be more relevant because Google was so important Google was influencing whether or not people would see you or discover you and so if there are certain
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tasks like open table or restaurants or shopping they are now going to start to shift their user interface not just for the clicks of a human but for the clicks of an AI That's doing research on the best product and the way that those are
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going to negotiate and in some cases influence or trick the judgment and the reasoning of the AI is really interesting so I think that that is probably the next domain where those things are going to get better faster they're going to have more compute but
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then people are going to be redesigning some of these experiences not for us and the user interface of humans but machine to machine and you're already starting to see this where there was one element of like an instantiation of R1
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communicating with another in R1 but the language that they were communting was not English or Chinese or even traditional code it was like this weird almost alien language and so I think you're going to see a bunch of that
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there's another adjacent theme which I think is also really interesting which is AI portends the death of apis so apis allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with uh Uber and you know Spotify uh through the
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backend through software but increasingly those things are complicated they're hard to negotiate there's a lot of legal there's API calls there's restrictions there's privacy there's controls but if you're one of these companies that are like I don't
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want to go through all of that can I just use AI to pretend that I'm a user and in fact I had this experience where I was using operator and I had this moral dilemma for a split second do I click to confirm that I'm not a bot
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because I had to take control over it because the bot actually was trying to do my research on behalf of me and so uh you see a world where apis that have been the plumbing of everything in SAS and software and negotiating behind the
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scenes may start to lose influence and power to AIS that are able to basically just negotiate on the front end as though they were a user so I think that that whole domain is going to very rapidly evolve in like a quarter or two
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you you mentioned sort of the limitations like biology moves at a certain speed there there's a couple subset of questions here but one is where's the limitation in AI growth right now it seems like we have energy as a a key input we have compute as a
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key input and then we have data SL algorithms as like the the next key input what am I missing what's the limitation on those well start with conventional wisdom which has here to for been correct which is you need more compute you need more Capital uh scaling
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laws for AI just throw more gpus and processors and money and ultimately energy to support that and you will get better and better breakthroughs the counter to that which you're seeing in some cases with open source or people
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that have now trained on some of the large models is that there's going to be a shift towards model efficiency and so that's number one that people are going to figure out how do we do these more efficiently with less compute number two
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which is a big sort of contrary thesis that I have is that a significant portion of inference so you know if you break down training you still need large 100,000 is clusters of h100 top performing chips it's expensive only the
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hyperscalers here to four have been able to do that you can do some training if you're using things like together compute and some of our companies without having to do that yourself sort of like going back to on Prem versus
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Colo versus Cloud transition 15 years ago but I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device meaning instead of going uh to the cloud and typing a query like 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an apple or an
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Android device and if I had a bet today it's Android because of the architecture over Apple but if Apple can do some smart things maybe they can catch up to this but some of the design choices and the closed aspects which have been great
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for privacy as a feature may hurt them in this wave and you could already see like per lexity can actually be an assistant on my Android device I carry both so I can understand both operating systems you can't do that yet on iOS and
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apple but here's the the Insight if 30 to 50% of my inference is my cached emails and my chats and my WhatsApp and all the stuff that I keep on my device my photos My Health Data my calendar then the memory players may play a much
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bigger role so now you have Samsung SK hyx Micron that are important here if I had to come up with somewhat pejorative analogy I think Samsung is going to be more like Intel I think that they're just a little bit sclerotic and bureaucratic and slow moving and it's
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going to sort of EB and decline I think Micron is a US company which is going to be more constrained by restrictions that are put on export control and I think SK being a Korean company is going to be able to skirt those in the same way that
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Invidia has with you know distribution of China through Singapore and Indonesia and Malaysia which is now being investigated but uh but the memory players are likely to be ascendant and so what here to for was a bottleneck on
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compute could shift attention Talent money into new architectures where memory plays a key role on small models on device for inference I've always thought of memory as like a commodity it doesn't matter if I have a mu chip or a
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scandes or that's what people thought about CPUs back in the day and then gpus for just you know traditional video graphics and then the AI researchers came and said well wait a second we can run these convolutional neural Nets on these gpus and they reached into
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somebody else's domain of PlayStation and Xbox and pulled them in and suddenly you know it lit up this uh phenomenon that turned uh Nvidia from 15 billion to you know two and a half or three trillion do you think Nvidia has got a
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long Runway I think that their ability with that market capitalization and that cash and the margin that they have they can reinvent and buy a lot of things so uh I think Jensen is a thoughtful capital allocator I think he's benefited
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and caught light in in a bottle over the past 10 years and now just particularly in the past six I would not count Nvidia out now what's the upside from two and half or three trillion to 5 trillion or 10 trillion or do they go back down to I
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I have no idea so that's a more of a fundamental valuation based on the speculation but if you have 90 95% margins and your chips are $30,000 could you shrink them down and sell for $3,000 and take small margins but get more
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volume and this was some of the debate that I think happened with the release of deep seek where you had basically talking about jeevan's Paradox that any one thing might get more efficient but the result is not that you
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have less demand in aggregate you have much more demand you know the classic example of this is like refrigerators single refrigerator back in the day was an energy hog all of a sudden you make these things more efficient and what
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happens it becomes much cheaper so if something's cheaper you're you're going to buy you know more of it and they shrunk refrigerators down and so now everybody had one in their garage and in their office and uh in basement and so
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the aggregate demand for electricity and then for all the components and coils and refrigerant went up not down same thing with bandwidth you know if you have uh 56k B modem which was like my first modem you know dial up internet
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and all that kind of stuff on comput surf and you know then you go to a T3 and fiber optic you know at the speed of light it is way more efficient but your Usage Now is just huge you're streaming 4K videos and watching Netflix and
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trading on Bloomberg uh whereas if you actually want to decrease use the non-obvious thing that you would want to do is actually Slow Down Speed I mean put me on a 56k b modem today I just like pull out my hair and never use it you couldn't even use Gmail on that
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exactly where do you think intelligence is the limiting factor of progress human intelligence I think that the great thing about us is that we are I don't know 60 or 70% predictable in that so many of the uh foibles and virtues and
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vices of man and women are Shakespearean you know they're hundreds of I mean tens of thousands of years old from Modern Evolution but with that we are still irrational uh you know Danny Conan was a friend Danny passed last year just an
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amazing guy but he could document all the heuristics and all the biases which you study and write about and he's like I'm still a victim of them even knowing them doesn't really insulate me from falling you know to them just like an
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optical illusion you can know it's an optical illusion but you still see it and you still fall so I think the limits to human intelligence are rooted in our biology and we have all of these uh embodied intelligence that have sort of
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been externalized in calculators and in computers that help us to overcome that and I certainly feel today that a significant portion of my day that might be spent with a colleague riffing on something uh and sometimes that's like
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great for am Muse or tapping into information or intelligence or some tidbit or a piece of gossip or an experience that they had and that's why like the diversity of cognitive diversity is really important I'm complimenting that with all day chats
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with perplexity and Claude and open Ai and you know any number of llms that might hallucinate just like a friend and might be wrong about something uh but might give me some profound Insight I think what I'm interested in is at what
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point will machines like if intelligence is the limiting factor on progress in certain domains or areas it strikes me that that in the near future the machines will be able to surpass human intelligence for sure and if that's the
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case then those areas are R for either disruption or rapid progress well I think you know what Peter drer never imagined when he was talking about knowledge workers and the shift from like blue collar workers to white collar workers was that machines would actually
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most threaten those professions and so you take some of the most elite professions doctors uh the ability to do a differential diagnosis today I take my medical records as soon as I get them from Top Doctors and I still put them
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into llms to see what did they miss and sometimes it une Earths some interesting correlations is there a scientific paper from the past 10 years that might have bearing on this particular finding or something in a blood test so that is
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really interesting um lawyers languages code multi-billion dollar lawsuits sometimes come down to the single placement and interpretation by a human of a word one of the things that Danny Conan recognized in he published this in
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his last book noise was that the same case the same information the same facts presented to the same judge at different times of day or to present it to different judges they are not objective and he actually thought that for justice
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and fairness that you would want the human intelligence applied to these situations with their biases to be either complemented or replaced by AIS that had a consistency and Fidelity in how they made decisions so those are all
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highp paying jobs with lots of train training lots of time to gain the experience the reasoning the intelligence and many of those things are at risk uh government itself the ability to legislate make decisions you want to be able to capture and express
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the will of the people but increasingly we have social media that's able to do that it could be corrupted but there's mechanisms to figure out how do you really surface what does the populist care about and some in Europe have tried
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to do these things the key thing is always like what's the incentive and what's the vector where somebody can come in corrupt these things but interestingly I actually think that the people whose jobs are like most protected in this new domain are
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bluecollar workers a robot today can't really fully serve a meal and they cannot effectively even though every humanoid robot tries to do folding laundry and there's still basic jobs that are not low paying but they're
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arguably safer than ever and this ties into immigration and technology and human replacement but people that are doing maintenance people that are plumbers many of these things are standardized systems but it's like the old joke about the plumber that comes in
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and you know he comes in and he Taps a few things and like suddenly the pipes are fixed he says you know how much is it it's a th000 bucks a th000 bucks for that he's like it was a $5 part he's like yeah the part was $5 but 995 was
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knowing where to tap and where to put it and so I think that there's still a lot of this like tacd knowledge and craft and maintenance that is going to be protected against the rise of the Machines That are going to replace most
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of the white collar intelligence and knowledge workers do you believe uh I think it was Zuck who came out and said you know by mid this year 2025 that AI would be as good as a midlevel engineer in coding in coding yeah for sure what
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are the implications of that walk me through like the next 18 months if that's true well again if you take this in the frame of jeevan's paradox then a lot more people are going to be able to code uh in ways that they never have in
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fact I think it was like Andre karthy who was on Twitter a day or two ago talking about who he himself uh as a coder was basically just talking in natural language and having the AI and I forget which one he was particularly using generate code and then if it if it
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tweaked something and he wanted to change a design and make a particular sidebar a little bit thicker or thinner he would just say make the sidebar and it was able to do that so I think the accessibility for people who never coded
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never programmed to be able to come up with an idea and say oh I wish there was an application that could do X Y and Z to be able to quickly do that is great for the big companies who employ many coders that are competing at an Ever
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faster speed you know you have somebody like like Mark benof who's saying that they're not hiring any more coders at the same time that he's still talking about the Primacy of SAS which is this weird contradiction but I would suspect
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that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired but the people that are there are still like these 10x coders and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to 100x do you think margins go
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up then for a lot of these companies I don't know I always feel like margins are always fleeting in the sense because it's like a fallacy of composition one company stands up a little bit higher and then everybody else is on their
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tippy toes so I think it just changes the game but I don't think that you have some like permanent margin the only time you get really large margins is when you truly have like a monop like Nvidia today until there's an alternative
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whether in architecture algorithms or in something else you know they've got dominant margins because they can charge super high prices because there is no alternative so when you have that there is no alternative but in many domains given enough time there's an
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alternative and then margins just resettle and look at cars you know the average margin on cars cars today are 10,000 times better by every measure of fuel efficiency Comfort Air Conditioning satellite radio but those margins never
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persisted as being like permanently High I always come back to sort of buff it in the 60s with the loom right I always relay everything to the loom cuz everybody was coming to him when he first took control and they're like oh
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we got this new technology and he's like yeah but all the benefits going to go to the customer it's not going to go to me I mean look look at AI right now billions of dollars being spent all the foundation models all the competition
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the second that deep SE comes out it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from open AI of when are we going to release models and so the flurry of all of this benefits us as consumers always and everywhere and so
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we were looking at in internally installing some new AI system to surface all of our disperate documents and there's a bunch of these and our Gmail our slack our Google Docs our PDFs our legal agreements and just have a repository with permissions and
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all this and and it's expensive in part because going back to that ignorance Arbitrage somebody could charge us a lot of money to do that implementation and my default was just wait why don't we wait six months because this is going to
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be available from all of the major llm providers today that want to get the Enterprise accounts and let's just wait and they'll compete and compete and it will accur to us as users talk to me about all these models people are
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spending you know hundreds of billions if not trillions of Dollars around the globe competing on a Model do you think that's the basis of competition or how does that play out and then you have zck who's trying to open source it and he
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spent I don't know what 60 to 100 billion U probably by the end of June this year open sourcing it so he's basically like I wouldn't say he's doing it for free but what's his strategy there first you have just straight head competition you know anthropic and
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Claude and Chach and open ey and others um then you have Sovereign models so there are countries that are saying we don't want to be beholden to the US or to China we funded a company in Japan called Sakana is one of the lead authors
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from the Google Transformer and a guy David ha and just incredible team and they are actually trying to do these super efficient novel architecture so they're not trying to train these multi 100,000 clusters their latest model
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which was based on this evolutionary technique was like eight gpus which was wild so that's one Trend but on the Strategic question for Zuck I actually think that he's probably playing it the smartest of everybody which is and he's
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been open about this um we're going to open source the models with llama and uh we're going to let people develop on them why because the real value is going to be in the repository of of data longitudinal data deep data if you go
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back 10 15 years like the number one thing in Tech was Big Data Big Data Big Data okay well now if you actually have big data you want to whatever models are out there to run on your proprietary Silo of data so the people that I think
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are going to be advantaged meta why they've got all my WhatsApp message Apple doesn't meta does they've got all my Instagram likes and preferences and every detail of how long I spend and Linger on something and what I post and
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uh all of that content my Facebook which I don't really use anymore other than when Instagram you know cross post to it but that is super valuable and they care about that in part because Zuck needs to Route Around both apple and Google he
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does not have a device I mean you've got Oculus and meta Quest and whatnot but that's not the one this Orion with the neural band from the company control Labs that we funded which was for the non-invasive brain machine interface to
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be able to use free gestures which is an absolute directional Arrow of progress right disintermediating the control surfaces you have remote controls and all that kind of stuff and just being able to Gest your map a device to your
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human body is is absolutely the trend but he's thinking about how do I route around these devices and how do I have a long repository of everybody's information and use the best model that's out there and the great thing
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about open source is it'll continue to improve over time so I think that that's a winning strategy I think that people that are continuing to develop ever better models unless they have proprietary data are going to be sort of
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screwed Bloomberg should do really well I mean the the huge amount of proprietary information all the Acquisitions that they've done over time being able to normalize merger data and historic information and the longitude of price information and correlations
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between different asset classes being to run AI on top of that is like a Quant dream so I think that people that have Hospital Systems arguably some governments have used efficiently but anybody that has a proprietary source of
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information clinical trials uh failed experiments inside of Pharma companies being able to to do that is the real gold and the large language models are effectively like over time I think going to Trend toward zero in a commodity
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excavator of that data so the moat is really in the data you because will be sort of comparable running on top the data sitting by itself is like an oil well that isn't mined you know or or not gas finding that isn't Frack so it needs
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to be extracted and I think that most likely open source but in some cases Enterprise Partnerships between anthropic or open AI with some of these siloed data sets will unleash a lot of value so aside from meta what counterintuitive sort of public
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companies would you say have like really interesting data sources uh that's a a good question I haven't really spent a lot of time on that to figure out who's got crazy amounts of proprietary data Pharma would be a good one because
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obviously they're you know tracking both their successful but their unsuccessful clinical trials there's a lot of information in the unsuccessful data like the things that fail that you can learn from you could argue that Tesla of
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course who I'm very publicly critical of like if they truly are collecting a ton of Road user data from you know every Tesla that's being driven that would be valuable anything where there's a collection a set of sensors a repository
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of information that is owned by them anything that we've signed off on that you know your data is free for us to use like like meta you think of Tesla they should have the best mapping software in the world they literally like Drive millions of miles every day they can
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update everything they can locate police they can locate speed cameras they can get real weather pattern yeah totally yeah but but okay the flip side of that bill right taking sort of like the opposite view for a moment Netflix
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Netflix has all of our viewing data they know what we like they know what you like they can make a perfect set of channels for you and the recommendations are reasonably good approximations of adjacencies to things that you liked but
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they haven't been successful nor has the human algorithm at say HBO in the past of like perfectly creating the next show that you really want to see and what's interesting about that is they've put a lot of money into this but it hasn't
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yielded The Recipe Maker for like the next perfect show and oftentimes the thing that you want to see is almost something that's orthogonal from what you've been watching yeah like I heard Anthony Mackey who's in um you know the the
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latest Marvel movie talking about an expectation that he'll be somebody was like how long do you think you'll be doing Marvel movies he's like I think probably like the next 10 years and I'm like probably two or three because
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people are just bored of this stuff after a while like nobody wants to see another I don't want to see another Marvel movie I like the adjacency of like the boys yeah which was like the dark you know superhero kind of movie and I think trying to find groups that
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have proprietary data that have some predictive value the most value probably for society I don't know if it'll be entirely captured by companies is just all the scientific information that we have because I'm absolutely convinced
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that we are going to have machines doing science 24/7 well so talk to me a little bit about I want to come back to Tesla in a sec but let's go down the science that why is nobody sort of taken every study published in a domain say
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Alzheimer's research popped it into GPT and being like where Are We Wrong what studies have been fabricated or proven not true that we're investing research in right like CU studies get built on studies and studies and so if something
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from the 80s came out and it's like completely false we' probably spent $20 billion doar down this rabbit hole and what's the next most likely thing to work is anybody doing that I have to imagine they are because deep research
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came out you know today or in the past 24 hours from open AI which is sort of their model with a better engine so to speak than Google's deep research which s was impressive both because of its ability to search many sources and then
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the ability to uh you know sort of I think it was either there or through nopm to conjure the podcast which at first was a static presentation of near human quality voice but now you can interrupt it like a radio caller which is super cool but you can say go through
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the past 15 years of pnas papers uh or science in nature papers around this particular topic and find correlations between papers that do not site each other or tell me any spirous correlations and the beauty of all of that on sort of the information or
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informatic side is eventually you will have a materials and methods output of that that you can feed into something like benchling or some of the automated lab players to actually say like run the experiment so I'm absolutely convinced
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like High certitude I don't know exactly which company will do it we've invested in some they haven't worked will invest in more hopefully they will but this directional Arrow of progress of the idea by analogy of machines doing
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science 24/7 automated is going to happen I'll give you one or two analogies if you were a musician back in the day you know if you and I were starting a band we would have to go and get studio time here in New York City or
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electric ladyland or whatever you bring your instruments okay maybe you could rent the instruments there and then garage ban and logic and Protools pops up and now we don't have to be in the same physical space my instrument is
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virtualized I can create a temporal sequence of notes I can layer them in you could play drums you could do vocals blah blah okay science is the same thing I can be on the beach in the Bahamas and conjure a hypothesis and use one of the
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AIS to test the hypothesis and look at past literature searches see freedom to operate see if there's white space and then tell one of these Cloud Labs that is literally like sending something to AWS back in the day and say run this
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experiment and the beauty of this is the robot will do the well here's the beauty the The Virtue and the vice the robot will do the experiment and it should do it perfectly because it's digital and it's High Fidelity the vice is so much
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scientific breakthrough has often happened because of serendipitous screw-ups right and so you want almost to engineer like a temperature on an AI Model A little bit of stochastic Randomness so that the machine can sort of screw it up to see what might happen
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because you know penicillin and Viagra and Rubber and vulcanization all these things happen by like random processes and post factor like huh that's funny and then you know you you run with it but then the machine will say here's the
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results and it will then reverse prompt you and say do you want to run the experiment again but changing the titration of this to 10 milliliters instead of five and you just click a button from the beach and you're like
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yes and the robots run it whoever ends up creating and building that I think is going to make a fortune well you don't even have to decide the robots could decide yes run it right and you're sort of out of the loop and it just outputs science
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that would be so interesting before we get to that point we'll probably get to the point where models make themselves better is that the the point where it really starts to go like parabolic almost I don't I don't know I I I
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definitely see that models can improve because you can even argue like deep seeks R1 is a model that was improving upon outputs from Chachi PT and and so on so I definitely think that there will be this recursive Improvement but you
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still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions you still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment and so you can model and simulate all you want but then you actually have to like do
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the thing and make the compound and and so those still take steps and you know organic chemistry and there's like 20 reaction steps and people optimize to like reduce them down to six and you still need the physical reagents and the right temperature and uh the
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experimental design so I still think that that's going to be the bottleneck but for sure like the ideation and experimental is going to that's just going to absolutely explode and then you'll have these automated Labs with lots of different instruments where
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robots will be able to take out a sample from a centrifuge and put it into the next thing and like you don't need humans to do that any more than you need humans to assemble sophisticated iPhones I mean we still have very cheap labor in
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foxcon factories and China and Vietnam and elsewhere now doing that but there's no reason for that over time isn't the lwh hanging truth though just like look at all the work that we've done so far and tell us where we're on the right
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track and where we're sort of like totally we're going astray and that like there's nothing preventing that from happening today I mean it's very like David dochain it's like if it obeys the laws of physics it should be possible
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there's nothing about this that is like totally speculative and Fantastical that it doesn't obey the laws of physics the other project that I wanted to I was thinking about sort of um doing is just calling like a prior art.org or
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something and having AI read through all the patents and make the next adjacent sort of like patent like Improvement and then just publish it cuz then there's prior art right uh well yeah there will for sure be AI patent trolls if you put
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it negatively this would dissuade that I mean in a sense it would sort of be making prior art for as much as you can 247 there are companies that do this where they have creative patent filers for continuations in part so that they
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can keep sort of the life of this going but the rise of agentic AI you can have some crazy idea some brain fart at you know 9:30 10:00 at night and you just had you know cocktail with friends and you're like oh like imagine you know if
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that ex okay well do the research does this exist and if it doesn't exist can you you know write a patent and sketch a diagram for me and file it and start an incorporate a company now all those things have to go at the speed of like
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certain processes but all of that could be done overnight where you literally wake up and there are multiple agents working on your behalf that have filed a patent created a design Incorporated a company possibly even put it out to some
33:01
group and raised money for it overnight that have opted into it and I I don't know if there was like successful enough and it hit a bunch of criteria I might allocate some Capital into an account to allow a robot AI to actually receive
33:16
pitches respond to it and create a small portfolio to allocate as an experiment so you can see this whole thing as just like a human idea or maybe one inspired by interactions with an AI that by the time you wake up you have a company
33:28
started and the basis for people to actually do work like that in 10 or 20 years people look back and like how did we not see that coming and look at all the jobs that are being created because every single person is now creating and
33:43
has like six virtual companies the future is going to be wild yeah talk to me let's go back to Tesla for a second why the hate on Tesla let me say I think Elon is amazing at certain things Elon is is arguably the greatest Storyteller
34:00
fundraiser inspiration for anybody in in the past maybe in all time truly I think his relationship with the truth has been questionable and so in Tesla particularly I think there was a time where the short sellers started to identify things not because they just
34:18
hated the company or hated the future or any of this and he was able to very shrewdly weaponize the US vers them they're trying to kill us right most short sellers that I know happen to be very disaffected people and they have a
34:30
chip on their shoulder and to me the motivating force and the incentive for them is not that they just want to make money but they want to be right and they want to be right because they've identified somebody that they think is
34:44
intentionally doing wrong it's the same thing as an investigative journalist it's the same thing as a opposition research for a politician it's the same thing for somebody that is trying to debunk a Sunday preach charlot in that
34:59
basically is almost intellectually competitive to say you are trying to pull the wool over these people's eyes and I know what you're doing and I'm going to call you out on it and so for me with Tesla I think that they got away
35:13
with accounting fraud on warranty reserves and a whole bunch of other things I think there was a lot of pressed digitation and magic of look over here while we're doing this and today it doesn't matter because they got away with it but I think that there was
35:28
not the same kind of honesty that I would ascribe to Jeff Bezos in how he built Amazon and you know raised a few hundred million dolls of equity you could look at stock-based compensation you could look at debt as capitalization
35:40
but created this monster that is profitable cash flow positive and never raised another dollar of equity and Elon raised north of $50 billion took out $50 billion treated it like an ATM said I'm never selling a share and sold lots of
35:55
shares and then you whether he had to do it to buy Twitter or whatever I just I don't feel it was done as honestly as other entrepreneurs that I greatly admire now that said SpaceX I have no issue with I think SpaceX is an extraordinary company I think it's an
36:09
incredibly important American company I think without it we would be at a massive disadvantage I think it is truly a National Treasure Run by gwin Shotwell incredible Engineers we've backed a bunch of these Engineers that have come
36:21
out from Tom Mueller to that I I just I think the world of I've just yeah been much more critical about elon's relationship with the truth as it came to Tesla and in many ways I felt like the whole thing was unnecessary do you
36:35
think those are onetime things or they're systemic and they crop up every few months or something in his Personality yeah he's past the stratosphere now like it's you know he's he's proximate to power in ways that people can't compete with if you're um
36:51
an investor in or you're Sam Alman in open AI you're not only worried about competition you're worrying about a personal Grudge from somebody who has the ear of the president that can weaponize all kinds of uh systems of
37:03
power from the doj to the FTC to the FBI and I I would be very nervous uh being an adversary with that kind of power so Alman came out and said he didn't think Elon would would use that power against him which is a nice and smart thing and
37:19
a necessary thing to say publicly and I think that Elon has even said like I won't use that but what what's the saying power corrupts yeah an absolute power corrupts absolutely but I don't know like uh you're in a position of power at Doge and uh om and office of personnel and are you and you have influence and you can shut some of these things down Does Elon love the SEC um you know he's been pretty vocal about that institution does he love the
37:48
national highway Transit safety uh so if these things are gutted you know I think you've got more free reign to shut down criticism you know you've got simil the best entrepreneurs when short sellers are like you know saying
38:01
something they don't want to ban Short Selling they don't want short sellers to be arrested they just prove him wrong and so my favorite story about that was Brad Jacobs and his the the short report came out the stop draw precipitously he
38:16
borrowed two billion dollar bought back shares and yeah right totally we're going to double down and go forward I think he turned that two into 10 or eight or something thing like it was just crazy so for me I don't know at 13 or so like after I was
38:32
bought MIT bar mitford I I became atheist and I just wouldn't I would see like these preachers exploiting people it just like irked me and it irked me in this it wasn't in some I I reflected on this over the years it wasn't in some
38:45
virtuous holier than thou kind of thing it was intellectually competitive it's like I see what you're doing you're running a con and I want to call it out and it wasn't rooted in like self virtue of like Pursuit Of Truth the real thing
38:59
when I like thought about it is no I I want to show that you're cheating people well short sellers are necessary to a well functioning market right we need to hear both sides of the story and make our own judgments and decisions what
39:10
point do you think that computers are going to really make most of the investing decisions well you could argue today they are not because they're doing reasoning and Analysis and fundamental work but because the structure of the market is so dominated by passive
39:26
indexation and that is effectively an algorithm and that algorithm says $1 in buy $1 out sell and in both cases indiscriminately and so you just have a flood of money that goes into the market and these indices buy everything and it
39:42
becomes this massive market cap weighted accelerant and then people say sell and then the money just comes out so the past I don't know 10 plus years where this has really become the case with Fidelity and black rock and state treat
39:55
and others that the ETFs which were well-intentioned you know you go and listen to Buffett back in the day it's like just put it in the market right you're it's hard for active managers to outcompete um definitely the case for
40:05
the past 10 or 15 years um but I I do think that we will see a return to active managers that are able to discriminate true fundamentals in part because I think that the cost of capital is just going to rise and all the funny
40:20
money of the past 10 years is is going to wash out two questions two rabbit holes I want to go down here one at what point do you think active managers an analyst is replaced by AI in the same way that Zak is saying an engineer at
40:32
meta is going to be replaced by AI already there are AIS that can not only go through q's and KS 10 q's and 10ks and can listen to quarterly earning reports and CEOs that are talking at conferences or on podcasts and can get
40:49
an emotional sentiment can see where they're varying their language in ways that only the subtlest of analysts in the past or portfolio manager could do and I think the most valuable thing that AI is going to do when you ask it questions and it comes up with the
41:02
answers and assuming those answers are accurate and cross-correlated and double checked they actually say here's the five questions you didn't ask and so that is going to unleash real insight now there is still this human aspect of
41:16
being able to look at somebody and decide do I trust them or not and I think that the best analysts are able to say very Buffet like or Joel green like is this a good business and there's ways to measure that like a fundamentally
41:31
good business even if an idiot was running it and then do I think it's at a good price and is therefore my expected return going to be high and do I trust the people that are running it because ultimately I am allocating Capital to
41:43
them in the same way that somebody allocates Capital to us I like the virtue of our private markets because I am less we're still beholden but far less beholden to a day-to-day Market you know Mr Market um fluctuation of you know manic depressive positivity or or
41:59
pessimism uh we have 10year locked funds we're able to make long-term bets it's arguably this great source of time Arbitrage when everybody else is looking and discounting back a year or 18 months or two years but you know you think
42:11
about the three main sources of Edge and we've talked about this in the past but informational analytical and behavioral informational Advantage used to exist a long time ago regulations like reg FD and avoidance of insider trading and
42:24
information that try to equalize the plan field in addition to a huge influx of really brilliant people that are able to use cuttingedge data tools having an information Advantage is really hard having an analytic Advantage where AI
42:38
can play a role in that let's assume we all have the same information and I don't have any better Intel or information like for example just as an aside on the information Advantage there was a hedge fund which I won't name
42:48
which was very cleverly going and actually buying stuff online from Adobe every time they did they got a piece of legal inside information which is adobe's web URL actually when you made a purchase for Creative Cloud would tell
43:05
you uh 4,723 or whatever and then like six hours later they would go and it was like 4 million2 and so they could infer and extrapolate what the sales were based on this because when they bought it six days later or six hours later or
43:18
whatever they saw where they were in the queue and you can sort of extrapolate that that was legal to do but once that signal leaks out and somebody's like oh that's a clever way to figure that out then it rapidly erodes so informational
43:31
Advantage hard analytical Advantage brilliant people combined with brilliant technology really hard and then it goes into this last one which is the behavioral and that to me is the persistent thing now ai over time will understand us in many ways better than
43:46
we understand ourselves Google already arguably knows more about you than the closest people in your life based on the things that you search for search and private for um and AI will as well and already there's an eerie moment that I
43:59
appreciate because I've given myself over to the information Gods there's an required energy to try to maintain privacy and I just feel like it's not worth it Mo we can talk about privacy because most people basically just want
44:11
to keep private you know their sex life their bathroom time and their how much money they have unless you are super rich or super poor because if you're super rich you broadcast you know you're on the Forbes 100 400 you're showing the
44:24
house you just bought the art you just bought you're signaling your wealth and if you're broke then you're really poor there's people that are on Twitter like I'm dead ass broke I have no money you know and they literally it's the people
44:34
that are in the middle that are middle class but want people to think that they're upper class or people that you know and and so uh everything else for privacy I think is like out the window but reason I was saying this is um I've
44:46
given myself over to the information gods and when I go to chat GPT because it has memory and it's constantly updating it there are times where it remembers thing that I'm like how did it know that and I forgot that it was like
44:55
from a search three months ago I mentioned something about my kids and a place that I like to vacation and part of me actually appreciates that that repository is compounding but it does sort of scare you because I remember the
45:08
things that we talked about and then if you were like oh like I heard you went to that i' be like well who' you hear that from but now if I asked the AI who'd you hear that from it would be like you you told me that you told me wait till it gets on your device and
45:20
then okay well let's go back up this Rabbit Hole a little bit here back to passive indexation so the of this is really post 2010 right the mass rise of passive indexing we've never seen uh well we did during covid but there was
45:36
so much money thrown into the system what do you think the second third order effects of this will be especially in terms of volatility or something unforeseen well you saw this a little bit with just how quickly the market reacted with a single largest one day
45:53
loss of five six 700 billion dollar with Nvidia just because of the fear over deep seek and the fear was a cascading you know traditional information Cascade oh my gosh what does this mean for the expectations we have about demand for
46:06
compute and and capex and the expenditures that people are going to have do we need to rethink this mental model and and so I think that there'll be things like that that whipsaw and shock people did they become reflexive
46:20
at some point like maybe at 500 million or 500 billion it didn't but had that hit 700 or 8 or trillion like does it then start the auto selling and the it's a good question I don't I I I don't know obviously systems where there are
46:35
significant leverage in the system are ones that are most prone to that the sort of Minsky moments where you know things are going fine going fine then suddenly they just collapse um and usually that's where you have a lot of
46:45
Leverage in the system and sometimes it's hidden leverage I don't know other than some of the 2x or 3x leverage ETFs that that's the case um in in in traditional Market but where does this go from here I'm not sure on the passive
47:00
active piece what will break this other than if you were to have widespread news reports of a handful of active managers that are suddenly beating the market you know decisively and they're pointing to the structure of the market and and so
47:16
there's a rebalancing where people start to shift out of these things on the volatility piece what's interesting is over the past five six seven years maybe five especially a lot of LPS allocators have gone into private credit have gone
47:30
into private equity in part because they are mechanisms of muting volatility and the vicissitudes of the market because you don't have daily marketto market and so there's been a little bit of this perverse incentive but as Buffett says
47:45
you know what the wise do in the beginning the fool does in the end and then these things get overdone and and so I'm actually worried about some of those asset classes where private Credit in particular I think was wise to do a
47:56
few few years ago and now is overdone you have another phenomenon which is every major sophisticated large private Equity Firm Apollo KKR carile Etc are all starting to think about or are actively thinking about both permanent capital in the form of insurance
48:12
vehicles like Apollo and accessing retail in a huge way that many people see retail being the next wave of this and when you say retail you actually just mean normal day-to-day consumers individual investors that might have
48:25
been on Robin Hood and could never hear to or access Apollo or Carlile but in aggregate you're talking about trillions of dollars of investor money and so I think that they're going to be tapped they're going to be into these vehicles
48:38
that will present new interesting Financial Vehicles because you're going to have to find ways to give people liquidity for these things and so I've heard about some interesting things actually from a friend my green who I think is a really smart
48:54
practitioner and student of markets he was one of the earliest to this passive active piece he was one of the earliest to understanding the mechanisms behind the scenes for the spack movement he's early now to this idea of Unis swap
49:09
which has a certain mechanism that provides liquidity by having let's say like 80 or 90% in treasuries and 10% in some underlying and you're able to swap out some IL liquid thing for effectively some liquid pool up to some point
49:25
there's some repricing and he's been thinking about uh something that like Apollo is doing with State Street and that this port 10s a movement into these almost artificial like like if I would have talked about ETF 20 years ago
49:39
people like what is you know don't we have mutual funds already and like no but they're going to go super low fee and you'll be able to trade them on a daily basis there's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that
49:51
will go into illiquid alts private equity in particular and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that and I think that that's both going to be really interesting and potentially to your point creates something that sets up
50:07
some massive blowup the other thing that I want to come back to in the rabbit hole here is you mentioned persistent Advantage is behavioral yes talk about that in the context of humans and how do we create an unfair advantage in a world
50:22
of AI for humans like what are the ways that we can like your kids it's like how are you teaching them to navigate this in a way that gives them an advantage an advantage um well a behavioral Advantage so you know you go back some years and
50:36
it was like okay we can still beat computers in chess done we can still beat them in go done we can be in video games done okay but we still have creativity done now of course human creativity is not dead but every day I
50:51
am doing something creative on AI that I can't do I cannot paint I cannot draw I cannot conjure I like taking photographs and I like the composition of that but I can engineer prompts which itself is an act of creativity and get the most
51:05
inspiring Muses and results and I can take works of art that I like and put them in and ask it to describe it and do it six times particularly in like mid journey and recreate from The Prompt some alternative of it there was even an
51:20
artwork that I loved which was this mix Mash of superheroes that looked like it was put through a blender and I was going to buy the artist's work and then I couldn't describe it to Lauren my wife and so I put it into mid journey and
51:32
described it and then I just clicked a button and it made four versions of it I guess 16 versions because each one was four and it was insane and I was like why am I going to buy this cuz I just recreated and I felt morally bad because
51:46
I wasn't copying but I had a perfect description of the style and and so I thought that that was pretty wild so these are tools that I think kidss should be using they should be learning just like a language and I think they need to be versed with it um in part to
52:01
understand the domains to avoid because they're going to be not void of emotional or aesthetic or moral value but you're not going to make money and so my wife and I debate this all the time about dance dance is amazing um we
52:21
started dating and she took me to this dance thing I was really not into dance at all at at Parson's theater it was this guy uh uh David Parson's uh at the Joyce and he has this performance called caught and me being into Science and
52:35
Technology I'm watching a bunch of people dance I'm not really into it and all of a sudden uh it's a weird Ambient sound very electronic very tron-like and there's a guy in a in white pants and and that's it and and then a strob light goes on anyway and
52:50
the strobe starts flashing and all you see as a viewer is this person floating in the air but behind the scenes what they're really doing is jumping jumping jumping jumping perfectly time to the choreography of the strobe so you see
53:05
them caught but they're doing this crazy kinetic athletic thing right and I was just like that's super cool right everybody should see this right and it was just like inspiring now that said we had this debate afterwards because she's
53:17
like you know these dancers make no money and I'm like well Market forces would say that there's too many dancers or there's not enough demand and they collect like unemployment insurance for half the year because they have to work
53:29
other jobs and they don't have this and it's just wild and so we got into a debate about you know what is the societal value of this now I found it valuable and I would go and I would pay money and be a patron but I wouldn't
53:40
want my kids to go and pursue that unless it was that they were solving for just the aesthetic passion that they had yeah but I think that there's very few crevices where AI will not creep in and either be able to do the thing nearly as good
53:58
including you think about the compression that I that we all enjoy of a Game of Thrones episode the compression of the compression algorithm of all of that Talent set design special effects screenwriting a lifetime of acting and Performing you know just Swit
54:14
down one of our companies runwayml you can and there's others that you can conjure today it's 10 seconds but tomorrow it'll be 2 minutes and full feature films with no key grips no lighting no costume design no set design
54:26
no actors and voice is entirely generated by Ai and so does that strip this art of its Soul kind of thing uh I don't think so I think it just creates a new form of art just like Pixar you know for all the people that were doing Disney Mickey
54:43
animations by hand and then suddenly we get this 3D rendered graphics and incredible storytelling that will be timeless but the tools that we will use will will very rapidly replace these things so I think our kids should be
54:56
embracing and using all of these tools the only tool that I restrict them from is Tik Tok but otherwise and that's for a variety of bad influence and Chinese Communist party uh but but otherwise I want them learning how to use every tool
55:10
as they would every Appliance in a kitchen and outside of those tools where do you think the advantage comes from is like a a networking advantage and who you know become more pronounced I think it's this I think it's human to human I
55:23
think that if you always can frame things as like what what's abundant and what's scarce in a world where there's going to be an abundance of access to information an abundance of access to um creative construction of things art and
55:38
literature and movies and um and just by the way as an as side I also will take boring PTA messages from our school and I will put them into large language models and send them to my wife where I'm like do this in the style of Matt
55:51
LaVine the Bloomberg daily writer um or do this in the style of Shane Parish or do this in the style of alware engine from Deadwood um and it's just it's absolutely entertaining and Brilliant and take something that's so boring and and cliched and hackneyed
56:05
and like just brings it to life right I do the same thing so and it's it's a lot of fun right it actually makes this stuff interesting but um but the advantage is going to come in what do I do with that when I output it I you know
56:17
I enjoy it for a second but then I share it and so all of these things all the value all the market capitalization of all social media is about sharing and I still think that we're going to produce we're going to share and what becomes
56:28
scarce is this is like human connection because we are still human and we still want that we want to be hugged and we want intimacy and we want to laugh with each other I mean I'll I'll share just a quick aside from this like two or three
56:42
months before Danny Conan died last year Lauren and I went over with a filmmaker and and another woman and we had a dinner with Danny and his partner Barbara derski who was Amos his wife and we were talking about um aging and
56:59
getting older and memories and Danny had this great point about that the pleasure of pleasurable things um got less pleasurable but less than the pain of painful things got less painful so for him the loss of a friend um you became a
57:17
little bit antiz to it the first time you lose a friend it's tragic but when all your friends are dropping dead it's it's like H this is just happening you know first person you know gets divorced and all these things over time the
57:30
halflife of the pain just decreases you're still losing the pleasurable things so food didn't taste as good and wine didn't taste as good and music didn't sound as good and sleep wasn't as good and sex wasn't as good and all these pleasurable things but he
57:42
thought that the pain was less painful than the pleasure was less pleasurable and so I thought that was interesting Insight Barbara had a different View and she's still alive and I'm taking some license to share her view but she she
57:54
said No it's it's it's still painful and the main reason she said that pain is painful is that these memories I have of Amos or I I shared that moment with this person and the great human feeling is commiserating about the thing that we
58:11
experience together or the memory and laughing hysterically at which I still do with my childhood friends of this shared moment and AI will never get that a another person won't get the inside joke and so to your question about the
58:26
the advantage the advantage is in that human connection because we are still human and we want that we Pine for it and so I thought that was a really profound counter to Danny's view which is that when you lose these people you
58:38
lose the partner to amplify that emotion a good one or a bad one and I think that being able to have like uniquely human experiences understand each other support each other um that that is still going to be an advantage a lot of the
58:52
things you said what what sort of the Common Thread with them in my mind was we feel part of something larger than just ourselves yes like relate this to working remotely or and how this interacts with other things right where
59:08
we might not feel part of something larger than ourselves and remot work is a great example where you you sort of the ability is there whether you do part-time or full-time to shut off your laptop and the world looks like you
59:20
right you're not forced to interact with people with different political views different socioeconomic status you surround yourself so you don't feel a part of something bigger and that changes how you vote it changes a whole bunch of things in your life I would
59:33
imagine I'm speculating here but I'm sort of like thinking out loud no I I I think a lot of your values a lot of our values and again I'm going to invoke Danny here in a in a conversation before he passed away was that you may think
59:48
you think the things you think because you analyzed and you reasoned whatever but no the reason you think the thing you think is because of the five or six most important people around you and they sort of believe something and you
1:00:00
believe them and so you get an information contagion and you will tell yourself that you believe it because you really thought deeply about it and you reason through this and but no the reality is you believe things just because there's the social phenomenon
1:00:12
so working from home versus working in person there are so many I I everybody is here Monday through Friday now you know at first it was Monday through Thursday take Friday now I'm like look if you need to leave you go family first
1:00:24
it's a principal here miss a concert recital a a science fair but but we need to be together why because there's so many interstitial moments there's a chance Serendipity moment because I come out of a meeting and I'm able to
1:00:38
introduce you to grace or Brandon is meeting with somebody and every day hey do you have a minute you know knock knock and then somebody's making an introduction and you just never know what it unlocks that never happens on Zoom or on calls it just doesn't the
1:00:48
structure of that doesn't allow for that Serendipity and those sort of human connections the ability to really feel when somebody swallows when you ask them a question and they're feeling nervous or like yeah you're like hey like is
1:01:00
something going on you know and and they're because everybody's fighting some epic battle you know theyve got relationship issues they got parents issues they got a sick person like and and we are just we're still human so I
1:01:11
feel deeply that we should all be connected in person and I do think that that's an advantage in a world of abundant AI um and sort of cold sterile even if it has the Similac of and and again a lot of people will use AI in a
1:01:26
beneficial way to share things that they might not even be comfortable sharing with a person and have a consultant a therapist to to help them but I'll give another example which is um another colleague here moved from one city to
1:01:39
another and he happens to be a religious observant but is an atheist okay but he moved to this new city and he found a tribe that he's like I immediately plugged in like we didn't know anybody we didn't have any friends but by being
1:01:53
part of this religion we stantly had friends and peers and I was like not that it's cynical or selfish or you know we could put a a veilance of meaning behind but really at the end of it is like will you help me is there reciprocity and that's this like ancient
1:02:11
sense of whether it's transactional or not it's overt or not you're signaling the depth of the sacrifices that you would make for the group this idea that something is bigger than yourself belonging is arguably like the most pleasurable thing having friendships you
1:02:26
know you do all these look at all these studies of people that age and what was meaningful to them in leading a good life and being ostracized or feeling rejected or left as like the most painful thing so I think that that's a
1:02:37
Timeless human truth and uh I certainly feel like and I encourage this with my kids by the way I don't want them just to have a group of friends in school because just like the diversity that you need in a portfolio you need to have
1:02:50
Hedges and all these other things because maybe something is not going right in that friend group and then you are more at risk of catastrophy in MH that oh my God like nobody likes me and you know and so if you're in a soccer
1:03:02
team and you're you go to a religious group or you're in Hebrew school or you're on a dance team and you have a neighborhood group of friends and my kids are in like six different things outside of school each and they then can
1:03:14
bring these people together which itself adds this feeling of like oh I connected people and I'm this node and it sort of cements the network in a way that is is profound and meaning F and and comforting I like that I want to come to
1:03:29
aging a little bit here I don't want to do it I don't want to age talk to me about this because I feel like based on the research happening now the amount of money going into this the progress that we seem to be making at least on
1:03:43
biomarkers that we understand uh we seem to be able to dramatically slow at best our aging process you think we're going to make a Quantum Leap in in term of average lifespan for maybe adding 10 or 15 or 20 good years in the next 10 years I think that's
1:04:00
possible 10 or 15 or 20 um not doubling I mean we did that you know in a few Generations you know people die at 40 years old or 50 years old and people now regularly live till their 70s or 80s you know this is an interesting thing
1:04:13
because I'm I we don't fund longevity work here uh and I'm personally not invested in any of these things uh I will go to my doctor and uh I will get my blood test and he will suggest that I take some supplements cuz I'm low iron or this or that and that's entirely
1:04:31
reasonable uh just to maintain sort of homeostatic function but I don't go absolutely crazy and intense but I appreciate the people Brian Johnson and others that are self- hacking and doing this and pursued and Ray KW was doing it
1:04:43
back in the day nobody has really seen Ray out that much you know uh he was taking like I don't know 100 supplements a day or something like that and last I saw I think he had a dupay and like it was like a messy situation but I'm I'm
1:04:56
glad these people are doing it both in pursuit of staving off their own mortality and a public service either interpreted as I can't believe you go to these extremes and I'm not going to do that because it's super stressful or
1:05:08
maybe you're going to unearth something and we're all going to be on met Forman and all these you know but there are this Timeless pursuit of avoiding death you know um it's very human it it is and and it goes back like the first form of
1:05:22
avoiding death was I'm not going to die so for the Fountain of Youth and ponel own today modern Pharmaceuticals and drugs and supplements and lifestyle changes um the second form was fine I'm going to die but I'm going to come back
1:05:37
and so reincarnation and maybe that was the spiritual or religious ense and then today's version of that would be Alor or any of these cryo I'm going to freeze my brain so that when they figure this out they'll bring me back um the third was
1:05:52
okay fine I'm going to die but I am more than my physical self there's an ethereal the soul the modern technological version would be the ghost in the machine endless Sci-Fi movies about people uploading themselves and their likeness which by the way are sort
1:06:05
of a really interesting phenomenon of how we deal with loss and the ability if there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice and my likeness and everything I've ever said which I have done that my kids would actually have a
1:06:18
dad Ai and maybe they can consult it for questions or and is that a good thing or a bad thing I don't know but it is going to be a thing yeah then you have okay I'm going to die but I'm going to live on through my progeny through my
1:06:29
children through my genes which is the evolutionary impetus and and I'm going to live on through my works and you won't be there to experience either of those things unlike the first three where you're not going to die or you're
1:06:40
going to come back and so I think about the people that whether it's where I grew up in con Island Brooklyn they put graffiti on the wall and they put themselves up until it gets washed away or if you're Dave Rubenstein or Steve
1:06:51
schwarzman You Put Your Graffiti etched in stone on the New York Public Library or but it's really no different just $100 million instead of free and the potential for being jailed um and then it's through your children and I think there it's very Buffet like the moral
1:07:06
sort of mandate would be like he described Don K of kooch that when you do die you want them to say what they said about him which was everybody loved him yeah um I don't have that like not everybody loves me but my kids you know
1:07:20
is most important I think the theory was the people that you want to love you love you which is interesting because the people that we celebrate the most if you think about Steve Jobs and even Elon like are the people that are closest to
1:07:31
him I don't mean millions of fans that don't actually know him but I used to have this debate with one of my best friends about Steve Jobs like the world loves Steve Jobs yeah but like people in his orbit didn't always love Steve he's
1:07:45
like terrible you know like he was so mean or like so I think that's really interesting but going back the common thing amongst all the people that have tried to defeat death from the people that weren't going to die through found
1:07:56
of Youth or modern biotech the people that were going to upload themselves the people that were going to come back the people that leave it you know to their kids or to their works the common thing amongst all them is that they're dead
1:08:06
you know nobody has beaten death and so the mental model that I like on this is okay take a piece of paper and put the day you were born on the front and then the day you're going to die roughly plus 80 years on the back and the only thing
1:08:19
that you may have control over in part is the story that you write between these two pages and my brother in-law passed when he was early 40s stomach cancer you know he lived a tragic short to you know relative to others and but
1:08:32
maybe you get to live this epic to and it's like how do you write it and who do you spend your time with and nobody's going to look back and say ah you know I wish I would have taken that extra meeting or done that extra business trip
1:08:41
or something it's like I'm really glad that I was there for my kids or my spouse and yet you work really hard and you and I always prioritize my kids like I think about all the time like their judgment you know some people are like
1:08:54
meet their make you know because I don't believe I care deeply well they say my dad was there for everything and in part for me because my father was not present in my life my parents spw when I was super young it's my little guy who's I
1:09:08
have two daughters and a son but my son who's nine always wants me to have a play date with my dad you know and and uh we're we're civil and we speak a few times a year but um I'm like it's just not that relationship I'm not going to
1:09:19
have that you know and he's like yeah but I really want you guys to and I'm like no I get to be the dad that I am to you because I didn't really have that and I'm making up for it now and and this is what it is and then I worry that
1:09:31
if they see such a present father do they take that for granted oh dude and then do they screw it up in the next Generation you know and and so I have the same thoughts I actually talked to a therapist who had this because I was
1:09:41
like am I too present in their lives like they need some space you know I'm home when they get home from after school and my wife and I talk about this like my parents split my father was married four times um all I wanted was a stable nuclear family but if my kids
1:09:56
grow up in a stable nuclear family do they take it for granted and does like one of them become a cheater and Infidel and all this kind of stuff because they and I have no idea but but I know for me what is Meaningful and what makes me
1:10:06
feel good and it's a totally selfish thing that is about solving for what I want but selflessly I think it ends up being virtuous so what would your top like three or four priorities be then if you were to outline them my kids and my
1:10:19
wife call it family number one I mean you know you think about like the people that lost everything physically materialistically in the fires recently in La like family is like the you know and I don't care over time as they grow
1:10:31
up and where they are and they're you know but that to me is like the most important thing number two is purpose and meaning I think this is a universal thing but I feel lucky that I enjoy what I do it's an intellectual puzzle there's
1:10:45
times of like great Fierce competition we're losing to you know I don't like to lose we're losing out to another firm that's got an entrepreneur I like the intellectual Gra ific a of being right when other people are wrong I'm very
1:10:57
intellectually competitive that way and discovering something that people haven't discovered I always talk about lus Pauling the double Noel Laureate who wanted for both chemistry and and peace and uh he has this quote about science
1:11:10
which I just absolutely love and this is like I hope until I'm 90 or 100 or 110 or whatever modern science lets me live till that I I continue to have this cuz it's an addictive feeling which is that I know something that nobody else knows
1:11:24
and they won't know until I tell them and I love that discovering a legal secret and knowing that this is going to be announced at the scientific breakthrough is coming and nobody else knows about it yet so that to me is like
1:11:36
meaning and purpose it's intellectually competitive I and and I understand the intellectual competitiveness I want to be right I want to make money uh I want the credit for it but it really is about like the status because otherwise you
1:11:48
would just do these things in private and totally in quiet but I I like that feeling of that uh even if it's vain glorious and ego and all you know vanity and so family that sense of purpose driven by this intellectual competitiveness um and then I think I
1:12:03
didn't appreciate this as much but it's sort of adjacent to the first there's a handful of people who I imagine myself like retiring with or like like guy friends and people that I enjoy spending time with that have the same sort of
1:12:15
values and they're they're very family driven and so uh my cousin in particular this amazing guy Jason redist one of my wife's best friends this woman Carmel they're both we call it family they're like friends and family but yeah it's a
1:12:30
powerful thing that I don't want to ever lose that's awesome um you process a ton of information what's that workflow like for information to get to you how are you using technology to filter how are you filtering information so I I
1:12:45
typically go to bed between 12:00 and 12:30 wake up around 700 um kids before they leave for school about 40 minutes I do a lot of physical activity usually three days a week between working out trainer Jiu-Jitsu all kinds of
1:12:59
interesting stuff but uh probably about an hour to an hour and a half in the mornings of reading through something like 40 different papers now it used to be like seven but then when I start to travel internationally if I went to the
1:13:12
mid East I would find an English version of some of the key papers same thing in Japan and elsewhere and so now I read a lot of international papers and when I say read I'm I'm I use an app called press reader it has the digital replica
1:13:23
of the specific version which I really value and I know we've talked about this in the past but I like to know what the editor put on c22 y That's not as visible on the website because there's meta information that the editor is
1:13:34
saying this is not important to be on the front page but if I disagree and I think that there's a magnitude of informational importance that to me is like some sort of edge then I will take screenshots of those and so I will sort
1:13:47
of call it Scout and scour through all these papers take screenshots in some cases I may even take those screenshots and put them into in Ai and basically say give me the summary of this article or give me the three key quotes that really matter um
1:14:02
and so I'll go down all kinds of like rabbit holes with that so that's the first which is just like call it 24 hours worth of information that is basically put into editorial decree you can usually get the Ft in New York time
1:14:14
like 4: 5 6 p.m. eastern time and so you have a little bit of information Edge because most people don't get the Ft for another 12 or 14 hours but they know they don't know that they could get it online but that to me is is Val
1:14:25
and I care about all those things including not the sophisticated newspapers um but like the less sophisticated ones like USA Today and I want to know what is the average person going to read when they wake up in a Marriott and get the paper delivered
1:14:35
under their door and that kind of stuff then Twitter uh you know I have all kinds of lists that I follow and it give time it might be something that is geopolitical and War related where I'm going down a deep hole or sometimes it's
1:14:45
Ai and technology sometimes it's my team and what they're posting and reading about but a lot on Twitter which I find truly invaluable I mean I I know a lot of people say it's like this dark cess pool of whatever but you can just filter
1:14:56
through and cut out the people I'm muting and blocking people all the time and and um and I'm discovering all kinds of just absolutely incredible people it has been as you know from one of our first conversations like this idea of
1:15:06
Randomness and optionality it is this huge Randomness generator this huge optionality generator and the accessibility and I just I absolutely love it so um that's another thing where I'm really rooting for Elon in the continued success of of X because I'll
1:15:20
continue to pay a lot of money for it and I pay more money for it but I find it super valuable and and it's real-time pulse and I'm excited for grock to continue because I think that grock and X just continue to sort of that's a
1:15:31
repository we talked about that before repository of information one of the first things Elon did was cut off access to Google from the data and I and I and I think that's a right move right this is this is our platform same way as meta
1:15:43
has so I think that that repository of everybody's tweets and retweets and likes and the comments that they've made you can already go on and do this in sort of a a relatively superficial way where you can say roast me and it will
1:15:55
basically off your past I don't know like 25 or 30 tweets sort of roast you based on what you've tweeted about but there longitudinal access of people that have I don't know 10,000 100,000 tweets is an amazing Pastiche of like you know
1:16:08
what um there's an interesting thing here which we were just riffing on internally which I'll come back to just remind me on sort of wrapping yourself in this information Mosaic and Breaking Free from it but uh papers in the
1:16:21
morning Twitter uh internal slack emails uh text texts you know just like processing all this information I use rewind on my Mac which is effectively doing nonstop screen capture and there will be other tools like this in part because I do not remember the source
1:16:37
when I saw information it's sort of the same thing of like if you see a show and you were to ask me today like where did you I don't know was on Apple TV like was it on Paramount was it on CBS was it on Netflix like I have no idea right and
1:16:48
in fact usually when I do the Apple search and it doesn't show up it means it's on Netflix cuz it can't search Netflix right yeah just huge information omnivore uh everything and then there's some you know random writer that I
1:17:01
follow that's like Katherine Schultz at the New Yorker Adam gnik and people whose style of writing and the the selection of their subjects I find really interesting then I'll go deep into some of their themes so you use rewind press rater what are the other
1:17:14
like technological tools that you're finding super Val every AI I might take a essay read it ask it to summarize the key points um ask it to put it in different voice es take two different essays and say where do these things
1:17:28
agree or disagree and so yeah like just non-stop I'm I'm on AI easily more than Google now but um I don't know two three hours a day what have you learned about prompting that would help everybody get better results usually very specific like uh I give it
1:17:45
a priming thing like you are the world's if it's a neuroscience paper you are the world's greatest expert in Neuroscience you have read every paper that has there has has been published you have both a skeptical eye to new
1:17:58
claims but you are also open-minded to interesting correlations that might not have been considered read this paper and you know give me the three most provocative non-obvious points and give me the three cliche you know and so just
1:18:12
and by the way I will put them into three different models at the same time so I will open three different browsers you know arrange them and put it into chat GPT put it into Claude put it into one of the perplexity models it's not
1:18:22
running on those two and you know sometimes I'll mix a match them I love that yeah it's sort of like a pallet of you know mixing we we have not yet done this as as a partnership but we've talked about it having an AI
1:18:37
partner um there's still behavioral discomfort about recording conversations you and I are recording our conversation now but every partnership discussion we have if we were confident that it was protected and encrypted because we might
1:18:50
say things that could be harmful you you don't want them coming out it could insult somebody or like or we have a piece of Intel that we don't want out but if we were comfortable that it was perfectly private which is a hard thing
1:19:02
to promise but if it was you would have a repository of every conversation we've ever had over the past X number of years the decisions that we wrestled with you would be able to have somebody to advise us an AI to advise us where are we
1:19:15
showing biases in inconsistency between a decision we made three months ago and this what what is different this time which voices are not speaking up you know and you can already get this in some cases with like certain Zoom calls
1:19:26
or other recording things where it'll tell you who spoke for how long and then you could run like aasian analysis of okay given that we're looking at these two companies give me the outside view the base rate of success historically
1:19:39
which inventure honestly doesn't matter but and then give me a Kelly Criterion of how you might size this based on the projected internal confidence and and so there's all kinds of things that we could internally do to use these tools
1:19:50
which I think over time we'll probably experiment with but the biggest thing is basically having like a capture of everything you know everything that you see everything that you hear everything that my my I I've already given over again to the Privacy
1:20:02
Gods everything that my screen sees and so I trust that that's siloed on my device it's not going to the cloud but it's super helpful when I'm trying to search for something I'm like was that a Gmail was that a text was that a yeah a
1:20:12
thing on Twitter was that a PDF I read where did I see that and the ability to DVR my life is super valuable if I could do that with my conversations like who said that the other day in fact Lauren and I just had somebody over you know we
1:20:24
hosted people at our house and we couldn't remember who told us this thing and we were like I had to go through my calendar to see who was over on Thursday or Friday oh yeah okay it was you know but being able to search your life
1:20:35
instantly I think is going to be a generational change in the same way that people were not comfortable you know posting on Facebook and then they were comfortable and then like now people are like posting themselves in swimsuits and
1:20:47
bikinis and it just doesn't matter that to me is going to be a big step change I want to come back to the info Mosaic but one thing we never talked about uh YouTube being like such a huge data Source Inc closed and slightly open I
1:21:01
guess yeah in some ways yeah like well I love that moment when um I think it was mirror from open AI was asked like you know so did you train and she like want to crickets okay the info Mosaic and Breaking Free from sort of like one thing I do love about ax is
1:21:19
that it shows you views that are contrary to your own like the algorithms gotten good yes and and there are what is it ground news that you can sort of do this where it will actually give you um a bias on you know certain things and
1:21:32
it'll give you both sides of the view so if you truly are objective and like truly knowledge seeking then you would want to experience that uh and I feel like that will be an option that you just click and enable a feature and you
1:21:41
know it's able to identify some of the biases and whatnot this idea of the information Mosaic was a recent conversation I was having with my colleague Danny kryon who runs like our risk gaming stuff where we're coming up with all kinds of crazy scenarios and
1:21:52
imagine these low probability High magnitude events and the idea was that over time this perfect Similac of Shane or of Josh is going to exist everything that I've ever said on every podcast everything I've ever written publicly
1:22:06
forget all my private thoughts but just everything that I'm out there publicly my voice my okay and so I almost imagined it like this matric like Mosaic like a Spider-Man costume that's like form fitting it's me or a close
1:22:18
approximation of me but what if you want to break free from that in a sense if I said give me something in the style of Shane Parish it might conjure something in the style of Shane Parish but and in the style of Josh Wolf or in the style
1:22:29
of David milch or Christopher Hitchens you know I I actually love invoking dead voices you know to to sort of bring them back from the dead right and and and have them opine on a topic what would Christopher say about this article blah
1:22:42
blah blah but what if I wanted to break free stylistically if I said um give me a image of a horse in Tribeca in the style of Wes Anderson you know I can imagine the pastel pallets that it would conjure and and you could imagine that
1:22:58
too with the you know rectilinear Framing and whatever but what if Wes Anderson suddenly had like a new stylistic change in his over and and wanted to just shift like he'd be constrained you know in the same way that people hate when you know I don't
1:23:12
know maybe when Dylan went electric or like you know somebody else changes their style or their genre and so there's this aspect where AI constrains you uh and just sort of playing with this idea of you know how do you break
1:23:27
free in the same way that there might be like the right to be forgotten that maybe you want to change your style the great virtue of college for most people yeah is this quartet of years where you can break free from who you were for the
1:23:39
past four years and nobody knows who you were and what you cared about and and maybe you were into heavy metal but you you were in like the band you know and you couldn't break free or maybe you were gay and nobody knew or all these
1:23:53
things that you can just suddenly like be yourself and explore new things and there's this element where the great virtue of college is self-exploration against the constraints of high school but could AI be this constraining Force
1:24:07
because the more content that you put into it the more knows you the more you may have trouble varying from it yeah and so there's something interesting there I like that a lot let's talk military and technology and you guys are
1:24:22
big investors in androl where is that going in the future well there's going to be a lot more Brilliant Minds I think that feel comfortable um motivated not only by a sense of purpose patriotism but also principal and capital making
1:24:38
that they see the things that they doubted early on like why is this time different another defense company of which there weren't very many but seeing andral's ascendency and valuation and success and program wins I think has
1:24:50
inspired a lot of people like wait there's something going on here we went from 50 primes down to five you're seeing the rise of these Neo primes I deeply believe that andril in the next few years will be a 30 to $50 billion publicly traded business doing singled
1:25:04
digigit mid billions in Revenue uh with software like margins that are not like these Cost Plus margin so that is going to usher in a big wave and they're buying companies they're acquiring smaller businesses but you'll continue
1:25:17
to see that sort of evolution in a world that people realize is not Kumbaya peace and safety there are Bad actors that when we take a step back or on our back foot or a little bit permissive that they arm up it happened with Iran and I think the prior administrations from Obama and Biden were well intentioned in trying to bring them into the Western world but you know it was a sort of ruse uh you know from Iran standpoint same thing with Gaza and
1:25:46
Israel and and Russia and who thought that we were going to see a land War you know in the 21st century where Russia would invade Ukraine and uh the China and Taiwan and North Korea and the African continent as we talked about in the sahal and mcreb um
1:26:03
infiltration of a lot of these groups into South America I mean there's just lots of conflict waiting and the best way to avoid conflict is to have deterrence and if Ukraine had nuclear weapons Putin wouldn't have invaded most
1:26:17
of the West and NATO you know really said don't worry we got your back and even though you're not part of NATO and they never nuclearized I I think the world timelessly you know through through all of human history is going to face enormous
1:26:32
conflict resource Wars water maybe next I think there's something like 1900 active conflicts around the world around water rights you look at China and Pakistan control of the water I mean there's just like a lot of resources you
1:26:48
look at disrupting undersea cables uh you know sabotage efforts you look at at uh deep sea mining you look at space as another Frontier uh there's just a lot of opportunities for zero some conflict and when you can't reconcile those conflicts
1:27:04
through diplomacy or negotiations or agreement it goes to violence and the people that can bring or affect or export violence typically have the upper hand and part of what has made this country great and made it powerful made
1:27:20
it the economic Juggernaut is is that it is allowing for the low entropy system even though the country at times seems chaotic that allows for the high entropy production of entrepreneurial ideas and and free market capitalism and Booms and
1:27:36
busts is that we have the most powerful military on the planet You could argue that that didn't just benefit the United States it benefited Canada Europe it benefited a lot of Mexico our allies for sure you can watch many fictional movies
1:27:50
that have run these counterfactuals of what would have happened you know if Nazi Germany had won or you know the Russians had landed in like a For All Mankind you know before we did in the moon and um but we're getting away from
1:28:02
an era of like here's a trillion dooll you know boat effectively it depends who you talk to uh you know if shouldn't we like I mean if that boat can be taken out by a $3,000 drone how effective is it yes for sure the asymmetry of a threat of an
1:28:19
aircraft carrier uh against a large Fleet of drones it is very much if you talk to Sam paparo who's the head of Indo pcom he will say it is all about Mass on target there's certain things that you know automation cannot you know
1:28:32
do and he wants what he calls which I guess is a technical term a hellscape in that region uh the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea and so that you make it really um impossible for them to have sort of any military dominance um but it is an era where it's
1:28:51
about you saw this again with Iran and Israel and Gaza Syria's missiles and counter missiles and Rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonics and space weapons it is just about going back to almost like Planet of the Apes
1:29:06
you know one ape through another a rocket another or a twig or a stone the weapons get more powerful but the behavior doesn't change we're back to throwing projectiles at each other you know and it's just they're they're
1:29:18
automated they're at speeds or at levels of a triable or overwhelming defensive forces that that is the battlefield do you think values become a disadvantage in some ways then like for example if the United States were oh we need a
1:29:34
human operator to pull the trigger and another country was no it could be completely automated for sure and therefore in a dog fight we're likely to more win like look this is already happening in the information space where
1:29:47
we have certain and in the autonomous space I I was in theic Pacific region with Socom and there's a drone operator who's flying the Drone there's another drone operator who's piloting the uh weapon system and there's two lawyers so
1:30:05
they're helping the commander who has effectively given like a god shot of you know how many combatants and civilians can be killed in what ratio and sometimes it's like 5 to1 or 10 to1 but there's lawyers that can authorize because we have a certain rule of
1:30:21
Engagement that frankly gives these military personnel the ethical comfort that this is a superior system but for sure if there are people that don't have that same moral code in some cases they can be at least temporarily advantaged
1:30:36
well you can think of that through AI too not just military right if we restrict we put restrictions on any technology and another country doesn't uh sometimes that can cause an advantage to another country China has the 50 Cent
1:30:48
Army you know these people are getting you know 50 cents for every tweet and information they put out the state department when they want to tweet something out through groups there's literally like a disclaimer that says and it's like one woman in Tampa that's
1:31:01
doing this like this was sponsored by the state like so we have these ethical restrictions which definitely tie our hands behind the our back in some cases and our enemies will always try to weapon weaponize this so I mean you can
1:31:13
look at many vectors today that don't seem like they're thread vectors but they have been weaponized yeah social media information we know and the best fix for that is ident identifying the Bad actors and also inoculating people
1:31:26
with a heightened degree of skepticism but the vast majority of the American population will not be inoculated they will see the things that they want to see they will follow the accounts that they want to follow and then occasionally those accounts will start
1:31:37
to Pepper in other information that they want people to believe and and that's how in information Cascades can go uh we have open systems immigration you're seeing a lot of the rise of the populist anti-immigrant movement in part because
1:31:50
in some cases it's a result of good intentions of providing Sanctuary cities and wanting to help people and provide amnesty and and help immigrants come here because that's what our country was built on and then you want those people
1:32:01
to assimilating when they're not assimilating but then you also have Bad actors like Putin who has weaponized immigration and put migrants on people's borders to create pressures so that you can get a political movement from inside
1:32:12
the country that will be sympathetic to the Nationalist sensibilities and and he's orchestrated that very well and so uh infiltration into our University Systems which except foreign capital and you see Qatar that has influenced very
1:32:25
massively domestic us universities uh China doesn't allow that you know us is not able to come in and sponsor Chinese universities yeah Tik Tok of course a huge one right we banned it years ago right when it had become Tik Tok for
1:32:37
musically in part because at the time I seemed like a conspiratorial nut saying I don't trust this with the Chinese Communist Party having control over this and then behind the scenes myself and many others have played a role in in
1:32:49
helping to orchestrate what I hope will not be thwarted by Trump to see that is divested I I have no problem with people using Tik Tok but it should not be in the hands of the algorithmic control of the Chinese Communist party so and it's
1:33:02
on a lot of government phones it's insane it's really interesting why haven't we seen more isolated attacks that are cheap and using technology and what I mean by that is you know a nefarious actor can probably for two or
1:33:14
three grand effectively uh plot an assassination I guess the question would be to what end and so you still have to realize that many people even if they're like EV Geniuses have an objective in mind and do they just want to sew chaos and
1:33:30
create distrust in a system and have people scrambling or is there an opportune time to strike think about the Israel operation with the Beeper uh plan this was 10 years in the making now they could have done it at any point in time
1:33:42
5 years ago but they waited until a precise moment and so being able to do the thing and deciding when you do the thing are two different uh decisions but I think that we been warned for a very long time about hacking and infiltration into our physical infrastructure for sure somebody could shut down air traffic control and what we saw just recently between the Blackhawk helicopter and this uh Regional plane from was it Kansas City you know crash
1:34:08
in Washington DC you could see the Ft the FAA shut down you know and have a glitch you can have infiltration into our banking system and you know just like the Sony hack right the big thing with the Sony hack was not that the
1:34:21
systems were disabled it's that information was revealed you want to create Civil War in this country just just reveal everybody's emails for the past year the things that we've said about each other you know I mean that like reveal truth in a sense right it
1:34:33
was the great irony so the aisc of these things in private helped to create a civil society uh our water systems our infrastructure our traffic lights you know I mean all the things that you've seen in Sci-Fi movies when like things
1:34:45
just start breaking I'm actually amazed that our infrastructure globally but you know even in newor City even in this office there's a million SKS in this office you know above our heads right now there's an HVAC system like the fact that we
1:35:01
trust this system and it's not going to fall and explode or blow up like and then we're shocked when these things do but I'm constantly amazed that the entropy the forces of entropy are con constrained by either really good
1:35:13
engineering or inspection of systems or whatever it might be the maintenance of systems which is another really interesting theme this idea of Maintenance like the past 10 years have been all about growth growth growth growth when you go to financial
1:35:29
statement on capex you've got growth and you've got maintenance and I think in a world where rising cost of capital keeps going up for a variety of reasons I think there's a ton of dry powder and Venture Capital private Equity but a lot
1:35:39
of it I call wet powder because this money is basically reserved for companies and people don't realize reshoring all of these things you know tariffs they're going to be inflationary there would be a rise in cost of capital
1:35:50
if you have a rise in cost of capital if you are a CFO where you're on a board and you're thinking about good governance and capital allocation we're not buying the next new new hot thing unless we really have to like AI today
1:36:02
yeah we're thinking about how do we maintain the existing assets we have and those assets could be satellites up in space they could be military installations they could be um our Telecom infrastructure our bridges our waterways sanitation and processing our
1:36:15
HVAC systems our Industrial Systems all those things need to be maintained so I'm increasingly interested in new technologies this could be software Services sensors all kinds of things that can help apply to Old systems to maintain them for longer depreciate them for longer let them last for longer I think there's going to be increasing demand for for maintenance of systems but I'm I'm amazed that everything around us is just not constantly
1:36:36
breaking it truly is like miraculous it is when you think about it right yeah what do you think of Doge the currency or the initiative the initiative talk cryp I think it's a virtuous thing because it's shining a spotlight on a lot of things that were
1:36:55
just done because they were done and you get this bloat or in some cases there was like overt obfuscation and so I think sunlight heals all and putting a spotlight on ridiculous spending or ridiculous inefficient things you know I
1:37:08
will say I grew up sort of a center-left Democrat my entire life the first time you go to the DMV you become a republican like you know it's just like you want systems that have competition because competition makes things better
1:37:21
because if you have a mon on something you don't have to improve if there's one Regional carrier for an airline if there's one restaurant if there's one place you have to go to for your passporter you don't want that sort of centralized control because the service
1:37:35
is going to suck because they don't have to do any better so I think if you can put a spotlight on excess and waste and bureaucracy and at least begin the conversations at a be at a bare minimum of wait we're spending how much money on
1:37:49
what I think that that's a virtuous thing whether or not these things will be effective at really reducing costs TBD but it it actually seems quite positive that they may hit some of their targets of trying to reach what is it a
1:38:03
billion a day or more and if that could end up reducing the deficit by 10% or 20% let alone 50% going from 2 trillion to a trillion would be incredible so whatever the motivation I don't believe it's patriotism it could be intellectually competitive it could be
1:38:18
power whatever the motivation I think that the means to the end I think the end is a virtuous Pursuit if you were to take over a country effectively and you were in charge of policies and regulations what would you do to attract
1:38:32
capital and become competitive over the next 20 or 30 years what sort of things would you implement what would you get away from and not do well I have an adjacent answer of if I was Secretary State or secret de for the day sure
1:38:46
which I'll give you first which is I would really put Priority on Africa as a continent and particularly that's ail and mcreb because I do believe between violent extremists Russian mercenaries China infrastructure you are one Terror
1:38:57
event away projected into Europe that creates the next Afghanistan and suddenly NATO and the US are in there dealing with Isis you're already seeing you know the first authorized strike by Trump on uh Isis in uh Somalia I saw
1:39:10
that today and so you've got Sudan Chad Mali Niger like it is just a hot bed of people that were coming from Syria and Afghanistan Islamic extremist it is a bad situation and I think that we should be proactive there before we have to be
1:39:23
reactive and it's a lot more costly in lives and money and blood and treasure the second thing I would do is a hemispheric hegemon declaration I just went to Nicaragua Nicaragua uh for a variety of reasons we went instead of Costa Rica but I feel much safer in
1:39:36
Costa Rica and I was worried that I was not going to be able to leave Nicaragua and we went with a friend who happens to be a prominent journalist he was not allowed entry into the country so it it really threw our family vacation uh his
1:39:47
family of five my family of five for for a a wrench um because the government is trying to uh take over the banking system and they don't want it to you know be covered by Financial journalists and these kinds of things and and uh you
1:40:01
look at who is in there and you literally have presence from Hezbollah from China CCP from Iran it's a bad situation uh the places that we think in most of central Caribbean Central America Caribbean South America are vacation spots where we get our coffee
1:40:17
and we go on a nice vacation massive infiltration from adversaries and so I think we are losing the game and I would declare almost like a new Monroe Doctrine kind of thing where we say the entire Western Hemisphere you've got a
1:40:31
billion people both ability to project into the Pacific and the Atlantic you've got mostly English and Spanish speaking people say for Brazil with Portuguese you've got a ton of resources a ton of brilliant educated doctors and and
1:40:44
whatnot and I would just Shore up this hemisphere particularly against crink you know China Russia Iran North Korea and their influence if we were worried about like Cuba and the Cuba Missile Crisis and things approximate 90 miles
1:40:57
or what from Florida I think that China is doing very smart strategic things so us going back in and saying we're going to you know reclaim the Panama Canal and our influence on it like re you know forgetting about provocations of Mexico
1:41:11
of like you know the gulf of America versus Gulf of Mexico but I think that having influence in that region is really important so those are the be the two things that sect for SE state that I would do is declare hemispheric hemani
1:41:21
and make sure that we Shore up our allies in the Reg and get out our adversaries and their presence in part because there's so much Commerce and money and infrastructure that's going in and then focus on the sahal and mcreb in
1:41:30
Africa for for Country competition brain drain you want the best and the brightest you need to fund basic research and basic science it should be undirected that's the Serendipity and the randomness and the optionality that
1:41:40
leads to Great breakthroughs you want Capital markets to be these low entropy carriers for high entropy entrepreneurial surprise so predictable rules and regulations I would lower I I don't know why we don't have a flat tax I mean I know why we don't but I would
1:41:54
just have a flat tax make it super simple rich people are going to scout around and figure out how to get around the tax system anyway and poor people are burdened by it um I get progressive versus regressive but I would just
1:42:05
simplify our tax scheme massively anybody that is coming here and getting an education in this country I would staple a Visa as long as they stay here work for American company for at least five years uh let them become you know
1:42:17
we want the best and the brightest here we are as an example again and I don't mean to make this like all ch but they are our most dominant adversary 50% of all AI undergrads in the world today are being graduated by China in our own
1:42:31
country in the United States 38% of researchers in AI are from China so we're outnumbered even domestically it's a big deal and we used to attract something like 23% of all foreign graduates here that's down to 15% people are either going to other countries or
1:42:47
staying in their own country and so we need that that's what want us World War II you know if if Einstein would have stayed in Germany or what what causes that to happen is it the tax rate is it opportunities available is it housing CA
1:43:01
like what are the what are the factors that go into people leaving well start with the attracting part you know as Walter wristen said people go where they're welcome and stay where they're well treated so we should be welcoming
1:43:13
now there's a debate about immigration and you know we should distinguish between you know the bad people and like brilliant people and we should want them here that just comes down to like basic vad right but you know some of that is
1:43:24
exploited you know a lot of these Consultants with um wiipro and some of the you know Indian um business process bpos the business process operations um or Outsourcing housing is a difficult one but people can always figure out New
1:43:39
York City is expensive but you can live in Long Island City and Brooklyn in Queens um but I I think um yeah uh housing availability we have I mean our cities are so rich and filled with culture and people and particularly if
1:43:52
you're a young person you want to be around that density of that because you're trying to find peers and a mate and you know all of that even if you're from another country you go to New York you can find your enclav of Korean or
1:44:02
Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or um Israeli and uh Caribbean and it's it's all here so yeah I think I think just having a culture that Embraces this and encourages it you already have a robust Venture Capital system of risk-taking
1:44:15
many other countries don't have that so that's another thing but if you if you were to design the system from scratch you want openness with security so some means of vetting you want a great education system that can attract
1:44:27
people that view it as a status to have graduated from that particular school and people want to be around people whether this is in a company or in a country that are like them that are competitive and highly intellectual that
1:44:38
they respect or admire or want to compete with so that's number two their work something we did in the 1980s I think it was in 1980 was the B Dole act where Government funding for research would allow the university and the principal investigator to actually own
1:44:52
the intellectual property that became an asset that asset could be licensed to a company it absolutely opened the floodgates for Venture Capital to be able to commercialize that that happen to coincide with orisa and allowing
1:45:05
retirement plans to go into uh Venture Capital so now you have a pool of risk Capital which you need for taking risk on unseasoned people and unseasoned companies and then you need a robust Capital market system to be able to continue to allocate money but again
1:45:20
Capital goes where it's welcome stays where it's well treated true of human Capital through a financial capital and so a rules-based system a strong military you know if you were starting a country from scratch you're not going to
1:45:29
have that but you need great allies then think about Singapore yeah I think I think that's a phenomenal model Singapore is a great model that's awesome I hope uh some of the government people we have are listening to this I
1:45:40
want to come to IP for a second and copyright and then uh wrap it up here so do you think that AI should be able to create IP or copyrighted material like if I tell AI to write a book is should that be copyrightable and who owns the
1:45:54
copyright the AI or me for the prompt it's super complicated because you know the first debate about this which is the great irony right because open AI investors and stakeholders were up in arms that R1 stole from open AI but you
1:46:05
can make the argument that open AI is trained on the repository of like the public internet and and you know every art that's ever been produced and whatnot now if you were an art student and you went to the lou or to the met or
1:46:15
to MoMA and you sat there and studied it or took a picture of it and then we we learn through copying we learn mimicry and imitation and and we remix these things and you know there's this great what is his name Kirby who did everything as a remix I just sent it to
1:46:33
a friend but it was like updated last year and it's it's so brilliant in its compilation of every facet of culture that you love from books to your Tarantino movie to The Beatles to Art you know to scen and movies like it was
1:46:51
all copied from something you know and and you're like wait a second that riff came from this 1940 song from this African-American blues guitarist that John Lennon or Paul McCartney stole and you're you know you're like and so
1:47:05
everything was sort of stolen from somebody it was imitated tweaked slightly and by the way that's what we are right I mean you get two people who exist and then there's this genetic recombination of their Source material
1:47:18
and every one of my kids are different but they came from the and and so remixing is like how every you know happens and it's like Matt Ridley said like you know idea is having sex and and so to your core question yes I think that if I do a calculation and
1:47:34
I'm using a calculator instead of like doing math by pencil that calculation is still an input into my output if I'm using AI to generate art uh and it's my prompt instead of the gesture of my brush and you know The Strokes of my
1:47:50
hand and uh I think it should still be mine even if it was trained like a great art student was by staring and learning and studying and then emulating and then these things evolve you look at Picasso through all the different phases of his
1:48:03
style of art you know from like realism and and portraiture to cubism and Abstract these things just evolve until you find the white space that defines you and that goes back to like if I train all my a and everything I've ever
1:48:18
wrote but then like my voice is is a new voice is rare and hard to create so um I actually think we should probably worry more about how do you break free from this constraints of these things then you know should should they be copyrightable well that goes back to our
1:48:36
earlier conversation do we just end up in this Lane that we can't get out of or we don't even recognize we're in a lane I guess in some ways even more devastating and and the Brilliance of all this again like I'm I'm a big believer that we make our fictions and our fictions make us and if you've watched West world I don't know if you've watched an episode or two yeah the first episode you know you have a guest who comes to the park and he's
1:49:00
sort of squinty-eyed looking at the host who's actual robot you learn later on but he doesn't know at the time and he's like looking at her and she goes you want to ask so ask and she knew what he was going to ask her he goes are you
1:49:11
real yeah and she goes well if you have to ask does it matter and you know I'm going to sort of spoiler alert on Westworld it's all about these hosts interacting with the uh uh with the guests and they're there to serve the guests but in fact it's the
1:49:26
opposite because every host is watching and learning every small Nuance every gesture every inflection of your voice every Cadence of your speech and it's learning you so that it can basically create a perfect Similac of you and 3D
1:49:41
print biologically a version of you and and so it's a really profound philosophical question about how we're interacting with these things but all these things have been trained on the sum total of all human creation and now they're being trained on the sum total
1:49:58
of human creation plus artificial creation and some of that is done with human prompts and some of it is going to be done automatically but I just think it's going to be part of the total Overture over of of of creation and I
1:50:10
think it's a beautiful thing so does anything about this scare you about AI like the direction we're heading I think in the near term the thing that scared me is what again scarcity in abundance what becomes abundant is people's ability to
1:50:28
use AI to produce content and I don't know if I'm getting an email from somebody did an AI write it or optimize it or was it really a thoughtful note from John this young college you know student who's persistent was it really them and can I infer something about
1:50:45
their persistence and their style of writing or did they put it into an AI and know from the repository of what influences me and what I've talked about and what I care about that they you know so many people are like oh I heard you
1:50:56
on this podcast and I felt compelled to write to you because I too care deeply about family and you know blah blah blah right I mean those are surface level stuff but somebody that's more nuanced about it am I being manipulated by them
1:51:08
or by the AI and if it's them there's a cleverness to it that I might admire if it's just the AI I feel suddenly more vulnerable so what becomes abundant is the sort of not just information misinformation or whatever but the
1:51:20
production of it what becomes scarce is veracity in truth and that to me um was less scary but more you need to be inoculated and immunized vaccinated and you're almost going to become a little bit more distrusting but like your
1:51:38
reactions right now I might say something and you might say oh and maybe you actually thought it was profound or maybe you're like a like this is not interesting at all but but there's something authentic right about this and
1:51:49
we are reading each other and reacting to each other that to me is become ever more valuable so our Humanity the interactions are the scarce thing even if and as through other mediums it's hard to tell I love that I always love
1:52:06
talking to you too so I get so much energy and ideas out of our conversations and I'll be chewing on this for weeks I know we always end with what is success for you you've answered this before I'm curious to see how it changes it really is the eyes of my kids
1:52:20
um it is for me them saying my dad did that or my dad made that or my dad was present for me and I think it's the story I tell myself about my own life and my relationship with my father and wanting to invert that and and so for me
1:52:34
success is like them saying I'm proud he was my dad he was a great father and I'm proud that he does all these things and when we fund a company or like some of these secrets that I talked about yeah I share them with my kids and so I was
1:52:48
taking my middle daughter to uh my oldest plays tennis my middle does soccer my little guy plays basketball like 10 days a week he's better at 9 years old than I was at 19 and I was reasonably good and I like sharing these
1:53:00
these stories so I'm like you know next week There's a story that's going to come out about this particular thing and nobody knows about it except the company and now you and and they're like oh my god really and I'm like yeah and like
1:53:12
you can't tell anybody you know and and I I just I love that feeling and that's awesome and I do it in part not because I want them to learn about it but I want them to be proud of me as selfish and vain glorious as that is and to be like
1:53:24
oh my dad's cool you know so I think you're cool you're not my dad but man I'll tell you my 15-year-old daughter definitively does not think I'm cool she says you are so cringe and uh I think everybody's kids say that right
1:53:38
it's the same with my kids like instead of telling them something I'll sometimes they might be listening to this but I'll get my friends to tell them and then all of a sudden it holds weight but if I tell them the same thing like yeah
1:53:49
whatever same thing with our spouses and yeah thank you very much Jos great to be with you I admire what you've built and the repository and compendium of the ideas and the minds that you've assembled it's it's it's like a great thing for the world thank you thank you