Schmidt Out of Luck — EP 73 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

All right, Kylie, how you doing?

I'm fabulous. How are you?

I'm good. We're back again. What are we doing this week?

This week I want to chat about our wonderful pod with Alexander Wang. Eric Schmidt got booed at a commencement speech. We have some interesting stuff on our Substack, Phantom Neuro, the Texan Telescope Ranch. There was a verdict mere minutes before we started in the Sam and Elon trial. More drama in XAI land and more.

All right, let's hit it. I'm Ashlee Vance.

And I'm Kiley Robinson.

This is Core Memory. Here we go.

So Alex Pod, main takeaways, main thoughts?

Yes. So we got the, we got the pretty exclusive interview with Alex. He hadn't talked much in 11 months. I think he'd done one rando podcast, but he never really got into Meta's strategy. Yeah, um, hopefully people have listened to it. I thought it was— well, I actually, I really enjoyed chatting with Alex. I know him a bit outside of when he's in a media situation. He's a bit different when he's in that. He's a bit freer. Um, I thought he was I thought, you know, we learned way more about Meta's business than we knew before, but Alex was a bit, uh, bit reserved on specifics. Yeah, some things.

Yeah, when people were asking me about it, I would say that he seemed quite nervous. I've only met him when he was at SCaLE. I met him at a random conference briefly, but yeah, in that— in this chair, I felt like he was a bit nervous to like hash out all the Meta stuff.

There's still this piece where I have to assume they're going to be very strong. I mean, they really do have just tons and tons of compute and they fall into that category of Google, Amazon, which is not exactly the AI behemoth so far, but these, these players just have endless resources at their disposal. It's an interesting dynamic that they have over there. Alex is 29, I think you said. Yeah. And you got Nap Friedman, Ostensibly working under him. Nat used to be the CEO of GitHub. He's this longtime open source executive, you know, major player in AI land alongside Daniel Gross, who also works there, had been investing in all the really the coolest AI companies. Um, Daniel had been with Ilya at, at, uh, what is it, SAFE Super Intelligence. And, and so super interesting dynamic there. Um, just to have Alex as the as the boss. And then, I don't know, he's very dismissive of these ideas that there's already discord between him and Zuck in one camp really wanting to push the limits of research, and Boz on this other side being more product-focused. And Alex said the reporters were all getting this wrong.

Oh, the drama with these reporters. They're always so wrong. Let's get a deposition in there. Yeah, I felt like he was very dismissive of that and of the claims, you know, Jan made of his age and him being too junior. I think, like, you can have all the compute in the world, but we've both seen inside these big companies, it's very bureaucratic and slow. And the point of this lab was to move fast and be like a frontier lab. But I mean, you liked the model, right? I, I, the only time I get to see this model is when it does horrifying things on Instagram.

So I mean, like I said in the podcast, it is weird that I, I'm, I'm not like a big Facebook person, but I'm massive on WhatsApp and then play around on Instagram. And I've got my Meta glasses, which I am unabashedly, um, happy to say that I enjoy. You got them on. And I just never use their AI stuff at all, even though I'm living inside of many of their products. So that seems like a problem to me. I thought MuseSpark— I only played around with it for a couple of days. It was cool. Does this multi-agent thing when it's thinking through problems and it's a little bit different to what I've seen from some of the other labs. But I felt like it was— well, Alex wasn't claiming it's really neck and neck. Yeah. And you could, you could feel that it's— it felt underwhelming in parts.

Now I'm wondering I'm gonna test my glasses. Hey Meta, what, uh, famous author am I looking at right now? Thinking, thinking. I'd be shocked if it got it.

It's— that hurts.

No, it should. It's just I don't think the 'what is it looking at' feature is all that good.

The— I— well, I also got the other glasses now, the augmented reality ones with the wristband. That might interfere.

It told me to restart the app and try again.

That's perfect.

Exactly what I expected.

And they were kind of cool. So they, I don't know if people know this, but there's these other glasses you can get and you put on this wristband and it reads your motor neurons when you're making movements and translates it to the glasses. All the wrist movement stuff worked way better than I thought it would. The glasses part was a little underwhelming. There's just not that many things you can do, but I saw they were tweeting last week that now they're opening it up to third parties to make some apps. But my kids were blown away, which I thought they would crap all over it, but they were really— they were shocked by the wrist action.

Nice.

Yeah, it was all right. So yeah, I don't know. Any other big thoughts on Alex?

No, I would like to see, you know, some of these visions actually come to life. Uh, I had a friend say like their, their models genuinely impress them and they work in AI. So maybe I'm just not looking close enough, but like the consumer focus of being in these apps, like during my San Francisco shoot, I opened Instagram and there was this ad for an AI chatbot that was a homeless woman holding up a sign. And I was like, why would anyone want to use that? And I wish I'd seen this before the Alex pod so I could ask him about it. But that's my interface with Meta's models and that is just kind of horrifying. But I would like to see, like, them, you know, reach the frontier and compete because they have all the resources to do so.

Yeah, yeah, um, yeah. Well, elsewhere in AI land, I saw this weekend Eric Schmidt giving a commencement speech at the University of Arizona, and my God, the boos rained down upon him, which seemed to be, like, possibly two things going on. One was that there were protests about him giving this speech beforehand because of, uh, some things going on with his girlfriend apparently, um, and so people were not happy that he was the speaker. But this seemed very AI-specific, definitely based on the lines of where the boos were hitting.

Yeah, when we talked to Alex, I brought this up. I was like, we're the same age almost, we both know how people feel about AI. It's very loud in, in my life. Like, I don't know anyone who really likes it. And I brought this up with Sam too, and when I published my Sam pod on my own Instagram, people are like, fuck that AI. Like, people our age hate it. So seeing that commencement speech and all the boos, people were like— I'm shocked that people are shocked, because if you use TikTok, you go through— I see so many things about how you shouldn't be using AI, it's amoral, and just like, you know, a natural disaster on humanity. So I was not surprised to see that.

So curious how this plays out. It's not going away. So, so where is this anger gonna go? We certainly seem like we've tipped over some point when you look at the— we talked about this a bit before, but the violence against Sam. I was actually shocked by the amount of boos in this crowd because my general impression is people have a distaste for AI but really aren't paying that much attention. And I think I'm wrong. Yeah, I mean, well, I think it's both.

I think they have a distaste and they aren't paying attention. Like, when I see the data center discourse on TikTok, I want to peel my skin off because it's just so misconstrued and like it's just pure misinformation because people only understand like there is some water usage, there's some energy usage, and to be clear, there's like a lot to be explored there. But people my age on the internet, in my opinion, are not exploring it in good faith. So of course, and then I also think that the leaders have a lot of blame to hold. Like they spent years saying like it's going to take all our jobs up until even recently in the past last year, Sam and Dario have said like, it's going to take all our jobs. And these people are entering the market, the job market, and not able to find jobs. And if they're applying places, is an AI recruiter rejecting them or going through first-round interviews? Like, it does seem dystopian at their level, you know.

There was that palpable feeling of these graduates sitting in this room about to head out into the world and not believing anything that this AI preacher was, was selling them. I am just— I mean, this— I wonder what we are heading into over the next year if this is— if this really is bubbling up. And it is a very difficult question on the data center front. It's like, what is the US as a country really supposed to do? I mean, this, this is the last thing we have where we're really ahead of China and the rest of the world. China's definitely not going to have any problems building data centers. It's actually a skill that the United States is great at. We have more data centers than the rest of the world combined. We actually know how to do this thing. And, and if we're gonna have this massive societal pullback on this, it's— it will be, um, difficult for the United States.

I think this was sort of the doomer argument that caught me finally into taking this more seriously. About 2 years ago at South by, someone I was interviewing had said, like, look, here's how it could pan out in realistic terms where it ends very, very badly, which is there's already so much political unrest and division in this country. These debates will make it accelerate way, way further and break us apart and, you know, make those divisions quite deeper. And then you get things like violence and these protests that turn violent, and we saw that with Sam's house, like, and that kicks up and kicks up, and then it gets into, like, you know, Does the, the police and the, and our government get involved? And, you know, that to me, when I saw that play out, I thought that seems very real. And it feels like we're at the beginning of that tipping point where it's like people are very, very, very upset. And I don't see it like quieting anytime soon, especially with more data center builds.

What happens when you do— you've got Demis at DeepMind, Google, Anthropic. We wrote about this. Jolie Gunn did a piece for us. The AI labs are getting so deep into science, into pharma. It will be quite fascinating if somebody actually had a breakthrough where they cure some massive illness or come up with some super drug. And how will we feel about these AI companies?

Well, that was in Eric Schmidt's speech as he was getting booed. He was trying to reel them back in and say like, well, this will cure cancer. As he was getting booed. Like, you could hardly hear him. But when I see this take on TikTok, uh, I see people saying like, it's not going to be LLMs, it's not going to be LLMs. But I still don't think— I mean, maybe I'm not giving them enough credit, but I don't think these like talking heads on TikTok and young people who consume news that way really understand how it all works. And I felt as a journalist when I was covering AI that that was a really important part of my job, was to put it plainly and not like buy in either way. But, you know, even then, like, the— it's— it polls— AI polls worse than Trump and ICE, if I recall correctly. So it's, it's in the gutter.

I've never been this confused about something in tech before. I feel like I usually have a pretty good feel for the booms and the busts and where things are going in the long term, and I make my bets. This one has played out differently. I, I would have predicted we would've already had a big Wall Street collapse by now.

Yeah.

The models have gotten much better consistently than I thought. I don't see that stopping anytime soon. This thing has more legs than I expected it to. I, I thought over the long term it would play out, but I thought we'd have a, a collapse here, uh, just 'cause things had gotten so out of hand. And now the technology actually, it's just, it's a bit frightening and exciting. It keeps impressing me more and more.

So yeah, I'm, I am shocked we haven't had a collapse yet. I agree. I also, I mean, I don't think this is a hot take to say the valuations are just nowhere near reality. And I like, I say that this is a software and people are like, well, no, it's amazing. I agree. I am amazed by what this technology can do and continues to improve on, but the valuations make no sense, literally no sense. So I'm shocked it hasn't had some sort of collapse yet.

What is NVIDIA right now? It is $5.3 trillion. Insane.

It's nuts. And OpenAI is going for a $1 trillion valuation. So is Anthropic, apparently. Yeah, that makes no sense to me, honestly. No. All right.

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Yeah, that was crazy. It was just as Ashlee was walking out of the room where I was like, oh my God, Elon lost. Uh, I mean, so my take is that I— of course the lawyers knew that that was a possibility, but Elon really wanted to embarrass OpenAI. He wanted to get everyone on the stand. He wanted everyone to be like, you know, their, their emails and their texts and their journals to, to be out in the open, including Ashlee's apparently.

Right. I made— I forgot about that now, which is insane. Yeah. So if people didn't see my text messages with Sam made it into evidence, I remember this during the coup. I— and the information was very close, but I'm pretty sure we broke the story first. I'm sure I had it first that Emmett Shear was going to be the CEO of the— of OpenAI. And I remember being in the thick of this., and I'm pretty sure I was learning about it in close to real time. I had, I was, I was well sourced on this and, and I was trying to confirm the story that, 'cause I had heard Emmett was gonna be in. So I texted Sam, hey, did you know? Yeah. Emmett's gonna be the CEO. I remember the feeling at the time. I don't have the message in front of me and I wouldn't really reveal it anyway, but I remember Sam at least feigning, um, like this was new information to him. And then in the trial, we find out, like, I think I was texting him as he was finding out from Mira that Abbott was coming in. And my text was like on his home screen. Yeah, he's like in a Zoom call or having a text with—

from a journalist.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, from a journalist. The journalist, Sam. But yeah, so then I had ex going over my, my tweet game, my scoop game. That was interesting. And I had about 300 people text me saying, did you see this?

Yeah, that was crazy. I think that came out over the weekend or something because I just remember looking at my phone and being like, holy shit. Um, and there was some discourse about it, but it is like, as a journalist, it's exactly how it works. It's like, I am hearing this, is it true? Like, that is exactly what we do as journalists, especially during that time. It was Insane. It was insane. So yeah, that was shocking. It was in the lawsuit. Uh, a journalist, Ashlee Vance, was on Signal trying to be good.

I think we had disappearing messages on. People will be screenshotting my, my messages.

Don't do that, guys. I was shocked that he had it on his lock screen as like visible text. I don't even do that, and he is a CEO of a very important company.

Yeah, yeah. Um, I think it was that It was a fun moment.

That was crazy. So that was my highlight of the trial.

Do you think— okay, so Elon's, you think, is trying to embarrass them, get all this stuff out? I mean, we did see it was a bunch of stuff that I knew from reporting this book that I'm working on, but it clearly— I mean, Greg Brockman got dragged through things quite a bit because he's got this diary. Um, I felt like he probably took it, had the worst of it all from a PR standpoint.

His diary was pretty damning. He was like, how do I become a billionaire, if I recall correctly.

And, and then who— I mean, did Elon— did— what did you— did Elon, you know, was this worth it to him, or did you feel like there was blowback on his side?

Um, I do not think it was worth it for him because what came out from Sam was incredibly level-headed. And albeit funny, there were some memes about him not being allowed to talk to them or be in the room, which was pretty hilarious. And the Emmett Shearer, like some guy at Twitch, that was all pretty funny. But no, like Sam came out looking like a normal adult human being trying to work something out. Uh, but the, the Greg stuff was pretty crazy. I don't think that changed public sentiment about OpenAI whatsoever. Uh, for Elon, I watched his testimony the closest out of any testimony, and he mostly just like berated the lawyer and didn't really say anything super interesting other than— I'm gonna say accidentally lying on the stand. He, he said that he had, uh, donated, aka invested in OpenAI, at a much larger number than he actually did. And then he had to recant that on the stand once it was pointed out.

But yeah, I think that was, you know, it's only chump change for him, which is funny because it was a nonprofit and these numbers have always been in these filings. So, um, yeah, that's what it's been a strange thing to stand on. Um, yeah.

And you thought— I'm sorry, you thought Elon was going to win?

Well, Elon has this like, you know, he's got this Elon reality distortion field where he seems— I remember he lost one case where it was like a Tesla worker, I think, who had had like a racial discrimination lawsuit. But that wasn't like directly Elon. It was Tesla. Everything that Elon's ever been involved in, even the pedo guy thing, where I'm like, I'm sure he's going to lose this because he called this dude a pedo. He wins. He always wins, and he's relentless. And, and this one, if you're right that this was like— this was the intention, I suspect he won't try to appeal and bring this back. But normally he drags these, you know, he just keeps going until he wins. I mean, you can just hire the best lawyers in the world.

I don't doubt that he'll appeal and try again because like, I really believe it's chump change to him to just keep going and dragging this out and distracting OpenAI. Because while Sam was on the stand, he was in China with Jensen in and Trump. And I, I don't know if Sam would have been there if he could have, but he, he wasn't. And Elon was in China doing this like sort of important press tour with the president. So if he keeps dragging it out, then he keeps distracting OpenAI and Sam.

How do you feel about the heart of what was being discussed? I would— you can view OpenAI take doing the deal with Microsoft, making the shift towards being a for-profit company, as its original sin in many ways. Clearly No matter what anyone argues, this was set up as an open-source nonprofit, and that was the goal. However, as you get into it, years pass and then it turns out, well, you are— the thing that's working for us is incredible amounts of computing. This is going to cost an insane amount of money. Elon was not willing to just give them limitless billions of dollars to buy computing. I don't see how they really had a choice. They're going to need money from somewhere. So I've always cut them a little bit of slack on this. I guess the question is like, what did they believe in their soul? But I'm not even sure if this matters because you get into the technology, then it's apparent that it's just going to cost ridiculous amounts of money if you really want to do this thing.

I think they would agree with the take that they were incredibly, deeply naive at the start to set it up that way. And then, you know, it was Dario and the scaling laws. So we need more compute, we need more data that costs a lot of money and time and we need the best researchers. And then Elon wanting to control the company and then them saying no, which meant they're like, where they get all their money from is gone. So if getting Microsoft in on the deal only worked if they converted, yeah, it seems like they, they had no choice. But I think, you know, something I think a lot about as an adult reporter now is when you're a kid, you think the adults have it all figured out and they know everything. And then you become an adult and you're like, no one knows shit at all. So that's what this feels like. It's like, why didn't you guys think of this at the start? They didn't know. I get that. But it was very altruistic and wishy-washy and Burning Man or whatever. And the reality is they had to be capitalists. Greg's journal did not make them look good. I will say that was pretty shocking because that was like, what, 2017, 2018, that journal? That wasn't very good. But but, you know, I think it was very naive and dumb to start it like that. And now they are hooked on that. And I do think the nonprofit open source approach is the right way to go. I actually do. I think that would have been like, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna like sort of destroy humanity in so many ways, you should be giving back to humanity. That was the main mission. So I think they should still uphold that, but it should have started with that like nonprofit for-profit structure.

Well, the— I remember when OpenAI started, I thought it was pointless. I thought Google was so far ahead, but I appreciated the, the thinking behind it. I love open source software. I could see this counterweight. The more you know about the company in those early years, it was just a series of experiments. They really had very little idea what they were doing. It was, it was a re— they always harp on this. It was a research lab. It was really like an academic offshoot from universities and just a gathering place for people with interesting ideas. So I, I can see how this evolved and spun out of control a little bit. And then there's no way you're gonna raise that much money unless you have someone like Elon who has incredible capital, who's just willing. You couldn't do it as a nonprofit unless you have someone incredibly rich who's just like, fine, Yeah, I'll— this is my philanthropic effort. Um, because otherwise you have to structure it in a way that people will give you money.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Um, I thought the— it's funny the way this played out and that the statute of limitations thing is what got Elon in the end, because he, he— after he pulled out of OpenAI, he really he wasn't that angry, and he, he just put them to the side. It wasn't until ChatGPT came out and it was clicking and he could see that this thing had really worked, and then clearly once he had his own AI aspirations after that, that all this, this comes up. I mean, he went through like multiple years of not really, um, seeming to pay that much attention to OpenAI at all.

Yeah, all the discovery doesn't show like Elon was super mad about it. I mean, he, when he wanted the company, it seemed very Elon straightforward of like do this or else sort of vibes. But generally, you know, in my reporting and my understanding of it, he didn't seem to hold resentment until exactly ChatGPT, and then he launched xAI. And that was the point of the lawsuit that OpenAI's lawyers said was like he only is doing this now because of xAI. And when they first started this lawsuit, I thought the same thing. I thought it was quite petty. But, you know, he lost.

One day we'll find out. About how close they ever got to resolving this. Um, I've got a couple ideas.

Speaking of XAI—

yes, go!

Per Bloomberg, Musk's XAI fails to pay staff $420 for giving their tax returns to Grok. Um, this reminds me of when I was covering XAI and there was all sorts of, uh, rumors that they were asking for training data from their staff because they needed the training data so bad. And Elon Musk put out this Google form that was like, hey, do you want to be part of like training Grok to his followers and ask them to provide information? So the training data thing has been like a long issue for Grok, is my understanding. But the $420 bit, he'll never give that up.

So they were going to pay the employees to feed their own tax returns into the model.

Yep. And I don't know.

Have you put your tax return into a model? Have I?

No, I haven't. But I have. How'd that go?

Well, I think I was getting it to look for a discrepancy. Yeah. My accountant had been like, hey, it was very minor. There's like $800 or $1,200 or something that's not accounted for. And rather than me spending hours looking through these spreadsheets, yeah, I just put it in. So I was like, whatever, I'm giving in.

I don't know if this is kind of a right term, but did you see that ChatGPT now has like a finance agent coach? I haven't used it because I actually don't feel comfortable hooking up all my financial apps to ChatGPT, though I have given like a year of statements to ChatGPT and asked for like, you know, what am I spending the most on, blah, blah, blah. But I only saw a tweet that was like, this is really bad and it's really wrong quite frequently. So maybe that's what Grok wants to work on. I don't know how valuable tax returns would be as a dataset. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

I'm— I think accountants are going to have a tough time from the models who've gotten much better at math very quickly.

Yep. That was in the Bloomberg piece. The whole effort was a rush job to catch up with Claude and ChatGPT before April 15th, alongside a parallel push to hire accountants and data annotators, while Musk himself encouraged users to chase bigger refunds through Grok.

And then you had the massive deal with XAI giving compute to— or SpaceX, I guess it is now, um, SpaceX AI, SpaceX AI tweeted giving compute to Anthropic for what I presume must have been many billions of dollars because Elon had been, uh, very anti-Anthropic, very, very anti-Anthropic.

So that was hilarious. Yeah. What do you think the game plan there is?

I think, I think SpaceX is heading towards this IPO. I think having a few extra billion dollars on the balance sheet will look very good. I think Anthropic underestimated how much compute it would need. And we're having all kinds of strange bedfellows being made.

It's funny, you know, SpaceX, the cloud company, it all comes down to cloud, everything.

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Phantom Neuro.

Yeah. So we put up a video on the Substack this Monday. It will be probably hitting our YouTube page as you are listening. To this. So the subscribers get the videos first, along with many of our stories to our Substack. But Phantom Neuro is a pretty interesting company. They're based in Austin, Texas. They make this, this cute, this like body computer interface. It's a, it's an implant that has electrodes. Um, and instead of being a brain implant like Neuralink and most other startups, this implant goes where, for the moment where somebody's had an amputation of a limb. And so if you've lost your arm near your elbow, say you put this, this device, it gets surgically implanted underneath the skin and then you hook up a robotic prosthetic to it and then you, you think what you want to do with the prosthetic and it, and it happens. We did this video. It's amazing. There's this guy, Alex Smith, and he, can take his hand off and like put it on the ground and still have it moving when it's not attached to his body. That was blowing my mind while this was happening. And then it turns out there's this— I've been writing about these, these robotic prosthetics for a long time. Um, they've been getting better and better and better. They're hard for people to control because they're just really limited. You have to kind there's like little buttons to click and you want to just be able to just think that you want to grab the Coke can or point at something. And so that's what Phantom's technology lets you do. It is just this year going to try to— the device that we were playing with, Alex had not had it surgically implanted yet. He would, he would kind of like wrap it around his arm and Phantom is just going to start doing its trials this year, I think, in Australia where they get surgically implanted. I got to play with the technology. I get to fly a drone using, using my mind and, um, and just kind of like thinking about the— well, making these gestures with my hand and, and it was translating to the, the drone movement and it was very cool. As for where all this is heading, we did a podcast with Connor Glass, the, the founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro earlier. We, I mean, You can make an argument we might be heading to a world of elective amputations where, where these prosthetics are getting so good that people might choose to Luke Skywalker it and replace, replace their hand.

Don't piss me off. What? Why on earth?

Why don't you want a carbon fiber hand that can spin 360?

I have my own hands. That's crazy.

That's the case that Connor makes. He also talks about this very sci-fi future where, I mean, part of this at the moment is helping these amputees. They're no doubt going to gain all this data from people using this. And then you could see a world where the military would want stuff like this. You might have a person just in a control room controlling some robotic arm out in the field, and maybe more than one at a time, and just, you know, doing this like Doc Ock kind of situation.

Yeah, it's like the Addams Family hand just scurrying across the battlefield.

Yeah, yeah, you know, and maybe, maybe you're trying to— it could be cool. I mean, if you're trying to like defuse a bomb or something like that, I mean, things would have to improve a lot, but it'd be way better to have a robotic hand in there than actual human, send it, go and hurt Locker.

The coolest part of watching that video was like, as I was watching, I was like, this must be a BCI because how does it register that movement so quickly? And it's not. And he said, what's his name again?

Connor Glass. Or Alex Smith is the patient. Yeah.

He said it only took, you know, what was it, 10 minutes to set up. And we both watched BCIs get set up and it takes a lot of training to understand.

And I did that and you'll see it in the video. It does. It just it just takes a couple minutes. So that part is legit. And I mean, that's the big perk here is that you could— you don't have to have a hole drilled into your brain to be able to, to get this prosthetic. It's a— I think it's like an outpatient type procedure. And, and so huge difference to, to the idea of an implant. I think Connor is interesting. Phantom has not raised nearly as much money as some of the BCI companies, and he's quite realistic, I think, because we're heading to this strange moment where these companies have raised money almost as if they're consumer electronics. Yeah, type companies where the idea is you're having elective surgeries to get these brain implants. The Elon of it all, Neuralink, has raised tons and tons of money, brought all this attention to this field. The other companies that want to compete then have also raised tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. It is not at all clear to me how you can justify that sort of capital on if you're just helping people who are paralyzed, who've had strokes. It's a ALS, it's a very small market. You're dependent on like these health insurance companies even paying for this type of stuff. And so I think we're gonna have this period where a lot of these companies go away. I think Neuralink will be fine because Elon can raise infinite money for infinite things, but the others are gonna have a tough time and I, found Phantom to be this middle ground of sorts where they haven't raised as much as everybody else. They seem very practical. This is like a— as practical as a, as a, like, body cyborg implant gets. And, and I found it refreshing.

How close are we to, like, you know, I think Sam's BCI company is trying to make so that it's not a surgery, surgical thing. It's more like on top of the skin. They're not quite there yet, but how close are we to that? Because then that would be like a consumer device potentially.

I think still years and years and years, and nobody's sure. There's this huge problem, which is you want to be as close to the neurons as possible, so you put these— that's where the signal is the strongest, you're getting the best data. This is why Neuralink goes into the brain. You have all these other people, they're like, well, people aren't going to want elective brain surgery, so it's a non-starter. We're gonna figure out how to do this either outside of the skull, which is extra hard, or where you sit on top of what's called the dura, which is this layer of protective tissue. So you still have to do a craniotomy for that, but it's less invasive. And so there's these different layers. Nobody has figured out really how to do it outside of the brain. Brian Johnson was trying to do this years ago with Kernel with these, like, helmets, and they, they work, but they're also not They're big. You wouldn't just wear it around all the time. And so, you know, in the Merge Labs, Sam Altman, the Sam Altman-backed company you're talking about, I mean, they just have incredible amounts of science they still have to figure out.

Yeah. Yeah. I just, as you were talking, I was imagining getting one of those straps for David and then like a Google Glass so he could fly the drone on the shoot.

David Nicholson, our cinematographer extraordinaire. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we're probably heading this motor neuron stuff is getting good between the, the Meta glasses and then what Phantom is doing. For sure, we will be controlling computer devices with some kind of like little thing like this.

That's interesting. I just don't see like enough reason to do it. Like, I, I imagine David with the drone because he does that on our shoots. But, you know, your kids had fun with it.

Did they play games? Built into your Apple Watch and now you're, you're changing the channel on your TV. That'd be nice. You're, you know, you're flicking your phone, you just kind of like make it a little teeny gesture.

Not having to find my remote would be ideal.

Yes.

Being able to pick up calls. I don't like the idea of the singularity as scrolling through ads on TikTok, but I guess that's a thing.

No, but I think it's— the stuff's working way better than I thought.

I—

this— these little gestures to do things. I could see it even in front of your laptop just because you'll— it'll be so second nature. You'll just be zipping through some stuff.

A decade ago, a bunch of tech journalists were getting chips implanted in their hands to unlock their phones. And look how far we've come.

I know people who do this.

Yes. So we have another cool video, Texan Telescope Ranch.

We did not to just like talk our own book, but I wanted to— I was going to do the story behind the story. We did this pretty amazing video on Starfront Observatories there in Central Texas, they have this very strange business where you— I didn't even know this existed— you, you send— that you send them your telescope, and then they, they fix it into the ground and they point it the right direction and they calibrate it, and then they hook it up. They've got— in the middle of nowhere Texas, they have fiber optic connections for reasons that are beyond me, besides Texas just being great apparently. And, and so you dial into your telescope remotely, and this is really for people that like to photos of the stars. And so normally you'd have to, you know, you're like making a weekend of it. You're driving out somewhere remote. You got to get lucky with the weather. You got to cart all your gear. You got to set everything up and it's a production. And then you only have that little window of time. Now you just like sit at your house, dial into your telescope. Most of the time now this is like automated with software. So it's just taking pictures all night. You come back in the morning, you get to sort do the best ones. There's this dude, Bray Falls, with great name. He's one of the co-founders of this place. He's one of the world's best, um, I think they're called— is it astro or astral photographers? Um, he takes these incredible images and he's a thing. So we, we hung out there for a day. It was very cool. The backstory on this is there are other places like this in Chile, Australia, um, around the world. It tends to be quite expensive to send your gear there, have it managed. What these dudes in Texas, they've done it like super, uh, is this the only one in America? I don't think it's the only one in America, but what they've figured out is this no-frills approach. I think usually they're sort of tied to like an observatory or it's like this like side business and they just found this cheap plot of land out in rural Texas that happened to have fiber there. And so I think the, the, and then they live in like RVs on the site. So they're, you know, they're committed to doing this as low cost as possible. So that, that's sort of the breakthrough they are. I don't— I think we mentioned it in the video, so I don't think I'm, I'm doing them a disservice. They're, they're going to open a new site in Australia.

Oh, cool.

Yeah. So this is growing and they're getting like— when I was there, they had 550 telescopes. They're already up to like 800 or 900 now. So people are really— they're just expanding. You should definitely watch the video for the images alone.

Yeah, they're sick.

But it's, it was like a, it was a very interesting world to dig into. I didn't know, I didn't know there were people so committed to this. I thought the, I would've assumed that part of the joy of this is the hunt.

Yeah. That's what I was gonna say.

It's going through the camping. It's, it's finding that thing in the moment.

This Arcano los dos, you know? Yes.

I think, I mean, I think that is part of it. Probably as people do, do both. And then there was something that seemed less romantic to me about you come and check your email in the morning. Yeah, your images are there.

It's like, you know, us having like a video, like our videos being done remotely and we're just like, that's great. You know, that's not as fun as drinking with David and Kamen. Yeah, but so how did you first find out about these guys?

So I was just on X as one does, and I just saw this photo of— it was just hundreds and hundreds of telescopes, and it was this arresting image. And I'm like, what is this? And I assumed somebody must have covered all of this before because it was just spectacular the way this looks. Yeah, I just hit them up on, on X, and no, nobody had been out there really to shoot a video. I think maybe like some Germans had come out to do— I think they actually came after us. And so it just— it looked so visual to me. And then obviously I'm into space. Stuff. And, and so it really struck me right as we were going out to film, the New York Times did a big story. So I was a little bummed. I wanted to do the first in-depth piece as well. But I think it was Kenneth Chang maybe who wrote that piece. He's a very good reporter. He did, he did a good job.

I did not see that. I'm sorry, New York Times. I only saw our video.

It's a good piece if people want to check it out. Starfront Observatory, please go to our YouTube channel and subscribe to everything. Also, super quick, um, we are still running this contest for the podcast with reviews. Um, we will get you— so The Shins and Weezer are going on a nationwide tour. Our podcast editor is John Sortland. He's the drummer for The Shins. He's an incredible human being. We will get you 2 tickets to a show if you leave the best review. I've seen some, but I have not seen enough. They are— we want creative, we want funny, We just want some stars, some reviews, and I think we should run this for like another month because I need to see more.

Yeah, I agree. I want to laugh out loud with you at Weezer, maybe.

Yeah. Okay. So we had a good— yeah, we had a good, good run through Texas.

Yeah. Yeah. I just finished up my San Francisco shoot that will be coming eventually. Canada also coming. Excited to show you guys.

The Kylie episodes are coming.

It's very fun. Ashlee's excited for me to be stressed about writing a script. And I hate to say, I feel like it's going to be pretty fine.

Oh, wow. Good. I mean, show me. I know.

I've done no work on it. I'm like, "It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine." Cut to me having a panic attack.

Scripts, they're actually fun to write. It's just, I find them intimidating. We do these shoots, and you go for 7 to 10 days, and we shoot hundreds of hours in the— The exciting part is that you can be very creative. The daunting part is that there's literally infinite ways you could decide to get into and out of these different episodes. And it's, it's just settling on something and then really committing to it. I always find hard.

Yeah. So I have to do that and then you guys will get to see these cool videos. I saw my first engine test and Ashlee Vance was really excited. To see me feel the fire. And that's on video. I haven't seen it yet, but my eyebrows were up my forehead.

And this was a jet engine for a plane?

Yes, yes, yes. And could do like low-orbital, um, rocket launches. So bring it up and then the rocket takes off, is my understanding.

I think we could talk about— is Astro— okay, so they're based in San Francisco. And what, like, what is their— what's their claim to fame with this?

Yeah. So what they did was there's two pieces I always forget, and you're the rocket guy, so please tell me. But there's something that spins and makes it go up, and that is attached through a pole to the thing that spits out the exhaust. And no one has ever successfully split that into two pieces. So they split that into two pieces and then the engine is connected to like an electric motor. And the idea is that From there, you can even change gears, which we haven't been able to do with planes because there is like one gear. If you want to go like on a commercial flight to Japan, it is not going to go supersonic, right? And it's just going to hit that normal speed and get you there from San Francisco in about 12 hours. And if you want to do a military flight, it's going to go really fast, but it's not going to go really slow. And so this invention, you're able to do like supersonic speeds in, you know, an international flight is the hope. It's still being tested. Like this engine is not like properly flight ready, but the idea is pretty insane. And so they've raised money to do that.

So it's for supersonic flight?

Yeah, exactly. Get to, you know, New York in 2 hours is what I was promised.

And they test them in San Francisco?

Yeah.

Are they quiet?

No, no, not at all. Super loud. I wore earmuffs and I was afraid to take them off. It kept starting up and then not working. They had to work out some things, and I thought maybe I was cursed because Engines do not like to work around me, apparently, but it worked. It's super loud. It's in South San Francisco, so there's more of an industrial district where it's not as disruptive, but it is right next to like this rave venue I go to quite a bit. So I would love to see them set that off during a rave.

Okay. Because this has been a problem for Boom, which is also trying to make a supersonic plane, commercial plane. And they had engine suppliers early on. I think they had a deal with Rolls-Royce. Maybe I don't want to misspeak. It was just something like Rolls or GE and things fell through. Then they had to design their own engine, which is always the most expensive part and the most time-consuming part of all this. And so, well, I don't want to put you on the spot, but so would they be— they're looking to sell— they don't want to make the whole plane. They're looking to like sell—

No, they do want to make the whole plane. They, they hate when I say this, but it's like the easiest way to say it's like Uber for supersonic jets.

Okay.

So they want to like make the plane, make the engine, and then sort of rent them out. And the start is, in theory, private planes. And then going from there. But I joked, I was like, did you guys think about buying Spirit? Because that would have been kind of funny. Uh, but no, they want to rent them out rather than selling them in full.

Okay. Okay. And then we've got Hermeus. They look like they've built their own engine. I can't remember if they're still— I think they are. Yeah. So they're still trying to chase supersonic speeds as well. Fascinating. Okay. So what did you— anything else that you, uh, Did you learn anything about San Francisco that you didn't know?

That I didn't know is hard, but like everyone, like towards the end, some people were afraid to say this, but I would tell them like every person before you that we've interviewed has said this, that there's this level of delusion in San Francisco that's like, we can only make what we wanna make here because people don't laugh us off. They get it and they join us and they give us money. People are like, oh, you know, delusional, maybe that's like sort of derogatory. I was like, every single person has said that. So that was sort of the theme of the episode.

People were denying that this is true.

No. What, you know, one company that I won't name was like, you know, maybe that's like a little too derogatory and maybe it seems like we're delusional. And I'm like, no, dude, every person has said like San Francisco is the place where people understand what we're doing. And you cross the street and someone's like working on a rocket company or a biotech company, and it's just like a high concentration in this little city to get that stuff done.

Yeah. This is the best and worst part of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, is this, this grand suspension of disbelief is what makes all these things possible. And then you run into people who are making nothing of significance but think they're saving the world, or at least claim to. And so you have to, you got to balance these things out. But, um, there's no question in my mind where I think, yes, you just buy the ticket, take the ride. You, we're all in this grand delusion, I think.

I know, it was like a very heartening episode because it wasn't just like rocket companies and, and rat neurons— kind of a hint. Um, it was, you know, the culture, the people who like live here for many decades and have been a part of like creating the zeitgeist here, talking about, you know, this is the last frontier. I talked to the founder of Church of Eight Wheels. If you're in the San Francisco area, you'll know Church of Eight Wheels. And he said that like, you know, he's, he's doing a roller skating rink, but he's like, this is the place that understands my delusions. Everyone says that.

And so it was a heartening It's what makes it a unique place in the world. I think this should exist.

Yeah, that's why I'm here. I need to be delusional with delusional people.

I got invited to but did not attend— there's a thing called Vitalist Bay, which is, I think, is a place, but they have this conference out near Berkeley. What's that? What's that? Light—

Lighthouse Haven?

Yeah. What is Lighthouse Haven?

Oh goodness, how much time. Uh, Lighthouse Haven is sort of a rationalist effective altruist compound. I believe Eliezer Yudowsky, uh, like, you live there? No, he does not live there, but he— his Lightcone Infrastructure, I believe, is the LLC, owns it. And that they also own LessWrong, which is a forum for mostly nerds to argue about, you know, tech, the singularity, all that. Uh, so Lighthaven is this beautiful former bed and breakfast in Berkeley that houses a lot of conferences related to those topics. And as I recall, some people do live there.

Okay. I think this Vitalist Bay conference took place at Lighthaven. I bring it up because it looks awesome. It's all about longevity. Longevity's new, new capital. And they had— this is like the— I mean, there's lots of longevity conferences and things like that, but this one is, is at the edge. They've, they've got all the people doing the headless bodies is the, the—

I wish I had known this was happening.

Yeah, I didn't get briefed until, until, um, as it was happening.

Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, Light Haven is beautiful. I've been there for many conferences and many parties. Uh, you know, it's just like peak Bay Area hippie tech culture. Longevity conference looks sick.

It does, it does. I'm sad that I didn't attend, um, but I will next year.

They have more conferences for you to attend, so no worries.

Well, people, go to all our stuff.

Watch us on YouTube.

Enjoy it. We're, we're collecting our Infinity Stones. We've got Sam and Greg and Alex. We have open invites out to Mira, Ilya, who else?

Demis.

Demis. I keep trying. Demis tells me he'll come on. Because PR people block me, uh, make it difficult. So yeah, we're on a little bit of a run here. I think we should just go ahead, everyone. Let's just make this Infinity Stone thing happen.

Let us know who you want on.

Absolutely. Yes. Like, who are the— I mean, I'm trying to get John Carmack. It's very difficult, but, but I— that's kind of like interested in the people who don't get as much attention but have fantastic big ideas. Don't say yawn. Look here.

No, I did not.

I'm over yawn.

I did not.

But people who, who think a bit different, um, please let us know. Thank you guys for all the support. The podcast just like doubled in size the last couple months. And, um, go to SendCut, send and make something.

Hell yeah.

And we'll see you probably next week or soon.

Thank you guys. Bye-bye.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylee Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Mickelson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and Send Cut Send for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.