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

You're watching TVPN. It is Friday, March 28, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We have a whole bunch of guests. Dwarkesh is joining. We got his book here. He sent me the PDF. I printed it out out of respect. Out of respect. But if he doesn't, if you come on the show, if he bails on us. You heard it here first. I'm gonna tweet out the link to the PDF. Piracy's back, folks. Napster is being sold for 200 million and I. It's a threat, honestly.

You could just upload it to Chat GPT. It's easier. People can just query it.

It's a fantastic book. I highly recommend going and picking it up. Stripe Press never misses. The folks over at Stripe are fantastic. We have another Stripe Press author coming on the show. We have a bunch of incredible thinkers and founders and investors lined up. A little bit of a AI Focus day, A little bit of focus on geoengineering today. Casey Hanmer and Augustus Dirico will be coming in talking about solar and also cloud seeding.

Augustus has been accused of being a part of the deep state.

He's breaking his silence.

And he's breaking his silence.

Yes.

With us on tvpn.

So we should have some fun with that, obviously. But it is kind of getting to a serious point with his. With his drama where, like, I think that the tone needs to shift and hopefully we can be a part of that. But first, let's start with a great post by Delian advocating that Trump should unpardon Trevor Milton because of how bad his video is.

He says nothing else. It's just the video was just so bad.

And so we're going to go through. Trevor Milton is the founder of Nikola, a electric vehicle company that zero emissions trucks went to prison over a fraud case. And we'll break it all down. Delian says, my God, can you be more narcissistic? Maybe take some responsibility for your fraudulent behavior?

Yeah. It's not a good signal if Trump pardons you but doesn't post about it. Oh, yeah, because if he was going to get positive attention from doing it, you'd think he would totally. You know, even if he knew he's gonna get some negative attention. But I don't think anybody. It's hard for me to see, you know, prison is a sad thing.

Yep.

But it's hard for me to see sort of whatever the argument is. Around freeing Trevor, given what seems to.

Be pretty clear cut.

Pretty clear cut, totally.

But let's read the Wall Street Journal article on it and get some facts and then we'll make and then we'll give you our take. So Trump pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton. Milton was convicted of fraud in 2022 for statements about zero emission trucks. Milton said in a video posted to social media Thursday that he received a call from Trump who spoke about how much of an injustice this all was done by the same offices that harassed and prosecuted him. The greatest comeback story in America is about to happen, added Milton. The White House on Friday confirmed that the pardon had been granted. A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Milton in 2022 on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, which is kind of always the framework for these. Anything that any, anything that goes wrong in business, it's all either securities fraud or wire fraud because you're making statements that lead to someone buying or selling a security that are false. During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Milton as a con man who duped investors, including in podcasts and on social media, about the company's sales and the capabilities of its vehicles. In one instance, prosecutors said he created a video of what appeared to be a truck driving normally famous video of the truck going down the hill. But really it was an inoperable prototype rolling down a hill. And that, that video always got me because I just feel like such a skill issue there. Like can't you just build one prototype truck? Can't you retrofit a truck even if.

It was a flat road?

I mean there are kids that are like engine swapping miatas right now and you can't like engine swap a truck and put an electric powertrain in there. Like it doesn't seem that hard to get something functional. The hard part is actually the scaled manufacturing. Like that's what Tesla is good at and that's why Tesla's so impressive. Like the first Tesla was impressive too. They kind of. But even with the first Tesla, it was built on the Lotus Elise and they just chopped it up and extended it and stuff. It was like, it was very much like, the criticism was like, that's just a Lotus Elise with an electric powertrain and it was impressive and it's great for all the investors that saw that. But it was never misrepresented. Elon was never like, oh yeah, this design, like you might, you might think it looks like a Lotus Elise, but really we designed it. No, he just said like, yeah, we use the body from a Lotus Elise, we paid them. They're happy, we're happy. And that's why the Tesla Roadster, the first one looks like a Lotus. Elise, it's fine. And that's not fraud. That's just actually doing the important parts of your business and outsourcing the ones that aren't important.

Calder in the chat says put him back in jail and don't let him out until he's built a truck.

Yes, this is our thesis. Yes. I want to see breakthrough biology writing from Elizabeth Holmes. I want to see a truly trustless ZK proof network hacked together by SBF in prison. He's moving prisons, by the way. Not a full story, but just an interesting fact. His morning routine now includes getting woken up at 3:00am yeah, the real.

By the guards, the real sort of, you know, crypto protocol is one that you could build and launch from within jail.

Right?

It's just pure code. You sort of get it onto one of the library computers, and then it's just out in the world.

I mean, SBF was telling that story of like, I'm the Jane street guy. I'm this genius. I'm this, like, amazing, like, you know, hacker, and it's like, okay, show us. Show us. Build. Build the chain. Build. Build something better. Build a chain. Write some code. What's the. What's the code rust that they all use or something? I forget. I don't know. It's a hard programming language. Like, programming for crypto is not easy. And so if you could drop some. Some amazing. Some amazing code, some decentralized network or something, he would win a lot of fans back instead of just being like, ah, I was, you know, it's all talk.

Yeah. And here' finance records show that Milton and his wife donated more than 1.8 million to a Trump fundraising committee in October.

Wait, like, from prison? I guess you can do anything from prison. That's what we've learned going to prison. You can do podcasts, you can tweet, apparently you can make political donations. Like, what can't you do in prison?

Yeah, you would think that from within prison, there should be some guardrails around, sort of this type of thing, but yeah.

Oh, I mean, also, Milton's lawyer is Brad Bondi, who's the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi, and so clearly cozied up to the Trump administration as things got worse for him. Unclear if he was connected to the Trump administration before all of this happened. But if you're running a fraud, probably pay us to, you know, start making some friends in Washington. Yeah. Also if you're not writing a fraud, probably need a lobbying group anyway.

The lesson is have friends in Washington.

Yeah, I guess. No matter what.

Yeah.

And so Milton maintained his innocence and he said he acted in good faith, accusing prosecutors of cherry picking his public statements to build their case. And of course there is an argument that this company could have been successful and was just kind of faking it till you make it. But there's always this question of like when is too fake? When are you faking it too much? And there's always this like fine line. I think, I think a decent amount of faking is actually acceptable. Like it's fine to put up a CGI render of what you want to build and just say, hey, this is my goal. It's not here today.

But it's so different for it to be cgi. Or even a hype video versus a demo.

Totally.

Demos, faked demos are wrong.

But even Google has gotten in trouble for.

And this is why there's anytime you see these hard tech companies that won't be named on X creating what they. They sort of blur the line between hype video and demo.

Yep.

And I believe that that is wrong.

Right? Totally.

You got to kind of like draw the line around. Is this an advertising for a future state or is this the current state? Yep. And the reason for that is if you're putting something out that you're sort of positioning as a demo but it's not real and then you're using that to raise money. That's wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I do. It is interesting. Like Google had an AI demo where you could just take a user camera to kind of communicate with Gemini and use voice. And it was a very cool demo but people dug into it and found out that part of it was sped up. And so they had done some light editing. So it wasn't a completely unedited video. And they hadn't disclosed that, but they hadn't said that it wasn't edited. And so it was, it was more just like a bad day in PR world. But you could imagine that if the stock had sold off a lot, there could be a securities fraud case. But we'd still be like 25 steps away from the founder. CEO is in jail. The Nikola case is like much more, you know, like just way, way more red flags. And so Milton is 42 years old. He founded Nikola in his basement in 2015. He took it public in 2020 at a valuation of 3.3 billion. He resign the company later that year after a short Seller's report alleged he made misrepresentations about the status of the company's vehicles and the production of hydrogen fuel needed to run them. So it wasn't even electric vehicle, it was hydrogen. I remember Nikola, whose market value briefly eclipsed that of automaker Ford before the fraud case against Milton filed for bankruptcy last month.

Everybody, everybody has they put forward squarely in their targets.

Right.

Adcock clearly wanted to raise at a bigger valuation to Ford. Otherwise why would you price the round, you know, Exactly.

Just right above their market.

Above it or whatever.

But Ford is Lindy. I think we're going to be driving Ford GTs in the year 3000. They're not going away. It's too great of a company.

Henry.

Low key, goaded 100% I was about.

To say many people said, why don't you just attach a motor to the horse? Robotic. Why don't you make robotic horses?

Yeah, teleoperated horses.

He said we have to wait a while until robotics get there, but for now we're going to make cars.

But hopefully the horse makes a comeback. Hopefully. You know all this humanoid buzz with, with figure and Tesla Optimus. We know we want the robotic horse first. I want to be galloping to work the self driving horse. The horses are self driving. You can literally train a horse to hey, go home and you can just be kick him on the butt and he'll just take you home.

Yep.

Who needs a Waymo? Yeah, who needs a Waymo?

That's right.

Let's see. Let's bring horses back. Milton had sold roughly $400 million of stock in Nikola. Wow, that's a lot of secondary delisted shares from the nasdaq a few days ago. Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors asked the judge from Milton's criminal case to order him to pay back nearly 661 million to shareholders. The SEC sued Milton in federal court in July of 2021, alleging he committed civil securities fraud. That case, which was on hold during the criminal proceeding proceedings, remains active, court records show. The SEC declined comment. So this is interesting. Like he, he got 400 million. They're going to ask him to pay back 661 million, but in the meantime he's spending that money and making campaign donations. What happens? I mean he will just be personally bankrupt. Right. So he can so basically has 400 million that he can just spend and he can just give away and if there's no way to claw it back, like if he buys a house and then he goes into bankruptcy, they'll force him to sell the house and then the house will go to the shareholders or the, or the money, or the proceeds from the house. But if he donates it, he's out now.

He's also, he's probably got another 30 years of his career in hard tech. I could easily see him running something.

Back come back, you know, I mean, I'd love to see it. I. We've always maintained that it's always sad when people go to jail and we always believe in restorative justice and we certainly hope that he gets back on the mechanical horse.

Yeah. The video, to Delian's point, it just makes it feel like, you know, maybe he doesn't, maybe he doesn't actually feel bad at all.

Yeah.

You know, it's odd. Odd.

Anyway, Trump issued a raft of pardons since taking office and has pledged to crack down on what he has described as the weaponization of the justice system. Trump was twice indicted by the Justice Department after his first term and separately convicted of falsifying records in the State Court of New York. Both federal cases have been dismissed and Trump is appealing the state conviction. Earlier this week, Trump also pardoned Devin Archer, the former Hunter Biden business partner who gave congressional testimony about their business dealings. Milton Archer and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whom Trump also pardoned, were all prosecuted by the. The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan. The Justice Department has also asked a judge to drop a bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. So oddly, like, you know, a couple of Democrats getting pardoned, couple of Republicans getting pardoned, a couple of seems like apolitical people who have maybe just, you know, asked politely getting pardon. I think the future, if stuff gets really, really political, will just be your. When you get sentenced, you're in prison when your party's out of the office and then so you get un, you get pardoned as soon as your guy gets into the White House and then you get unpardoned on day one of the new administration and you're just in and out of four years. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's the future.

Yeah. And you're just donating to your, to your team while you're in, you know.

Exactly.

In prison to try to make sure like.

Yeah.

Otherwise it could be an eight year stage.

Schrodinger's prisoner both in and out of the clink.

Dark.

But, you know, a lot of people made money, a lot of people lost money on Nikola. If you were buying puts, probably did pretty well.

Yeah. Those short sellers.

Yeah, yeah, they probably did really well.

Actually, we should actually have them on.

I wonder, do you think it was Hindenburg that did it? I wonder who did the actual Nikola short seller report. But anyway, if you're interested in going long, going short, you got to do it on public investing. For those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Go to public.com, sign up the best.

In the business and there's going to.

Be a new stock that you can trade on public.

Wait, before that.

Yeah.

Nikola in 2020.

Yeah.

Had some coverage from Hindenburg Research. Not the firm that you want to get coverage from.

Nope.

How to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto OEM in America.

That doesn't sound good.

So anyways, a little rough. Hindenburg's kind of retired now.

Yeah.

Anyways, out of the game. Out of the game.

But maybe there'll be a new viral short seller that emerges soon.

I think it's Shkreli.

Yeah, he's doing it. Yeah, he's been doing.

He's really doing it. Yeah, he's like. He actually realized you don't need to do a report.

Yeah.

You just need to post.

Yeah, just post.

Just post.

But yeah, he's been. He's been good. Anyway, new stock coming to the market. Everyone's talking about Core Weaves ipo. And we're going to go through the informations report on the winners in the Core Weave IPO and why VCs missed out. We had Taney on the show and he had a great quote. He said Core Weave is the web three to AI pivot done. Right. So it was originally a crypto mining company and now it's an AI.

The best center, potentially the best to ever do it.

The best to ever do it. Truly. Truly. And it looks like it's going to be a fantastic outcome. It looks like it's going to price right around 40, up from 5 cents a share in 2019. Not too bad. And so we'll take you through who invested, when they invested and how much money they made. Let's kick it off with the information Reporting from Corey Weinberg. He says Core Weave's ipo, which started trading today, had a rocky path to the market, but delivered a windfall to Magnetar Capital. The investors big. The investor bet big on the AI data center startup, but presciently protected itself from the risk of big losses. And if you want to pull up what Core Weave is doing on public, I'd love to know, like, how is it trading right now? Because this is the IPO day.

Today's the ipo.

Today is the ipo. We got IPO news, folks.

I'm pulling it up right now.

I'm going to need a soundboard from you. I'm going to need some public.com data from you.

I'm going to need a lot crazy. I didn't actually realize.

Yeah, well, there's always this trickle of like the S1 comes out and then there's gossip articles. Will they go out? Will they not go out? Will they scrap it? Well, they went out. It started trading today. It had a rocky path to market, but delivered a windfall to Magnetar Capital. The investor bet big on the AI data center startup, but they also protected themselves from big risk of big losses. It seems like they sold at a certain point in the secondary market. So Magnetar invested, went in Core Weave when others wouldn't touch it and that helped it get favorable terms. That turned 850 million in equity into 4.3 billion. Folks, let's hear it. Based on the $40 per share IPO price, that's a good return and they weren't exposed to significant risk. Magnetar is the biggest of a handful of winners in the offering, which priced Thursday night at a lower price than expected. So Core Weave has been long been controversial. It borrowed billions to build data centers that serve the huge demands of artificial intelligence. That debt really scared off Silicon Valley's big venture firms and none of them will be celebrating one of the biggest tech listings in recent years. A lot of VCs have a blind spot, said Nick Carter, former guest of the show. A venture capitalist focused on crypto startups. And he made an early investment personally in Core Weave. We had him on to talk about that. We'll have to reshare that clip today. The conventional wisdom as a VC is you don't want to invest in capital intensive businesses. This is something that we've seen again and again. They're harder to underwrite and they did.

Quite the party round.

Oh yeah.

If you look at some of the friends and family. Yep. There's a Russian poker player, Italian music producer.

I love it.

A New York based plastic surgeon and a Sesame street voice actor.

That's exactly which is kind of what.

You want to optimize for in the early stages. You never know. One day you might need some as a founder. Founder might need some plastic surgery. The next day you need a voice actor.

People talk about it's diversity of thought. Exactly what diversity of thought around the table.

Yeah. The next day you might, you Might be down to your last 100 grand. Need to take it to Vegas.

Yep.

Multiply it.

Got your poker players help you there.

If you get them into the country, that's helpful.

You need to make a jingle.

Yeah, the jingle. The Italian music producer. Yeah, the big one.

The big one that's pricing a Core Weave jingle in Italian.

What's their tagline?

Core Weave. Big data centers, highly leveraged.

Yeah. I don't know if this is accurate, but their debt to equity ratio right now is 800 over 811X.

Let's go.

That doesn't seem possible.

I don't know if it's right. But when Core Weave started, investors were betting on more of the canniness of its founders, Michael Entrator, Brian Venturo, Brannon McBee, then on their business plan. The first business of Core Weave, Ethereum mining, became worthless after Ethereum holders essentially cut miners out of the process in the fall of 2020. That, of course, was the merge when Ethereum went to proof of stake as opposed to proof of work. I had mentally written the investment, Carter said, I thought they were going out of business. Instead, the founders repurposed chips and computing equipment they used to mine Ethereum into other uses like graphics rendering and AI. And of course, Crusoe Energy also did something similar. They were using peaker plants and oil and gas extraction. Just the extra energy that's sitting stranded on the grid, you can't use it to power homes. You drop a bunch of server farm right where the energy is super cheap or maybe even free, and you start mining crypto and then over time, you start training AI models. So let's go into Magnetar Capital.

Magnetar, which turned a $50 million loan to Core Weave four years ago.

Wow.

Into a multibillion dollar stake, is set to be the largest beneficiary from the ipo. So it sounds like. Sounds like they were.

They know what they're doing.

Yeah, they knew. I mean, absolutely insane. Former Citadel traders founded Magnitar, is Core Reef's largest investor and has continued to back the company through its most recent private fundraising. Its name is mentioned 157 times in the company company's IPO prospectus, more than twice as often as the CEO.

I mean, you look at this chart, it's like a convertible note in 2020 at $2 a share. They did the Series B at $5.50 a share or $5.58 a share. And then they also came in the series C38.95 a share. And then they did a tender offer at 47 a share. And so they have, they have done just again and again and again been involved in this business.

So this was cool. So the managing partner of Magnatar, David Snyderman, says sometimes the stars just align. I think we were the first firm to get comfortable lending against that asset called high performance Compute. She's referring to Core Weaves inventory of high end chips produced by Nvidia to power AI products.

Some of Magnetar's investments came in the form of loans that turned into equity. This is the convertible note facility.

Yeah. If it was a convertible warrants, it's sort of, it's not sort of confusing to just say this was.

I think they did all of the above. Yeah, I think they did. They did do just straight up.

They're getting warrants with warrants on top.

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

Yeah. And so I just that the angel investor, that's the Sesame street voice actor was able to get some liquidity.

I think they probably did fantastically. I mean Nick Carter did great. So why, why would the Sesame street actor not not do not do well as core?

I wonder if they were able to prevent a lot of dilution just by being able to fund a lot of this growth through, through the debt.

Yeah, I mean it seems like, it seems like it was kind of 5050 because they did take a lot of dilution from the penny warrants. Right. That's why Magnitar is mentioned so many times in the IPO prospectus. But you know, probably less than if they were just trying to, hey, we need $50 million to buy a bunch of a bunch of chips and build a data center and we have no revenue. And so it's a $10 million pre money and we're going to give up 80% of the business or something like what is the alternative if you're not doing debt at this scale? As Corey grew, Magnetar lent another $30 million collateralized against Magnetar's oh oops, where am I? Magnetar capital collateralized against CoreWeave's contracts to sell computing power to Microsoft and Nvidia. Core weave has paid $66 million in interest so far on those loans, so less than 10% and these mature by the end of the decade. Magnatar was the second biggest investor in Core Weaves fundraising last year, putting in another 350 million. Documents show Magnetar and tech investment firm CO2 were able to hedge their bets. They got a put, which allowed them to sell back their stakes to Core Weave if the stock fell two years after the ipo. But that could become an important investment term because investors in the round paid 38.95 a share, meaning they stand to lose money on the deal if Core Weave stock goes down much after the $40 a share IPO. Of course, they might not exercise that immediately. They might wait it out but see where the stock is in a year or two. But they do have that that put option for a while. If investors were to exercise the right, it would mostly it would be very costly for CoreWeave, the company said in its filing. Spokesperson for CO2 and Magnetar declined to comment. They're not talking because they're in a quiet period, of course. Several funds are underwater on their investments. Core Weave In Core Weave at the IPO price, investment firms Jane street, Fidelity, Macquarie, Blackrock, Newberger Berman and others bought $650 million in stock last November. For early investors. Moment of silence for this moment of.

Silence is brought to you by public.com.

They bought at 47 a share, 15% above the IPO price. Magnetar, best known for winning bets on dodgy mortgage loans before the financial crisis. These are former Citadel guys, after all, they know what they're doing. Is now deep in the AI investing frenzy. It's expected to write one of the largest checks to OpenAI, also a Core Weave customer in OpenAI's $10 billion funding round. This month, Bloomberg reported, Magnetar launched a VC arm to leverage its relationship with Corev by investing in new AI startups in exchange for access to the Nvidia chips Core Weave owns and core we put 50 million in that. And we've talked about these like VC funds attached to startups before. You said, you know, maybe it doesn't make sense for perplexity, but in Core Weave's case, it's like they have the underlying data center. You know, they have something that's like very complementary to an AI company, an AI app application layer company. And so maybe it makes a little bit more sense in this case. And if you're building an AI application company and training or inference is one of your most, most large like expense line items, maybe it's great to actually have that relationship really tight and take some equity.

I think it makes, you know, once you're maybe past the $10 billion stage.

Exactly.

Or at least a billion dollars of revenue, do your VC fund.

Yeah. Like it seems like Core, we pass product market fit. Right. It's a pretty basic business. It's. Yeah, they build a, they build a data center and then they sell access to that data center.

Yeah.

And they're, they're doing great. And interestingly, Dylan Patel just put out Semi on Semianalysis, the GPU Cloud Cluster Max rating system, how to rent GPUs in the U.S. i'm going to try and refresh this, but I believe Cluster Max, I believe he gave Core Reeve a very, a very strong rating. It actually rated a few. Let me see if I can go to Semi Analysis. You want to keep reading.

The article's mostly over. I can cover a little bit from Nvidia.

Yeah. So Semianalysis rated every single NEO Cloud, Core Weave, Crusoe Together, AI, Oracle, Azure, aws, Lambda, Google Cloud and interestingly, Core Weave got the highest ranking. They are the only Semi Analysis, they're the only one that won the Semianalysis Platinum tier. In the gold tier was Crusoe Together, AI Nebias, Lepton, AI Oracle and Azure. But AWS got silver and Google Cloud got bronze, which is something that most people wouldn't expect from a hyperscaler. But you know, we've seen with Google Cloud they just had to buy, they had to shell out $32 billion for upping their security. And you know, even though they are known as the greatest, you know, hyperscaler in many ways there's a little bit of like maybe they were behind the ball on, on specifically running AI workloads in the cloud for, for other companies. Whereas Core Weave built their cloud specifically with AI in mind for the last few years, kind of had a fresh start, maybe greenfield project and did very well and earning high marks from Dylan Patel over at Semi analysis. Anyway, there's. There's another interesting line in here about Les Wexner. He's. He's in here, owns 3% of Core Weave. He invested $1 million through a trust, and that's worth something like $800 million now. Of course, Lex Wexner.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

A controversial figure. He's been linked to Jeffrey Epstein. And he also in here, he used to own Victoria's Secret. And so again, not your traditional AI data center investor, but someone who got on the cap table early and rode that stake.

Yeah.

Rough way.

700X. So banger. Banger. Never thought we'd be hitting the size gong for.

Size is size.

Size is size, though.

Size is size. Nvidia is also in the deal. Probably Silicon Valley's biggest winner from the.

It's good to see them get a win, to be honest.

Finally. Finally. Yeah. Jensen needed it.

They've been sitting on the sidelines.

Been rough. Yeah. They really did need, like, an AI narrative for them. They needed like a. Something to really pump the stock. So they're, of course, the dominant chip maker. They have made a crucial supporting role as one of Corviv's largest investors. It owns about 3% of the company, fully diluted after having bought about $100 million worth of shares in the Series B in early 2023, which was, you know, that ChatGPT moment was just taking off and scaling laws were just kind of becoming popular.

It's so strange that Nvidia and Lex Wexner have the same ownership.

That is crazy.

Core weave.

Yes.

Narrative violation.

So Nvidia, it's about $700 million at the IPO price.

Secret Jeffrey Epstein guy.

Yeah.

Has the same ownership levels as Nvidia.

One of the greatest companies of all.

Time in Core Weave, one of the highest profile.

I mean, it really is like just a bizarre company. Like, they're. They're doing amazing stuff. You can see from Dylan Patel's analysis, like, the product that they've created is clearly top notch. I believe that Dylan Patel is very objective in his analysis, and he's not because of the nature of his business. He.

You know, there are some lists in this industry that you can more or less pay to get on.

Yes. But I don't believe that Dylan Patel's is Exactly.

Well, it's 11:30.

Oh, it is.

And we have a special guest.

We do.

I believe they are in the waiting room.

Let's bring them in.

What's up, guys?

Hey, how you doing?

There he is. What's going on? See you guys. It's great to have you.

Good to see you. I heard you've been doing space repetition to practice for interviews. So I've been doing it. It says your name is Dwarkesh Patel. You have a podcast, and you interviewed somebody named Mark who owns a website called facebook.com. can you tell me about that?

Yeah. In fact, I made an entire Anki deck just for you guys.

Really? No way.

How's the book launch been going? How's the press tour? How are you doing today?

It's been going good. The people have all kinds. I have a book out called the Scaling Era, and it compiles the interviews I've been doing about AI and people like, as you mentioned, Mark and Demis and Dario, the heads of the AI labs, but also researchers and engineers and philosophers and economists about. And it's been really interesting because AI is one of those topics where there's so many fractal questions you could ask about what is its impact going to be? How are you going to train it? How do we even think about a super intelligence? So been dealing with a lot of different kinds of questions, which has made it interesting.

That's great.

How contentious was the sort of book process? Did you know you wanted to go with Stripe? I imagine you could have had your pick of the litter in terms of legacy publishers that promised you all sorts of things, but you happen to own sort of your own distribution. So maybe it was just about picking the right sort of underlying partner for.

Honestly, was never a matter of picking a publisher. The main question was whether I should do a book in the first place. And so some folks at Stripe Press reached out, and if I was going to do a book, it would be with them, because, as you know, their reputation precedes them. And so then it was just like deciding, do I want to do the book or not? And I think in retrospect, it was the right call. I think I'm really delighted with how it turned out.

I want to talk about acceleration. Are you feeling the acceleration? Like, mathematically, we are not accelerating GDP yet, although technically we are today. I think GDP ticked up just a little bit, which means we're technically accelerating.

But it must be your podcast.

Yes. Hopefully we're responsible, but, you know, energy use is not. Is not accelerating. Even some of the benchmarks are kind of saturating. We're not seeing acceleration curves. We're seeing solid growth, but at the same time, it feels like we're on the precipice of acceleration. But what does it mean to feel the acceleration for you?

I think it's a really good question because we have these models which we think are smart, and as you say, we haven't seen them even automate the things which we like. When we're having a conversation, we'll be like, oh, the call center workers, they should be really worried. And they still have got their jobs. Right. So what's going on? There's, as you know, people have been talking about, we need to make the models cheaper. When deepsea came out, they were like, oh, it's going to be Jevons Paradox. And we'll be using them way more now that they're cheaper. I think the real bottleneck is just we got to make them smarter. I don't like they're already so cheap. It's like $0.02 per million tokens or something. Ridiculous. I think the real bottleneck for me using them more is not their price, but them being more useful, being able to take over more parts of the economy.

Yeah. Do you think that intelligence is all we need? Andre Karpathy was talking about the importance of agency. Talk to other people about maybe it's all like, what makes humans effective. It's not just intelligence, it's also agency. It's also coordination, friendliness, networking. Tyler Cowan's talked about, like, do we even need to map the different parts of, like, the skill tree that humans have, like, charisma, wisdom, like, underrated is like these, like, the AIs are getting more intelligent, but they're already, like, maxed out on wisdom. Right. But do we need to think about a different taxonomy here, or do we just need to max out intelligence and everything else will come?

No, I think you're absolutely right. I think you need a lot more skills. There has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough, we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is, is. And in fact, in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a beginning. So the big example here is when Deep Blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess.

Yep.

People thought that this was like a big breakthrough in intelligence in general because we thought that what chess required was the general intelligence. And you might have heard this concept of AI complete problems, where if you solve this problem, then you've solved intelligence. So people said that about self driving. The Turing test was supposed to be AI complete.

Yep.

We've gone through all of these subcomponents of intelligence, and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to It. The thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se, although that's a part of it. I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this global hive mind where the reason we can make iPhones and we can make buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency. It's the fact that. But there's so much specialization, there's so much capital deepening. People are just like, doing things, trying different ideas. AIs need to be smarter in order to do that. They need to have more agency in order to do that. But once they can, you just. If you have millions of AIs running around trying different things, that's. That's when we get the real acceleration. And you'll feel it in your blood when.

When you say, like millions of AIs, you've said that you think that there will be billions of AIs running around. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, how can we quantize? Are we just talking like chatgpt da use? Are we talking about individual threads? Because you can inference multiple threads on a single chip. Like, how are you thinking it when you think it sounds more concrete when you say there will be billions of AIs, but is that really just like there will be a hive mind that is equivalent to billions of people? Are we talking about like one? Or maybe each model is like one entity, but then there's sub threads. How do you think about like, that concept of like, like billions of AIs?

Honestly, I don't think anybody knows. I think it'll just like, depend on how the tech tree shapes out.

Sure.

I have heard like these wild ideas in some of these interviews where one person at J. Kotra mentioned this idea of the blob. And the blob is right now. You know, it's really hard for. If you have an institution or organization company, it's really hard for the person at the center to have that much awareness of what's happening in the company, to control it to any great extent. Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain as any other Chinese person or any other person in general. And in the future, you can imagine that, look, the thing at the center just has way more compute. And it's not clear whether we think about it as more copies of AI Xi Jinping or AI Sundarpichai or something, but you could just have this huge blob that's constantly. It's like learning more things. It's like writing every Single press release the company releases, it's reading every single pull request, it's answering every single customer response that. I don't know if that at all helped answer the question.

Yeah, it's a very weird question of like, how this will actually play out. Will, like, do we need to recreate the concept of like an individual brain and then copy paste it a billion times, or do we just need one really big brain? It's unclear to me. I don't know. Jordy, what do you got?

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

How many times have those people said that? I think that's a very zero. Some people were saying things like, oh, you're eating up this fossil fuel, which is our affection for Ghibli somehow by making these things. I think it's just a very zero sum view of the world where there can be a limited amount of beauty, there can be a limited amount of joy. I just don't think that. And can I be honest? The thing I was really feeling when all these Ghibli images were coming out, I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future, where, look, you're getting a glimpse just from these early images of how cool and beautiful the things AI makes or helps us make will be. Just imagine this scaled up like 100x1000x integrated into all our senses, maybe even into our minds, integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth. Yeah, I'm just like, the future could be really beautiful.

I agree.

Yeah, I'm Wearing like a VR goggles and it's making everyone beautiful. It's really rose colored glasses.

Right?

Yeah. To begin with. Yeah.

Yeah.

How do you feel? So Manus AI is apparently doing like a roadshow in the United States right now, sort of raising for American VCs potentially. I saw some people pushing back on the timeline saying like, you know, bad luck to any American VC that does that. How do you feel? You know, you know, and the criticism would be like, you know, we're in this sort of a, you know, cold war American, you know, venture capital dollars shouldn't be sort of funding companies that are potentially competing with us AI labs or application layer companies. What's your sort of broad take on this sort of like cross border investment in AI?

Yeah, I was in China a few months earlier and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture capital system there felt and the tech ecosystem generally because after the 2021 crackdowns, people are just like really pulled back. And it sounds like after the deep seq moment that sort of changed, at least in the AI, at least in AI, because now the state, the city funds and whatever are more willing to push in. Yeah. How should people react to this? I'm of two minds because one, I do believe that there is like there could be an intelligence explosion and you really want to be ahead of that and you don't want to help them get ahead on that. So I think like the expert controls and whatever are wise. As for just mana seems like in the middle ground here where I wouldn't want to just generally try to harm China by tariffing batteries or cars or something. This is an application of AI and it's complementary to American AI Foundation Labs because they're using the cloud model. Right. So I honestly, I don't have a strong thing. What do you guys think?

I don't, I don't. I'm exactly in the same position as you. I don't have, you know, if American, you know, I did find it a little bit weird that some American venture capitalists were just like cheering on. Yeah, deep seek just like, you know, blanket statement like, you know, open source is good, this is good. When it felt like the way the launch was like rolled out and announced was done in a way to potentially sort of harm American financial markets.

But I mean, my take has been that just, just on a pure investment finance level, like investing in a Chinese company just can be difficult to get your money back at a certain point because the money just gets kind of stranded there. And then depending on who's in charge of America at the time. It could be very onerous to bring that money back. But I want to stay on China. Real quick, I thought, I mean, fantastic piece. I don't even know what you call a video essay. Essay. But the. One of the things that really stuck out to me as a creator like yourself was the, was the lack of Chinese Joe Rogan basically. And I was wondering, like, have you, have you thought about that more? Have you unpacked that more? Like you would almost expect that even if all the crazy censorship is true, why is there no power? Power law win. And there's a Joe Rogan who just spouts propaganda constantly, like, what is going on that's driving the lack of these like long tail, like, you know, world like country renowned, country famous people.

Yeah. I feel like you guys might actually have a good perspective on this because somebody might have said, why doesn't tech have their like Joe Rogan equivalent? And you guys started your podcast network and I think somebody could have said before you guys started your podcast network, why doesn't something like this exist already? I honestly, I don't speak Chinese and I don't. This is just secondhand stuff I heard in China. I feel like reluctant to make grand conclusions about Chinese culture based on like, why don't they have a Joe Rogue? And then it's because, like, this is. Chinese culture is like this or something. The sense I got was that they are more concerned, like whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume is often more focused on practical matters. And if you listen to Joe Rogan, it's very much like, let's just shoot the shit about whatever. I get the sense that it's like that is just not that interesting. At least with the people I met.

Yeah, yeah. It's less practical stuff. I wonder if there's also an effect where just some of the first social networks probably accelerated more quickly to these highly Diffuse algorithmic driven TikTok feeds that allow for smaller micro celebrities essentially where things. We. In America, we've been building up this celebrity culture for so long that we have this more of a power law dynamic. I don't know. I don't really have a thesis on it. That's. That, that, that, that's super built out. But it is fascinating.

Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting. Have you been there?

I was there once on a layover, but Jordi did live there for a while.

Oh really? In 2016, I worked at a. I went to Fudan.

It was A little hedge fund called High Flyer.

Yeah, no big deal. No, I just studied abroad there. So I was there for a semester and I worked out of China Accelerator, which is like a startup accelerator. So very, very interesting experience that I don't.

I mean, the scale is crazy. I was in Guangzhou even just for a day, and the scale of the buildings there, it's just, it really is remarkable. Like you need to see it in person because the pictures kind of compress everything. You don't really understand until you're there.

The one, the one thing that I found that was weirdly fascinating is I would. I. For some reason, I don't know if it was the iPhone camera at that time, but I found it very difficult to get high quality images because it was so polluted that like something about like your own eyes would be able to kind of like, you know, huh, increase the contrast. But I would take a picture and I'm like, that's not what it looks like. And I realized over time that it was just like certain areas were so heavily polluted that the iPhone camera would just kind of bug out. But I had a question for you. Something from this week that I thought was funny was that we were all kind of holding our breath for the next ChatGPT moment. And then it was also ChatGPT with their image generation product. Do you think we should be holding our breath for another company to experience this sort of moment like that where it's just full, complete takeover of the mindshare? Because mindshare is just so important right now. This sort of benchmarks come out and everybody in our corner of the Internet is like hyper fixated on it. But the average consumer, you know, one of the things I thought was fascinating is, you know, John and I had a couple Ghibli posts each that sort of broke containment. And a lot of people were quoting it and saying, all right, like, tell me what this app is. Everybody like, what's the joke? Like, they just still didn't know like chatgpt or anything like that. But I think it would be amazing for the industry if another company could have, you know, a moment that big. Do you see something like that happening, you know, this year? Or have we sort of reached.

Yeah, even like the agent stuff like flight booking, you could see that like there's some application that would go real broad. Is there any like next, next milestone that you're waiting for?

If somebody did get a reliable agent to work, I think that would just be like, that would have a similar break the Internet in a way that you personally could use and you could just log in. And I think it'll probably be one of the foundation lab companies. People have been for years trying to build agents and they just haven't worked. And it makes me think that that's a fundamental limitation of the current models. And so it'll just be the company that is building a future model that is geared towards computer use and so forth. That is what I'd expect it to be. I mean, I was thinking the other day, remember when Sam got fired and people were posting on Twitter, oh, there's something. What did Alias see?

Q Star?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think that's why he got fired. But it is notable that in retrospect, if you were following the Q Star rumors, you actually would have been in a good position to anticipate, you know, that there would be this like reasoning breakthrough that's kind of what they were talking about at the time. Similarly, GPT 4.5 and Grok 3 being not that much better. If you were following Twitter six months ago, you would have seen, oh, pre training might plateau, but we'll have to go with inference scaling or something. So maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's going to happen. I mean, I remember at the time I was just like, these idiots on Twitter are just like, they don't know what they're talking about. There's like a rumor mill and I'm like, kind of like, I mean, you know, you take it with a grain of salt, but they kind of had the big picture. There's like no secrets.

Yeah, there was always this funny dynamic where people were criticizing Sam for launching ChatGPT without telling the board. But then at the same time people were criticizing Sam for like being non technical and not driving the product forward. And I was like, no matter what you think of Sam, like those two things cannot be true simultaneously. Like you have to pick a side here. You can't criticize them for both like not innovating and also innovating too fast. But anyway, I want to talk about like a, like a flip side of the P Doom argument that I've been kicking around. Basically. Like we've seen these like accelerating trends before. Nuclear energy, energy too cheap to meter has been talked about before and we have hit stagnation. Like it is possible that just something can break in our society and all these different economic and political forces can align to just say, hey, you know what? Nuclear energy is not going to double every couple years. And it didn't and I'm wondering, like, what is your p stagnation? Like just your probability that something happens? Maybe people freak out, maybe there's just, you know, one world government or something. But we actually see AI stall for a significant amount of time, like 50 years. There's no intelligence explosion purely for stagnation reasons. Do you think that's a possibility?

Like 10, 20%? I think there is a dynamic I talked about earlier where we in the past we have underestimated how much it takes to make a coherent intelligence that has agency and so forth. Right. That could be part of it. Another is that there is no intelligence explosion. So sorry, I mean the most important thing here is, look, we can keep increasing compute that we're putting into these systems for maybe the next five, ten years because computer is just growing at this ridiculous rate where in three years we're going to have 10x the amount of global AI compute that we have right now. But at some point right now we're spending 2% of GDP on compute and data centers and stuff like that. You can't just keep like 10xing that forever. So if somehow this whole deep learning paradigm is wrong and we just totally miss the boat somehow, then I can see it happening. That's, I give it 10, 20%. Otherwise if we do get AGI, I'm of the opinion that we're not. It would just be so hard to contain it. Like it's an incredibly powerful technology. Even if there's no intelligence explosion, even if it doesn't help you make an ASI or something. Just AGI alone sure is like, would just make the economy explode and all kinds of crazy shit.

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

I was thinking about this this morning actually and the intuition I was thinking about is so since 1750s we've had 2% economic growth in the world. Before that it was like a tenth of that, right? 0.2%. If you were around in the 1500s or 1000 and somebody said there'd be like 2% growth, I think you might, given your reference class, have been like, look, it just takes a long time to learn how to artificially select crops and how to build like new structures and aqueducts and whatever. That is a process that takes a while. So why do you think you're just going to be going through like increasing that 2, 3% a year and in retrostrate it is like really weird. You look at the last 100 years of history, we're discovering all these new things in physics and chemistry and so forth. The last 50 years, we're like, like we start with a transistor and now we're talking on this magical screen. And that was just like physics didn't bottleneck that. I think, like you get another 10x and I don't see any in principle reason why the next 10x the physics is like, just would not allow the robots to move fast enough.

Yeah, I mean, certainly on the GDP question, I think the energy question's like maybe a little bit murkier, but then there's probably other ways to optimize and still get those gdp, GDP lifts, even with, even with energy growing at like a more reasonable, less explosive rate. So I, I think I agree with you there.

I'm sure you've talked about this in other interviews and with some of the individuals that are sort of leading initiatives at these companies, but what's your sort of broad take on, on Apple's position and how they've been approaching everything in AI? You know, it's sort of like I've seen, you know, they've sort of led with like Genmoji almost as much as they've led with like, you know, everything. All the potential of what you would want out of sort of AI assistant. But how do you think these, you know, companies like Apple and Google sort of like figure out product development and like proper distribution of these products? Because I feel like that's been the big critique. It's just like they have every, every possible advantage, such talented team members, and it has to be so frustrating.

It should be a sustaining advantage or sustaining innovation if you're looking at the innovator's dilemma framework. And yet it feels like it might wind up being disruptive. I don't know.

Yeah, they're not AGI filled enough. You know, like if you treat it like another feature. Well, I mean, even if you treat it like another feature, it's like mysterious why Siri doesn't work on my phone, but. But it's like more people basically. And if you take that seriously, you're not just going to be like, oh, and the 25th department in our complex is about making Siri better at speaking or something. No, it's like, this is the future.

Yeah.

And then that then becomes the giga bowl case for safe superintelligence, meaning none of the features or consumer applications really matter at all today and you shouldn't even release them and you should just sort of of accelerate towards the end goal that enables all the other goals.

That's an interesting point, I think maybe somewhere in between, where if you didn't release ChatGPT, you wouldn't have been able to just know that this is a feature people really wanted and that they would get a lot of use of as compared to the other things people were using GPT 3.5 to do. And I wonder if other things that other features of AGI will be similar where if you don't deploy it to a bunch of engineers on cursor, you just won't know what actually makes something a good coding bot. The counterargument to this, and I think what the SSI people would say, is that they actually are deploying, but they're deploying towards the one thing they care about, which is accelerating AI research. And they don't need to do that externally, they can just do that internally. And so the basic question is, can you get this closed loop where you build AIs which are helping you accelerate AI research, super intelligence? I'm like 5050 on that question. But that other 50% is like a big deal.

Yeah. You mentioned AGI pilled. Is there a difference between AGI pilled and ASI pilled? And why do OpenAI co founders seem incapable of starting anything but a foundation model company? Yeah, I always wondered, like, I just want one of them to be like, yeah, actually I'm starting a travel company, but it seems to be traveling a.

Lot after their jobs are gone.

They only know one thing. They're all one trick ponies. I mean, I love them all, but like, it's just funny that none of them started anything else.

It's the only thing that matters. Maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, I think you're right. I think some people. I wouldn't even put it as esi because even if you don't believe in this, like, godlike intelligence that's going to control the world, I'm not sure I believe it either. I think there's AGI pill. Then there's like transformative AI pill where you say, look, even if they're just like humans, if they have the advantages that AIs will just intrinsically have because of the fact that they're digital, which is the fact that they can be copied with all of their knowledge, right? So think of the most skilled engineer in your company like Jeff Dean or Elias ets. You can like copy that person with all their tasks and knowledge and everything. You can merge different copies, you can scale and distill AGIs. Those advantages alone and the fact that there will be billions of copies as we increase the amount of compute in the world, that alone is enough for transformation in the sense of going from what we were like before the Industrial revolution to the industrial revolution pace of growth. And so I think somebody can be AGI pilled in the sense they say, yeah, I expect human level intelligence to emerge in the next 10 years. But they still don't take that seriously. As in, okay, well what does that imply about what is happening through the economy? Does that just mean like, oh, you've got a smart personal assistant or does it mean like, no, we're in a very different growth regime.

Last question.

Two last questions. I guess.

Go for it.

Go for it. One question. So are there any people in the book that you feel like in the fullness of time are sort of very under hyped or not getting enough attention? People that are unsung heroes that maybe don't post a lot on X today but. But when we look back 15 years from now we'll be like, those were the people that were doing. Cause there's this weird phenomena right now where it's like if you're just loud on the Internet, you just suck mind share and attention. And maybe there's somebody building over that's doing more impactful work or really at the forefront that isn't posting at all because they're actually onto something.

That's a really good question. I think a lot of the people I've interviewed have subsequently or you know, at the same time like are well known, right? So even if you're not a Lab CEO, so if you're like a Leopold or you're a Sholto or a Trenton, people know who you are on Twitter as well. The person who I think might be underrated still is an interview I did that we only released in the book. So we have two interviews that we kept for the book. One of them is Ajeya Cotra and she is somebody who has been Doing these really interesting. Since the 2000 and tens, these really interesting analyses of how much compute did evolution spend in total in order to. Over the billions of years evolution has been going. How do we model that as a computational pathfinding exercise and using that as an upper bound on how long it will take to build AGI and then how much computer does the human brain use? How much time do we spend learning as kids? And how much compute is that in total compared to how long long it takes to train these models? What does that teach us about how much better these models could get given this overhang that has informed, I think, a lot of, oh, shit, sorry, this is the wrong answer. Although Ajaya is excellent and she's also underrated, the one who is also super, super underrated is Carl Schulman. And I think, I don't know if this name rings a bell to you. This man is like. You would not believe the amount of ideas that are out there in the AI ecosystem. From like the software only singularity, basically the intelligence explosion kind of stuff, to these transformative AI and modeling out the economics of this new growth regime. So much more. It's like this one guy, it all came from him. He doesn't like to write that much, so he tells other people his ideas. I had him on my podcast and we put his stuff in there. He just has all these galaxy brain takes. One of them was he looked at the research on what changed between chimpanzee brains and human brains, and he's like, oh, there's a bunch of structural similarities. It's just that the human brain is bigger.

So.

So this lends credence to the scaling hypothesis, all kinds of galaxy brain stuff.

That's amazing.

I have one more question and then we'll let you go. By the way, X is down. I think you broke it, or we broke it together, but yeah, we're still live on. Yeah, but how do you think about more on, like, the business side? Because I've just. I think everybody's been fascinated with your journey. When you started your podcast, everybody would have said, like, there's enough podcasts. Like, we don't need, you know, we just don't need more of them. That, that clearly is not true. There's plenty of white space and your growth is proof of that. But how do you think about value capture and what you're doing? Because I'm sure you've had people come to you and say, like, hey, look like, you know, just, just come, keep doing the show. But we're going to give you $50 million of sort of, like, shares, and you don't.

Nobody, no, nobody has come to me with that.

Well, they should, I think. Yeah, but, yeah, like, how do you think about kind of. I think there's this general fear in the tech community right now where it's like, this is the last two to three years where you can, like, you know, accumulate wealth, and then, like, it's over. And I don't believe that that's true. But how do you sort of balance, like, you know, you're doing something you love all day long, which is just like, talking to interesting people and, like, thinking about the future and, you know, humanity's potential and technology and all this stuff. But, you know, how do you balance. How do you balance all that.

That.

That fear and wanting to capture value from your work, but also wanting to not be conflicted and being able to just be sort of this independent actor?

I actually am very curious about the answer for you guys, because even though the network you're starting now, it started with a much bigger bang than my podcast are starting out with. So I assume you actually got a bunch of these kinds of offers as you're like, oh, this is new and exciting.

Well, yeah, we care a lot about, you know, being like, Switzerland, but specifically from, like, the investor. The investor side. Right. Like, long term, we want to have any sort of investor be able to come on the show and talk about what they're doing.

That's right.

And I would imagine the same thing for you. Like, you don't want to be, like, you know, so tied in or have to one, you know, foundation model, you know, company that you can't talk about the incredible things that someone else is doing. Right.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep. I have had, like, different podcast networks or whatever reach out to me in the past, and I've seriously considered them. In one case, I was, like, close to saying yes. And in retrospect, it was like, this was many, many years ago before, like, the podcast had grown that much at all. And it was like, we'll give you. We'll edit the show for you and we'll produce it for you, and all we ask is 50% of the revenue you earn through the future.

That's a rough trade, 50% of your life, lifetime earnings.

But I had a couple of friends who I was like. They were like, dude, it's like working. Just do it yourself. And I'm glad because also, another thing that might have influenced your decision as well is talent is so key. Talent in the sense of I think it really matters to have one, or in this case two. In your case, two people who are like, we care. This is our vision and we are going to instill it rather than this is an institution where I'm the face of it. But secondly, what I was going for is like talent as your editors, your other people on your team. For me, I've just been super delighted with the people I get to work with there. And it just like the care and attention to detail they have just would not be replicated with. Here's a team of editors at this podcast network. It's like instead of the people I've sought out and I love working with and I give them detailed feedback and they give me detailed feedback and you know. Yeah, that's what also what makes it special.

Yeah.

Onto the specifics around, do you think the general techno, you know, techno capitalist fear of, you know, like, you know, basically, like, I think a lot of, you know, 22 year olds right now are coming in to their sort of careers and they're saying like, well, everybody's going to be paperclipped in a few years. Like you've got to sort of like create value and capture it now so that, that you're okay in this sort of like AGI future. I do feel like that's maybe sort of common fear throughout history, right. Where there's like, people have this sort of pending sense of doom sometimes. But do you think that's like, you know, what would you say to somebody that, that had that sense?

I, I think like, I think the way to model out the next few years from a career trajectory is you'll just have 100x to leverage, but you want to be in a position where you can use that leverage. There's a common thing, and I'm sure you experience this now as well, is that as you advance in your career, before you're like, I've got a bunch of time, but I don't know what to work on. And after you're further along, you're like, I have no time, but there's like a thousand different ideas I have for things that would be super valuable or I think would go really well or something. So I think what you should do is just get to a point where in whatever you think is interesting or care about, you're at the frontier and can see what the problem space actually looks like. If you care about AI, I would really recommend moving to SF and then just start working on problems and use the leverage that AI gives you. And if you end up getting paperclipped. It's like, what's the point of you personally, what's the point of you not doing anything? Worrying about that in the 80% of worlds or 90% of worlds where we don't get paperclipped, you will get to say you worked on something really cool at a time that was really important in the history of humanity.

That's great.

Well said.

Thanks for coming on. This is fantastic.

This is fun, guys.

We gotta have you back. This is really, really awesome.

Make it a regular thing.

And super militia on you guys. I mean, like, you were like, well, your previous thing is a couple months in, but this is like a couple weeks out and you're already killing it. That's awesome.

So much.

Yeah.

We really appreciate you coming.

And for, for, for the record, we're not building a network.

It's actually a head fake.

It's a head fake.

It's just a show.

It's just a show. Forever.

That's right.

We'll never come to you and say, give us half for, for editing.

You know, you want at least 75%.

Yeah, exactly.

Great having you on.

Great having you on.

I'm excited to get, you know, everybody to get access to the book.

Yeah, yeah, go get the book. I, I printed it out. We have a man buy the actual thing.

Yeah.

Thank you for doing that stripe press. The scaling era is here.

Cheers.

Thank you guys so much for having me on.

Bye.

See ya.

Bye. And we got Casey Hanmer coming in. We kept him waiting. Sorry about that, Casey. Hopefully you're still here with us because we want to hear about terraform. We want to. Have you seen his office he builds from a castle in Burbank? It's, it's like amazing. Some guy built this, this, these crazy castles. It's a fascinating company.

Boom.

Hey, Casey. How you doing?

Hello.

Very well.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Great.

Are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else? Where are you?

I'm in the castle. I'm behind a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year.

But yeah, amazing.

I mean, the castle windowless wall is right by me here.

Very cool. Can you give me just a little bit of intro explanation of the company? And then, I mean, I. Do you want to hear the story of how the castle got built again? Because it's a funny story.

Sure. Well, let's start with Terraform. So three and a half years ago, I rage quit my job at NASA JPL and incorporated Terraform Industries to build cheap Synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. And we've been at that for three and a half years now, and we've made a lot of progress. It's super exciting. The castle itself was built in the 80s by the bandy family who built many of the industrial buildings in Burbank. And they worked with a general contractor who was down to do crazy stuff. And it turns out if you're building from cinder blocks, you can make them any shape you like. So, yeah, that's how we got a castle.

Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Can we start with this quote tweet that went mega viral this week? You said, I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now. Don't ask me. It's a video of Elon Musk landing a rocket, and I think Elon quote, tweeted you and said, just read the instructions, but can you give us some more context on, like, unpack that? Like, what exactly is the outside context problem? What's going on?

Yeah, it's a bit of a geeky deep cut. So the outside context problem is a concept popularized in Ian Banks's culture novel series. In particular the novel Accession, which primarily deals with the culture coming in contact with kind of a previously unknown alien. I mean, the whole books are full of aliens, but this is like an alien. Alien intelligence that's modality is very reactive. And so their usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming force. And then just read the instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in IMX's novel. So in this novel, there's millions and millions of fully sentient, very, very large spacecraft that fly around basically looking after humanity. The deeper point is, I think Elon's a very interesting person. I think he's obviously very underestimated. Has been throughout his entire career for whatever reason. And.

But is he.

And I think, you know, convention.

Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but is he underestimated in our corner of the Internet or just sort of broadly? Do you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon, you know, fanboy?

I think even then, yeah. And. And I think, you know, conventional wisdom a year ago was like, oh, Elon is getting involved in politics. He's going to. To shoot his feet off. And I think he genuinely took a big risk backing Donald Trump for the election. If Kamala had won, I doubt it would have gone very well for him. But now there's a person who a year ago we're hearing all these op eds like, oh, he doesn't understand politics. Still hearing he doesn't understand politics. He's taking a huge risk. He should just focus on Mars, what is he talking about, et cetera. He's now in the White House literally running the IT modernization process of the entire federal government, which is code 4. He has root access to the entire government. And I think ultimately, I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for United States. You know, obviously there's going to be some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way. That's always been clear from the outset. I wrote a blog post about this last year saying, you know, why do we need a Department of Government efficiency? But I think think overall we should probably regard ourselves as extremely lucky that someone of Elon's calibre has taken interest in fixing the processes that affect all of us, not just finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies or skirt around certain regulatory issues such as the normal way that you deal with these things. But I think the conversation needs to be had here. And my general complaint is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the DoGE process are not constructive because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on.

Going on.

And I think this is a process that would be improved by constructive and high quality criticism and suggestions and better ideas flying into the system. I think that's always the case. But there's an outside context problem because most of the people who are jumping up and down about the various alleged outrages that DOJ is committing do not understand what's going on. It's beyond their context, which is not a huge surprise, but. But it is a major problem. It's interesting, particularly for their interests. And I wrote a post about this as well. In the context of California. Like California, I live there. I love it. It's a great state, but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now. And that's a real problem. For the future of the progressive movement, San Francisco needs to be a shining city on a hill.

Yeah, I agree.

I have a random question, but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it. Do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep tech or hard tech investors? After years of SaaS and sort of Web3 and now it's sort of the hot thing? I mean, even you started your company in 2021, even then you know, it wasn't, you know, there's sort of the meme, right, which is, you know, deep tech would have loved zero interest rates, right? But like, there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being, you know, there were plenty, but there was not, not as many as there are now. Do you have advice to just sort of venture capitalists broadly about how you're evaluating, you know, if, if a, you know, bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible, like, how do you actually, you know, how, how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that? Because, like, it just seems like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed, but like, they're doing like, like very real work and very likely will have dramatic impact.

Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about acquiring the necessary expertise to make better than random judgments when it comes to potential deep tech startups, but the reality is it's extremely capital intensive. It operates on a different set of both physical and legal laws than SaaS, and that actually makes it significantly less efficient, I think, in terms of the health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem in this case. But instead you can look at, well, what are the contemporary and historical cases where major innovations were successfully brought at scale into the market. And in almost all cases it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing capital relationships and projects, and in particular a large team of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value. And then you take that team and you throw the water. A new kind of problem and a new kind of problem and so on. And the most salient example in the recent past is the Elon industrial complex, where Elon has this family of companies that, that are doing things that everyone else really struggles to even kind of wrap their heads around in most cases. But history is replete with examples. And I recently have kind of gone very deep on Henry Kaiser, who founded more than 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam, built 1500 ships in World War II. Stuff that we regard as impossible today, like, oh, how can we fix the American shipbuilding? He just stood up a shipyard from scratch in less than two months in 1941. Like, they didn't have computers back then. It's just insane stuff. So, yeah, there are historical examples of this happening, and I think one way of thinking about it is that capital allocation in hard tech is a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money. And probably the optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already proved their worth speaking.

Yeah, speaking of organizations is you said you rage quit NASA. Is NASA's best work behind them or if you know, now that Elon has root access, could we see the organization sort of revitalized at some point?

I very much hope that the DOGE team will devote some efforts to helping NASA recover its historical capabilities, which we have to remember within living memory were the envy, remain the envy of the world. But unfortunately my experience, it's personal experience. I didn't see all of it obviously, but my experience at NASA was that the organization is, you know, it's still stuffed to the gills with brilliant people. But most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work like actively being blocked and hindered and, and punished for going above and beyond. Which is not how we should be running a space program, competing with China. Like China's program managers in their space program, they fear the consequences of failure and NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference.

Can you talk a little bit about stagnation, what happened in 1970? There's a whole bunch of different theories. Is it a culture issue? Do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset? I've always been tracking energy. That's the point where the energy growth kind of broke from 2.7% per year to 2%. It feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear. Maybe it's this DOGE stuff that's going on. Will it be political? But how important is unstagnating on the energy side to kick everything into gear? And what are the the stack ranked priorities for actually seeing increased human flourishing, economic growth, energy, all the proxy metrics that are important.

Well, you hit on the most important aspect there, which is we can measure this right? At the end of the day we either have total factor productivity growth or we don't. And if we do, then our children will have a better life than us no matter what. And if we don't, then they won't, no matter what. It doesn't matter how innovative we get about social programs and redistributive spending and various sneaky forms of communism. At the end of the day, we're either growing the economy or we're not. And I think that what the hell happened in 1971 is overdetermined. In some ways. Henry Kaiser died in 1967. Various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so on occurred. We had the passage of NEPA and Secre in the early 70s as well. All of these things I think well intentioned or, or kind of contingent at the time. But since then, I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moore's Law and improved computing capacity, we would have been in much more dire straits as far as economic stagnation goes. But I'm also extremely optimistic that we're going to turn this around, first of all, because we seem to have gained the ability to talk about stagnation, first of all, and to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding, for example, the fertility. And the second thing is that obviously AI will help, but we've also got this incredible technology in solar power which is allowing us to convert, in a sense, we're going back to the land, converting sunlight into energy about 100 times more efficiently than plants do. And electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn. So I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem this decade. We might take a good crack at the permitting problem, at least in the west, this decade as well. And I think those two things combined, plus some intelligent AIs will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve.

Can you talk more about solar? Why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear? There's a lot of chatter and everyone loves both right now. But why, why is solar, what you've chosen to kind of make your life's work here?

Yeah, at least for now. I mean, to be clear, I'm not bigoted against nuclear power. I'm not worried about nuclear radiation. I taught nuclear physics at Caltech for a while. It's a fabulous technology, but. But again, like, we can theorize about it or we can look at history. And history shows us that nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted by various navies for operating, you know, clandestine, you know, underwater vessels that need air, independent power supplies, or nuke nuclear aircraft carriers that need the ability to outrun said submarines. But other than that, you know, even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power their surface fleet. And I think if you want to honestly understand this, you need to, to kind of dive into why that is the case. At the end of the day, nuclear reactors are steam engines. And steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton Cycle. And there are certain irreducible costs associated with steam turbines and so on. That does drive the cost up. And that's even if NRC didn't exist tomorrow. Right. Even if you could buy enriched uranium on Amazon.com, it would still be the case that just the steam engine component of it is going to cost no less than coal. Solar on the other hand is fascinating because sunlight rains down on the earth every day for free. There's a fusion reactor up in the sky due to some weird quantum effects and again, silicon trickery. It is possible to convert that into high grade energy in the form of electricity with, you know, a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper, considerably thinner than a sheet of paper. That silicon is enormously abundant on the Earth. We've gotten really quite good at making it. There are factories worldwide now turning, churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down. If anything, Production is increasing 30 to 40% per year, which is just bananas. It's the sort of growth rate you'd like to see for any technology. And the reason this is occurring is because there's a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off so we don't have to theorize about, well, what is it going to take to get to first of a kind, second of a kind, 100th of a kind, start getting those economies of scale down. In solar that's already happening. It's a commoditized product, it has no moving parts. You don't need any special skills or labor to install and operate it. It's even easier to do than planting corn. Just put it on the ground and it spits out power. Which in our discussion about 1971 electrical power is basically wealth. It's a free money printer you can put on the ground. And this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated about the various tariffs and solar panels. I think if China, our geopolitical adversary, is attempting to harm us by giving us solar panels subsidized at their taxpayers expense, we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even worse. And I don't pave Nevada with them or something like we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track. But yeah, basically that's the key. Some batteries on the side and the problem is solved.

Yeah, speaking of like paving Nevada, what does your, what does the future of Earth look like in 20, 50 years? Is it Solar panels all over in space? Is it solar panels all over the Earth? Is this, is it going to feel cyberpunky or will there still be trees around at all? Am I just in a matrix pod? But my total factor productivity is going up, so I'm happy. What does the long term future look like for you or in your mind?

I think it's a bit hard to say. I'm quite optimistic. You'd have to be to start a hardware company. And I think really what the future looks like comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build. If you want a great future, go and build it in terms of, of energy. We can, we can give every man, woman and child on Earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States, which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year, with something like 6% of Earth's surface under solar, which is, it's a, it's much, much less than we currently use for grazing or for row crops or for forestry.

Wow.

It's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities, but, but it's quite a bit less than agriculture. That's enough for everyone. The scenario, the previous call you were talking to Dwarkesh about getting paperclipped. We're not going to get paperclipped. What's going to happen is the net present value of land for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season, but for Solar, it's about 100,000 or $200,000 per year. Now, if that's powering an AI artificial superintelligence data center, which is 1,000 times more economically productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain, which has to sleep eight hours a day and browse Twitter, then obviously, economically speaking, our farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to starve to death. And that's the true AI doom scenario. So again, that's something we should be aware of and something we should figure out how to forestall. We will obviously have a lot of solar in space, but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space. I don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the Earth anytime soon.

Is that just because the economics don't work out? I've seen a couple of these companies, they're using mirrors or lasers.

Yeah, the mirror one is interesting actually, because it kind of exploits the fact that if you're a solar array owner, you have no other way of getting more power other than Paying someone to reflect some more down to you, which is super cool. Don't get me wrong. As far as solar cost goes, the Starlink constellation is solar powered. It's in orbit. It generates considerably more power than the space station does collectively, obviously like maybe 100 times more power than the space station. And most of that power is used to amplify radio signals and transmit them down to Earth where they're received by our antennas. And the revenue per watt of electricity used to transmit microwaves through Earth's atmosphere to the consumer because it's, you know, chopped up and turned into Internet data as opposed to just raw power, is about a billion times higher. Like the revenue per watt is a billion times higher with it being Internet at a few hundred watts or whatever transmission power, than it being, you know, attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down for power plants where we pay, you know, 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that. Now, Starlink is actually fabulously profitable and I'm super proud of the team there. I just, I think it's absolutely incredible what they've done, but there's no way in hell that their Profit margin is 10 million percent. Right. So it's just not possible. So I don't think that space based solar power is likely to be a thing.

Do you think that the average Seed Stage Deep Tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough? Because in almost every sort of question we've asked you, you've had sort of economic sort of rationale behind your answer. And I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that, you know, there's sort of this like, sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing and then what's waiting for them is, is potentially a product that like, is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product, but then there's sort of, you can't actually get any value.

Yeah, I've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model and, and they did the thing, but it just didn't, it wasn't competitive on the grid at all.

Yeah, that's the nightmare scenario. No, I mean like, at the end of the day, if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you, then go give it a shot. Right? You don't know. I don't know, like customers and consumers, they like weird things. We just don't know. Like that's the fabulous thing about capitalism, it just fire hoses options and potentials at the market to see what sticks. And if you think back to when we were children, there's no way we would have known that the stable, attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this. That's not how they worked back then. So for the younger listeners, just quiver in fear. We didn't have cell phones when we were young, so you should give it a go. On the other hand, if you are trying to do a hardware tech thing at massive scale, you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you. You cannot fight capitalism to get to massive scale forever. You have to grow massive value. It's not a mystery.

Economics.

Yeah, exactly. Would you rather have them on your team or against you? And I just see this mistake time and time again, which is like, well, this technology will work if we can bring about some massive behavioral change in the entire market or something, probably that's not going to happen. But if you can produce a product like an iPhone where when the new one comes out, hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by a thousand dollars of cash in their wallet and they just, they're just like, shut up and take my money, then you've done the right thing. Right? You're thrilling people that you're giving them something that they'll happily part with their hard earned cash to receive. And yeah, I mean, it's not like this is a mystery. Build something people want.

I have one too.

Okay, we'll go fast. Yeah. The Scrolls project, is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project?

I think there's a certain kind of person who really likes to curate and organize information and I think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical origins and past. And I think that's worthwhile.

Jordy, you mentioned briefly the sort of AI doomsday scenario where the AI just realizes that it should blanket the earth earth with solar panels and to, you know, feed itself. What else scares you in the world? To end on a high note.

I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans, it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 1930s. And so we've, we've literally allowed billions of people to die painfully lonely in old age, when if we just had enough insight and enough effort, we could have figured out how to stop that a long time ago.

Wow, interesting. Well, hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree.

Well, unfortunately we used all the GPUs to make Ghibli this week. So maybe next week we can put it.

Next week we can put the AI to work on extending our lives. Thank you so much for joining, actually.

Thanks so much. I really enjoyed this.

Yeah, what was that?

I was going to say one last thing. One of the major problems with DOGE is that we have these entitlements, costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and so on. Like 1% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis. Right. These are all diseases of old age. Right. If we can just increase human lifespan by 10%, we cut that whole trench trillions of dollars of annual spending by 10% because 10% fewer people die every year and they also get to not die. It seems blindingly obvious. And yet we spend less than 0.1% of our national health budget on anti aging research. Less than 0.1%.

Wow. Well, we'll have to dig into that more. Thank you so much for stopping.

We would love to have you back on. Maybe we'll come over and we'll. We'll do one in the.

In the castle at some point. Yeah, I'd love to.

That'd be great.

Thank you so much. This is, this is a fantastic conversation.

Really enjoyed it.

Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon.

What a brilliant. What a brilliant mind.

Yes. Scrolls enjoyer. You always get good stuff with scrolls enjoyers. The scroll guys, we gotta have the whole. Maybe you should do a scrolls day.

Scrolls day.

But back away from scrolls. We're going back to books. We got Nadia Asprujoff coming in the temple of technology. She has just announced a new book called Antimemetics. She's a former Stripe Press author in the hall of fame of authors, in my opinion. If you publish on Stripe Press, if.

You can publish there, you can publish anywhere. That's what people have been saying.

Yeah, it's really, it's really the NFL publishing. Yeah. Like it's. Anyway, let's bring it up.

Super excited for this.

Let's see. Thanks so much for joining. We're having some fun. Yeah, thanks for joining. Can you give us.

I'm surprised that Delian didn't join, by the way.

Yeah.

Because Pavel was about to have his. He was about to have this amazing.

Do not send Delian the link. He will just, just bomb this interview. He does have the link. Don't let him know that he can use the link because he wants.

He's a very good hype man.

He's a great hype. Man. Anyway, yeah, Would you mind just a brief introduction and give us a little high level of the book?

Sure. I'm Nadia, writer and researcher. I just published this new book called why Ideas Resist Spreading. And it's about this idea of anti memes, which are self censoring ideas. So ideas that we find really interesting and compelling in the moment, but for what, whatever reason, they kind of resist sharing or being remembered. So I think we usually think that if an idea is good or interesting or compelling, it's going to find a way to be shared or spread on its own. But there's this whole other class of ideas. So things like taboos, forbidden ideas, stuff we don't really talk about in public, cognitive biases, so stuff that we are sort of like blind spots about ourselves that we don't really realize. All this kind of forms, this class of ideas that are anti memetic and don't spread super easily even though they're interesting, important ideas. So that's what I wanted to write about.

How much of mimetics is just actually compressing the idea down. I was thinking about how Lulu's going direct manifesto has this really pithy phrase going direct founder mode. Same thing with the network state. Kind of two words that really hits versus Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a fantastic essay about AI called it Situational Awareness. We don't see people using situational awareness as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going. Is it just a packaging problem or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an antimemetic property?

Yeah, I think some of it is a packaging problem. Like ideas themselves have these innate qualities that are mimetic or anti memetic. Some of it is just about how the person perceiving that or receiving it is how do they interact with that idea. So you can think of certain ideas that are spread really really easily in certain networks, but not in others. Conspiracy theories are a good example of this. So yeah, I think it's a mix of both. It's partly about the idea, it's partly about the person that is sharing it or receiving it.

Sure, Jordy.

Well one, I want to make this segment the most beautiful ad for your book. So I'd like to go through a number, a number of the of the ideas. I did want to. A book had been going viral and I got a copy of it. I wanted to get kind of your high level take on it. It's funny, there was this was maybe released in 2021. There is no Antimemetics division. It sort of went viral a little bit last year, but then it is no longer like for sale. Or I guess you can buy it or the paperbacks are trading. Is that the hundreds of dollars on ebay right now? Yeah. So I have one. I should probably, you know, just sell it and buy like 20.

No, keep holding, keep holding.

But it's. I just thought the great irony of like, you know, they were. They were maybe going after like, you know, something similar to what you've been researching it, but. But the. But then it's not even available anymore. So it's like not, not, not, not.

They're dog foodie.

Anti memetics. Do you have any sort of like, take on that? Yeah, I'm curious, like, and then more more broadly, like in researching this, like, what. What's the full breadth of what you were kind of like, like looking at? Right. Because I imagine you were researching and finding forbidden PDFs and books in a bunch of different areas. Right. Of like this sort of esoteric knowledge that humanity ignores for some reason.

Yeah. I'll give a big plug for Quantum, who wrote there is no anti Memetics division. And he actually coined the term anti meme, like back in the day. And it originates from this fiction, like horror sci fi kind of online wiki. And so, yeah, he published that book, I think 2021. It's a horror science fiction book and it's about antimemes as this sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are kind of like these black holes. They destroy everything they touch, they consume everything that comes in contact with them. But for whatever reason, we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them. And so there's this intelligence unit that is trying to fight antimemes, but can't even remember that they're doing it. Hence the title. There is no antimemetics division. Super cool book. Highly recommend it. And all of his writing, honestly. And that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic. I had never heard of the concept of anti memes before this. And yeah, I was reading that book, kind of like Depths of COVID Yeah, 2021. Sad dark times. But like, also it was kind of. Everyone was doing stuff in group chats and they're doing stuff like Clubhouse was a thing. And I had been working at Substack. And so I was thinking a lot just kind of about how does this concept apply to the real. Like, where do Antonyms show up in the rest of our life. So it was definitely direct inspiration for this book. But, yeah, I wanted just kind of like a nonfiction treatment of the concepts.

Totally. It was not practical in any way. It was just sort of like you said, a sci fi horror exploration of it.

I feel like.

Can you talk about. Can you talk about? I feel like we're in such a weird time. Our generation was sort of like. Like, not born on the Internet, but we sort of like gained consciousness on the Internet. And the Internet is something that just like, circulates ideas both like fact and fiction, like, extremely rapidly. And so in many ways, like conspiracy theories and these, like, sort of forbidden, potentially truths. Or maybe it's fiction, you know, you don't know this sort of like, I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't, you know, like, yeah, the only conspiracy. Like, the only conspiracy theory I believe is that they're just like many, many, many, many conspiracies going on and all sorts of things at all times. Right. So can you talk about, like. Yeah, I think, like, what. What can people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like, process information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that. Or something that's factual or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just antimemetic and it doesn't want. Want to be known or it doesn't want to be identified as truth.

Yeah, I thought about that a lot while I was writing this, just because I think there's a lot of doom and gloom about kind of like where the Internet is right now or social media didn't turn out to be what we expected. And I really didn't want to write that kind of a book because it is partly about this transition from once upon a time, you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about getting trolled, canceled to whatever, and a lot of people. I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of just wanted to tune out all of that. But I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other. It's not like, oh, Twitter or whatever is over and we're just going to all go back into our little caves and only talk to our friends. But both of these things actually feed off of each other. And all the things that get workshopped in the group chats kind of make their way back out into public Channels and vice versa. And I think there are things about that that are good and bad, maybe to your point, just about not being able to even tell what's real anymore. But group chats aren't really a safe haven from whatever is happening in public channels because they end up becoming these super incubators for crazy ideas. And so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshopped by a small group of people. And so in some ways, they're kind of like mutating and making ideas even crazier. But yeah, I mean, not to be overly defeatist about it, but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it. And where we decide to direct our attention, what we decide to focus on, that is what your reality becomes. And so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore. But I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about, then life is not really so bad.

Yeah. And like, you, you compared, like, you know, what's happening in sort of the. The town square, like something like X and then what's happening in group chats, Right. Like, oftentimes, like, we're in this world where there's sort of this, like, fiction appearing on the timeline, and then the truth is like racing through group chats and on a long enough time horizon, they intersect. Right. Because like, they almost like, like an idea can be, like, put out there and maybe people agree with it in the moment, but then eventually sort of what's happening in the sort of like, private group chats, like, actually does start spreading and sort of like breaking containment. And in many ways it feels like that's happening faster than ever. Right.

Yeah. I wanted to ask a question about kind of like, practicality here. I think a lot of founders and business folks think about can they align their company or their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condense it down. Obviously the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of, like, what Lulu does, and it's helped her business as opposed to, in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy. Is it possible to do the opposite, to take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti meme so that, that the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss?

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

I've seen this where I've seen people chirping at each other on X and I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation. So you post, you know, I like SpaceX, and then I quote, tweet you and you're like, SpaceX is terrible. But then if you quote, tweet back with something that's just like an essay, I'll just be, I'm tired, I'm out. And you kind of win by. And I've also seen the, I've also seen these attempts to take, you know, a legitimate attack vector and then, and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right. And so, so if you're being attacked by someone, you can say, oh, well, like that's an idea from 4chan, or that's an idea that's from the Communist Manifesto, so we should disregard it and, and put it in the forbidden category, even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on. And so, I don't know, it's a fascinating topic.

Can you, can you talk about some of the differences between anti mimetic ideas and anti commercial ideas? And anti commercial. I would put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where nobody makes money if people eat less, right? Like, like it's sort of this idea that like there's, there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting, which is like big breakfast was like, came in and they're like, you gotta eat a big breakfast. And like, there's a bunch of people that benefit from like the big breakfast, you know, you know, complex. And then if you start going around and saying like, hey, you know, you can just have coffee or water and like, just eat lunch, like it's hard to monetize that, right? It's not like I can be like, hey, don't Eat food and also like, you know, pay me to like teach you how to not eat food. And some people have done that. But like I feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are anti memetic and like just don't spread for one reason and then stuff that's maybe like slightly more obvious, but it's just like not spreading because there's no like sort of economic or commercial interest that's like trying to spread a certain idea.

Yeah, that's super interesting. I hadn't actually thought about that yet. Yeah, I think there's still plenty of ideas that can spread memetically even without a commercial engine behind them. So yeah, folk wisdom, aphorisms, things like that. But you're right that having especially I think in the realm of health related things, I'm just thinking about a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that where people kind of have to bumble around and find their own answers to things. And it's partly, even if they're like, you know, chronic health issues that tons of people are facing and dealing with, there's no like clear answer to them. And I think sometimes when the answer is something that can't be. Yeah, monetized or sold, then it's if we think of it as just like another engine for driving the spread of information, if that engine is missing, then something kind of might languish and not reach everyone that it should. So yeah, that's super interesting.

How do you think about Elon's positioning with Xai around this sort of like truth seeking AI? Like is it possible that a properly trained LLM could be more inclined to spread ideas that, that are sort of antimemetic within humans yet like the machine is just like, you ask it a question, it's like, well obviously like this is like you know what you're dealing with. Whereas a human would tell you, you know, you know, some other, you know, answer that, that maybe was like more correct, direct. In some ways I think it can.

Be really useful for ideas that are anti memetic on an individual level. I know Some people use AIs for this where it's like, tell me based on the conversations we've been having, tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize. And maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might not be super honest, that could be useful. I still think it's really hard to, to spread things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas. Through a network. So even if one person really believes it and is totally bought into an idea, how do you get it to actually spread from person to person? And yeah, it's a little bit harder to think about how that takes place.

Well, I'm super excited for the book. Congratulations.

Yeah, we should do. Once we get a full copy here, actually ordering, we'll do a deep dive.

On it and we'd love to have you back.

We'll have you back on and help the audience figure out how to make.

Money, how to make money from anti fanatics. Because that's the theme of the.

That's what's really going to get the book.

How do you. Oh, my competitor, no one's ever heard of them. Now all of a sudden no one can remember them. They just disappeared from the Internet because we put anti genetics to work in capitalism. Fantastic having you. Thanks so much for coming on the show and congratulations. Two time author now. Fantastic.

Incredible.

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

Yeah.

From the website quickly enough. We have the founder of Rocks on who is here to tell us all about SDRs, AI, SDR technology agents and a whole lot more. But I'll let him introduce himself.

Let's go.

Welcome to the temple of technology. Great to have you here. How are you doing today?

I'm good, I'm good. Thanks for having me on. John Jordy. Nice to meet you. Sam connected us. So excited. Excited to join your Ramp sponsors.

Yes. This is the Ramp sponsored segment. I mean seriously, like I went to Ramp and I was like, okay, there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry but there's probably something that's working. Like just tell me what you guys use. And they were like, well we use Rocks and it's great. And so they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here and I want to learn more about the product genuinely because it's not something that we're using yet. But in the future we imagine that, you know, know, millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day encouraging them to listen to the show, encouraging them to, you know, download. Rate us five stars on Apple podcasts. We Want a really intense million AI salesforce and we're hoping you can help us with that.

We want to swarm.

We want to swarm the born amazing. But anyway, what do you actually do?

Yeah, absolutely.

So.

So we're still pretty early. Most of it is all word of mouth as yet. So there's a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a sales and marketing team. So we built the first enterprise ready agentic CRM. So it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you. So rocks in the system like in Ramp gets installed, it unifies all your customer data in one place, keeps it in Ramp's environment and then feeds a swarm of agents. And our agents are designed to supercharge the max free mints the sam to the world. Like how do you supercharge the highest compensated frontline kind of winners or killers in go to market.

I love it.

And the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work. And that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow like Ramp are going to have supercharged builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully rock. So that's what we do.

I love it. I have a ton of follow up questions. I mean, I mean it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this, this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the frontline actually writing copy, hitting send. And maybe we're more in the centaur era where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone. Is that how you're thinking about it right now? Even if in the long term you're going full, the AI will actually send emails.

Yeah. And kind of going off of that specifically. I think everyone can see why back office work is getting sort of Automated.

Perfect for LLMs. Clean up a bunch of data.

Cursor can have an amazing NPS even if it has like a huge error rate. Yet front office work, when you're interacting with customers, like everybody's experienced this at some point, you know, either the individual themselves or an employee of the individual, like sort of messes something up with a customer and it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost revenue versus like a lost five minutes, like correcting a bug. So balancing that sort of front like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower.

Yeah, absolutely. As Lulu Kind of gave me the best advice like we're building Batsuits, not butlers. And the core idea comes from I've had the bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before. We're not at a point where you can completely go FSD for your large just customers. The core idea is how do you supercharge Sam or a Max or Eric with AI but they are the ones who are orchestrating or Q being the system where they review and send because the cost of really messing up is in. In my kind of the small term feels like a bad email. But you would degrade trust through the brand, through the person. And that's what we focus on is how do you build an agentic system that you could use today. It's not vaporware things we can use today. But how do we supercharge the kind of frontline kind of back carriers. I think over time there's going to be dramatic seat compression or efficiencies to be had where people who support those back carriers, which is kind of 80% of the employee base, they will have to evolve to thrive or kind of risk basically not being relevant.

Can you talk about the innovator's dilemma? Sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation. Logan Bartlett on his show said that, that you know, if you go back to mobile, the, the, the salesforce of mobile was just Salesforce and his thesis was that maybe the salesforce of AI is just Salesforce but. And they're obviously doing stuff in AI but at the same time we're seeing Apple drop the ball on product development, Google's dropping the ball on product development. It feels like there's more fertile ground than ever. So how have you reasoned through that and why are you taking this bet? Even though there's some people that are saying, saying hey, it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it together 100%.

Like Benioff's the goat. He's the goat of all goats.

Let's hear it for Benioff folks.

Legend, yeah, like I grew up not in the Bay Area like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration. So if you look at ServiceNow and Salesforce they have a massive advantage because they have distribution but also data. Like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in working with intelligence providers and being earning the right to be the custodian for enterprise data and bringing in public data. So our position is what we're arbitraging is what somebody who Holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage. The users, they don't want to use them, they use new tools but they've also lost data. Data is now in the warehouse. So if you 40% of the data in a software kind of data warehouse like a snowflake is actually go to market data.

Interesting.

So when we think about kind of building these new Systems incumbents, a $3 billion kind of incumbent has a massive advantage. But what we're focused on is how can we a earn the eyeballs of the Sams and Max Freemans of the world but do it in a way where we're doing a rug pull where build a system of record which indexes the data that's not already in the system of record.

Right.

So rocks gets installed, indexes everything in the warehouse brings in. You can connect all the other sources. And I think the winning kind of companies would be folks who bundle data end users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of default platforms.

Talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other other companies specifically in San Francisco around you see these companies coming out, you see these revenue charts, right? It used to be investors billboards on the 101. It's seriously in 2021 I remember saying investors would say, you know, sort of best in class companies are getting to 1 million ARR in nine months. And now it's basically like okay, best in class companies are getting to 10mil in three months. So if you're. And so what the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like, well if I want to win as a company, like we need to put up, you know, just these ridiculous numbers that you know, and anybody that's built a company knows that like in like revenue ramp is not necessarily like always connect, you know, tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that. So I'm curious to know like do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is forcing people to make sort of like short term decisions or riskier decisions or in some cases even like, you know, misstate facts.

Yes.

I think it's ultimately the founder psyche. Like I've been around the block. But I have to say two things this time around makes me the most insecure. Like all of us are very insecure.

Right.

My wife's listening in obviously. Like we're all insecure monkeys in some way. So two things. One is I think this new generation is about talking about these Crazy kind of revenue curves. The way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring high quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy, happy. So we focus on strategic like the Siemens of the world enterprise customers like redis and MongoDB and ramp, like how do we land there? How do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses which would generate enduring revenue over time as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure and grow their own revenue. So that's how I internalize that. I think the game is going to be our quality about enduring revenue. And there are businesses like Wiz and Datadog to be built now. It's just that Datadog and Wiz, although they were rocket ships, they always focused on essential kind of solutions to really, really large businesses. And that's what we're focused on. The first part of the psyche, I think is not spoken enough is the fact is end consumer expectations are in this invisible asymptote where they're expecting singularity, like consumers, because they've been sold singularity and are using perplexity in ChatGPT, they expect all work to be done by software. So that is actually the one that keeps me up in mind, like how do you deliver Eurogenic experiences which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations? And that's where I think the winning products are going to come from. So the revenue stuff kind of really, really hits, but I kind of process it out. But the consumers and their expectations, there's some stuff that kind of keeps me up 24 7.

Is it internally, are you thinking with the team, like, how do we achieve this sort of like ChatGPT moment for the enterprise? Right. Like you could imagine, like there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that like you would get that.

But Cognition kind of had that where they launched Devin and it was like this viral sensation, even though it was an enterprise agent for coding. But that's a great question.

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

Yeah, you're spot on. So we're in the boring space of ERP and CRM, the most essential but also the most lucrative software market. Like we've chosen the path to be the daily driver for all customer facing knowledge workers. So we focus on building something that's a land, expand land with the maxes and the sound of the word. But grow into a 200 plus kind of active users at Ramp. Like that's kind of the core motion. I think that agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in, day out. And so we optimize for like internal like post land virality. So there is no seats. You land rocks and everybody uses it. And I think that's, that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver.

Can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product? Obviously it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse, the snowflakes of the world. It sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations. Is there a rocks app? Like how does a salesperson actually interact with rocks day to day?

Absolutely. Pure Ramp. Like kind of cracked engineering shop. So we build product. We're pragmatic product builders and we work with the platforms. So we have a web app, an iOS app. The guy who build Ramp and Robin is here. We have a Slack app, we have an email app. So we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of agents working for you. It's powered by our own warehouse native CRM. So it's running in your warehouse and it's a two way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot.

Right.

So that's kind of our core idea in kind of large sophisticated organizations who are already winning like the Mongols and these folks. Like we would definitely integrate our API into the internal tools in most of the rest. We want to build an application that humans actually want to use and then hopefully get 2 to 3x more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of ten times more productive.

Love it. Jordy, you got anything else?

That's all I got.

Cool. Well, this was fantastic.

We'll have to have you back. We need to get our big news.

I hear there's big news coming. I want him back when he announces it. I want to hear it. Yeah, first.

Absolutely. One short story.

Sorry.

I'm a sports nerd. I grew up in India. Getting up in the morning, seeing sports center to see like Jordan and the wizards. That's, that's when I started watching it.

So that's all the success.

Hey. Hey. We talked about this morning, like there's going to be a one name entrepreneur for AI B2B SAS and you could be that, you could be that guy. So you could be Kobe of B2B SAS. We're rooting for you, Wilt Jordan.

Well, thanks for coming by.

Congrats.

Yeah, thank you.

Well, we got another one name entrepreneur coming in the temple of technology any minute. Augustus. You don't even need to know his last name. Name. You might know him by his.

Augustus the Rainmaker. Former Roman Emperor.

Former Roman Emperor. The. Yeah, yeah.

Accused member of the deep state.

Whose member of the deep state. We're here to confront him. Put on the tinfoil hat. Break it down. I promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the Internet is watching and this will be clear.

I won't go too crazy.

Augustus, I. I really appreciate. Appreciate you taking. Taking a shot and taking a chance on this.

No, I mean, the man has no fear. He faces his. He faces his vocal opponent, opponents daily.

Yeah, he really is good at duking it out on the timeline. Never lets them get to the last quote tweet. He's having fun with it too, but it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy and we got here to break it down for us.

There he is.

Welcome to the temple of technology, Augustus.

Wow, I feel like your hair grew an inch. You must be drinking a lot of, like, milk or whatever to stimulate that hair growth.

I'm drinking Justin Mares bone broth, bro.

There we go. Fire. Shout out.

Former brother. Brother of the week.

Former brother of the week. Justin Mares, can you give us. Just set the table for us. For those who haven't been following the drama. What's going on? How'd you wind up in this situation? Is it frustrating? Is it hilarious? A little bit of both.

And it's great. It's the same effect as like, the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like your attackers are like, he is the most powerful man in Silicon Valley. Yes, we really controlling the weather. Yeah.

Yeah. The hit pieces have gone direct now. Like, you're getting the puff pieces in the. In the mainstream media, and then the decentralized media, the citizen journalists are coming for you. So break it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, dude.

My favorite so far has been the guy that was like. Like, this is clearly a CIA psyop to make weather modification cool. He's backed by Peter Thiel. And the same click of the same cabal of VCs as all these things.

The.

The state of the union is 29 states this year have proposed legislation to carte blanche all weather modification and atmospheric engineering. And so these bills, they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management. Chemtrails. It's a suspicion that the government is like, what you see is contrails, long streaks in the sky. They suspect that's just like poison. Probably not. I haven't seen evidence of that yet, but open to being convinced. And then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the Earth to cool the planet down. So it's this climate intervention, and then cloud seeding kind of just gets lumped in. Cloud seeding is what Rainmaker does. And it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing. But because, no, nobody knows the difference. They're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that we're some sort of like, Agenda 2040 anti human globalist initiative. And so, surreal as it's been, I'm both in the trenches in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the Union. A lot of them I haven't testified at because I realize that actually drums up a lot more craziness than maybe is good. But we're in this public knife fight with the government of Florida and Tallahassee just trying to, you know that tweet that, that iconic tweet where Trump says, like, I just want to stop the world from killing itself. Like, I just want to bring people water that need it. And I think that if you ban cloud seeding, you're basically banning, like, rocketry or fission. And so that's what we're trying to stop right now.

Can you talk about water scarcity? I think people, it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out. And it's not that expensive.

Water comes from the faucet. Gasoline comes from.

We're here in Los Angeles, which is, you know, one of the most, most sort of arid parts of the United States.

It's only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to reroute the river 50 years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one. The Owens Valley situation. So LA county basically had to, like, send out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between, like, the Owens River Valley and then redirect the water. Then there's a couple water barons that like, you can't even say the name of, or you'll be like, disappeared California. But the California State water supply strategy, like from the Department of Natural Resources, says that half a million acres of Farmland have to turn into Desert by 2030 in California in order to maintain water supply for the cities like Phoenix. Arizona is banning new housing development because there's not enough water. Salt Lake City people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up and there's not enough water. And then, you know, like, the wildfires that go on all over the country, that's because there's not enough water on the ground. And in the case of Florida, a lot of people have told me, like, you know what? Listen, I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that is a desert. But Florida, we get plenty of rain. Like, why do we need to bother modifying the weather here? Well, 14 million acres of farmland in Florida is currently in a drought. And then 30,000 acres of Miami Dade county just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water because there was a drought. So, like, if. If Mayor Suarez is listening, please save us.

We.

Yeah, we just want to bring people water. And drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential than people realize. Like, if you want to make America healthy again, we have to grow food domestically. And if we don't have enough water to do that, then it's going to be some kooky gmo, like, Chinese stuff that gets shipped over the ocean or like, Soylent Green product. Not to.

Hear you.

Deep cut.

Yeah, that's. That's where we're at right now with respect to drought.

No, no. Yeah. A lot of distance.

What are these? Is there anybody besides you fighting to save, you know, the private and public, just private and public groups from being able to do cloud seeding? Like, is it. Is. Are you the last man standing or do you have a team?

Team so. Well, I've got a great team at Rainmaker, and I'm really grateful for that. And we've had a bunch of farmers that are beneficiaries of our program go to bat for us because, like, they previously had to tear up their pistachio ranches or their pistachio orchards because they didn't have enough water for them. And now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that we're. We're doing. But you know, that. That part where. Or that, like, famous Stanford speech where Teal says, you know, you should go after a really small market, like, if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late. Well, well, I'm not, like, the last man standing. I'm kind of like the first man standing. So it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members I have at Rainmaker running around the country, it's Augustus Derica V. A couple states, 30 states.

Yeah.

And what is that? Yeah, like how do you even balance this? Sort of simultaneously you have, have. You're a company, you generate revenue, you have expenses, you're sort of planning timelines and you're also potentially fighting legal battles and you're also dealing with technical risk in the business. What you're doing is very hard. It can be done, but that's also a challenge. As an entrepreneur, how do you balance all those things? And it feels to me the strength of legal risk is like the most asymmetric risk. You can always launch, create a new prototype, take another flight, et cetera. But then if there's sort of these like blanket bans, that feels like, is that like taking up 60% of your time now just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in five years?

Well, so not quite. I mean it's definitely like a large double digit percentage. The interesting thing with respect to the political dynamic though is this, this. It's not really like a right left issue so much as it is like an east west issue because the west doesn't have water. So Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the US are like, oh, this is sick. I would love to have water. And the people that have as much water as they have conventionally needed and aren't subject to drought, they're the ones more wary of it. So I'm not worried about Rainmaker domestically at a state level just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet, like Nevada or Arizona or New Mexico. I do think that the domino theory thing holds true to some extent. So yes, we do have to focus on it. The super like funny, crazy outcome is that I just like, if Rainmaker was totally banned from the US Then we just double down on Riyadh and then we like camp out there for five years and come back weathered and wearing desert garbage.

Lawrence of Arabia mode.

My Arrakis engaged. My Dune.

My Dune. They're gonna send you to Dune.

I watched, I watched Dune 2 in theaters five times, bro. A religious zealot comes to turn a desert planet green.

I love it. That's great.

Yeah. So no, I trust my team a lot. I have a really great talk a.

Little bit about just like the general fear around cloud seeding. I think that right now, with Health and Maha, there's just this general idea that, like, anything new is risky.

Yeah. Fertilizer having a heyday.

Yeah. Bull market and ludditism for sure. But, I mean, at the same time, like, you know, you eat too much salt, your doctor will tell you that's gonna hurt your heart. And there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level, you take it up by 100x and it gets bad, and there's just all these balancing. And then also we do the mice studies. But does that really transfer? And you know, what happens when someone's, like, you know, vaping pink liquid for, you know, 50 years? Like, we don't really know. And we're kind of figuring it out right now how. What gives you confidence about the. The low impact of this?

So, you know, I really sympathize with people that are worried about this, because it sounds, on its face, like crazy to be modifying the weather and to be dispersing chemicals. But to your point about, like, vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcome, like cloud seeding, even though Rainmaker is very innovative, even though a lot of new things have been done in academia that we're implementing in from, like, the last five years. Cloud seeding is 80 years old, dude. This was invented in the United States in 1945. GE has the first patent from 1946. People have done 80 or 30 or 50 years, depending on the watershed studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil. And after decades of operation, you only see parts per trillion of this stuff. Like, you need super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place. And so there's been no negligible health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment. And those studies, they've been done. And should Rainmaker replicate those? Should we continue to do it just to prove it out further? Totally agree, but it's totally safe. And if you think about the LD50, like, the lethal dose of silver.

Right.

It's less than salt. It's less than table salt. It's milligrams per kilogram with salt, and then it's 2,800 for silver iodide.

So this is.

This is, like, a resoundingly safe material to be using. And the data from decades shows that.

Can you talk about a little of the history of. I feel like when it's easy to look at the chemtrails thing and be like, okay, well, like, the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's, it's like literally like mind control and it's like we're such, we're so divided in America. I don't know. The mind control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do? But there is a legitimate criticism that like when you fly a bunch of planes around those contrails are emitting pollution and your, your skies get dirtier. And I remember after 911 all the planes were grounded. It was the clearest day in the skies ever. And, and there is some sort of like low key harm and, and there's always these like knock on effects. I'm sure with the solar radiation management. Same thing. We, we have been experiencing global warming, but we've also been experiencing global dimming and those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way. Can you just talk about some of the history of these things and, and how you think about worrying about the, the second and third order effects of cloud seeding?

Yeah, yeah, totally. So with respect to the weather modification and climate engineering, like the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years.

Yeah.

Like build a city. Then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation and precipitation patterns. If you have a coal plant or a steel plant or nat gas plant, the steam and the airsoil you emit reliably creates more clouds and precipitation like tens of miles downwind as well. Well the emissions from our cars. Right. Like those have pollutants in them apart from just like CO2 considerations. So we do modify the weather unintentionally all the time. Rainmaker thesis is that like we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unfuck the earth as it stands or make it more lush and abundant. Once we've done the former. When it comes to knock on effects the common question is like you know, if you're making it rain more here, is that reducing precipitation downwind there?

Yep.

Totally reasonable question. Like I think on its face that that logic makes sense. Unfortunately the system's pretty complicated. It turns out that only 9% of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States precipitates over it. The vast majority is either recycled by the oceans. Precipitates over the oceans, evaporates away and never condenses again over the years us. So if you just increase the utilized water in the atmosphere, then it's purely positive. Sun and you can select to some extent for which Clouds aren't naturally going to precipitate with the appropriate radar and probes. The evidence of downwind drought is totally uncompelling. Nobody's provided reliable data there. But are people concerned about it? Are they rightfully concerned about it? Sure, totally. And then the last thing I'll say with respect to. To contrails. There's this funny thing that people realized where if you fly a bunch of planes early in the morning and then develop contrails, you'll actually cool that area locally and the planet to some extent, because it'll reflect sunlight before it warms the planet up with the light of day. And if you fly a bunch of planes at sunset, then that will retain the heat and kind of act like an insulating layer and keep the earth warmer.

Warmer.

So, like, just plane flights, you know, American Airlines, Delta, whoever, they are doing weather modification unintentionally, apart from any chemtrail stuff. I'm just hoping to give a little bit more sanity to the ways in which we're modifying the weather.

Earlier this week, there was a video that went viral of a very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested. Do you think you'd have an easier time in the public eye if you were just planting trees? Or is. Is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue? Regardless. And do they have to do cloud seeding in addition to that, or are they just using traditional irrigation? Like, how does that. I wanted to talk to you about that. That Chinese video that went viral because it was so striking, and it was like. For me, it was like, I want that here for sure, but I don't know how other people took it.

Yeah, it looks like you get, like, a thatch roof in the middle of the go.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. It felt like this idyllic, like, little preserve. You put a ranch house on that. The golden retrievers running outside. You're taking the horse down to the local golden retriever mode. Yeah. To the local saloon. And it just seems like. Like it's the. It's the west, Right. Again. You have new land that people can go live in, and that's just like, a land of opportunity. And I think that'd be so cool. But. Yeah. What's your take on it, dude?

I mean, that's what the Central Valley was. The Central Valley used to be deserts and swamps, and now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet. It produces, like, 30% of all of the fruits and then the majority of, like, the red fruits. In the United States, we used to terraform all the time. Like the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the west people, you know, like maybe it's a last man problem, maybe it's luddedism. Maybe it's just like general, like. Well, no, I won't say that.

But.

Like we've just lost the desire to be great. I think in the United States we've lost a desire to like build the future and see the future through. If I was just planting trees, yeah, for sure it would be easier. You need the water though. So unless you're setting up up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is, and cloud seeding in addition to that, it's a non starter. There's a couple technologies, you know, I mentioned last time, like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water. That would be good. But you know, trees, they emit dust that creates like a, a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation. Cloud seeding, like it mimics that natural process. It's just with a material that works a little bit better. So yeah, man, I plan to plant trees in the future. I plan to make as many things green as possible. I hope that people get on board with the vision to make deserts green and great. But it's going to take a minute.

I had a funny experience at Hereticon. There was a guy talking about terraforming. I'm blanking on his name, but he put out this amazing.

Thomas Puero.

Thomas Puero made this amazing presentation. It was like 40 minutes long, showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be. And one of the places that he highlighted was the Salton Sea and how you could like theoretically like divert the.

Colorado river with Augustus. We went out there and, and Ben.

And then I went up to him afterwards and I was like, this is an amazing project. I would love to make the Salton Sea like Dubai with just like, you know, it's, it's a, it's a Jordy comes up.

How do we make money off this?

No, but I asked him, I was like, how do we actually do this? You know, I was thinking like the way to do it is through a hyper commercial project that says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxic surrounding this sort of evaporating sea. Like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the Salton Sea that's now very depressed and then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen. Like it feels like you need like, like he, I asked him how, how does this get done. He was like, I have no idea. Like, somebody should try it, but, like, I don't know how they would actually get it done. Is it, is it really just like one person caring that that sort of, like, makes these kind of projects possible? Right. Like, in the case right now, there's like a good chance that whether, you know, weather modification, cloud seeding, et cetera, just would get banned if you weren't, like, flying to Florida frequently.

Great man, theory of history.

Great man, theory of history. But, but, but, yeah, like, like, it feels like in this era, in this sort of Doge era, like, if we do enter a period of like, deregulation in some areas, like, some of these projects, you know, might be possible. But yeah, how, how do you think about the Salton Sea opportunity? And then just like, you know, if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore.

So a related thing, interestingly enough, is like, I think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employ. I promise this is related. I'm going to wait until Q1 or Q2 26 to do this, but we're just going to stand up a land fund and we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't arable, primarily in Arizona and California. Because the same acre of land that's worth like six grand in either of those places has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does. That would sell for like 70 to 500,000. Like, we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity in to get LPs involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an agricultural asset that is only made viable because of the water that we bring. It has to be a commercial interest. I don't think that we, you know, maybe America at one point had, like, maybe there's this idyllic previous America that existed. I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit or because it was cool. Now, yes, it has to be cool, but moreover, there has to be commercial interest. And yeah, I'm going to do exactly that. And I hope that somebody beats me to it for the sake of all of the benefit that'll come from it. But if they don't, I'll make a lot more money because of them.

This is hilarious because you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land, because Casey Hanmer, we had him on the show earlier, he wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a Parking lot and you're going to be like, no, like I'll pay a dollar more per square foot. But I do.

We can have the auction. We'll have the, we'll do the auction.

Yeah, yeah, $5. $5. I have $6. $6. I do have a question about the cloud seeding stuff. It feels like, I mean all of this stuff is somewhat zero sum. Like we're not really creating new water, we're kind of moving it around. But desalination seems awesome. I was looking at it pretty intensely a year ago and it seemed really difficult honestly. But desalination, like what is your take there? And it just feels like we have, you know, I would expect a Gundo company to be doing this. Like we have people working on nuclear, now we have people working on solar. You're working on cloud seeding. Like, like desalination. If I heard like oh yeah, there's some hot guy, hot startup who's working on, on, on desalination, I wouldn't be like oh this is breaking my mind right now. I'd be like of course that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the El Segundo because like they've kind of checked the box on everything else. What's the state of desalination and what's your take?

Yeah, decel is great. I'm not anti D cell. I don't think that we step on each other's toes. It is a modification of the water cycle, right? Like, whereas, whereas they are taking salt water out of the ocean, making it fresh and usable. Well, we're taking cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable. It's relatively efficient right now. I think there's a lot of promise in catalytic desalination. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently innovative in the space, but I think that probably shows more promise than ro. It's relatively efficient as it is. The problem with desalination for giga scale American projects for a lot of the world that is currently undersupplied with respect to water is conveyance. We can set up a huge diesel project in la. Sweet. No dice for Colorado. Doesn't matter for Nevada. Barely even matters for the Central Valley because you have to hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists and it's doable. Like the California State Water Project project is evidence of conveyance working, but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes into shipping that water. So should California be more reliant on it? Totally. Could we, like, with tariffs or something, strong arm Mexico into giving us, like, the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona? Maybe. But if you're in the interior of the United States, the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky. And that's who we're primarily trying to sell.

This was Blake Masters point that I really enjoyed. He said, you know, how do we get water into the interior states? Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico? Well, we're going to reroute all the water from California into those states, and then California. The future of water in California is nuclear power desalination. And he said that, like, 10 years ago. Haven't heard anyone try and build it. Maybe he should have stuck with venture capital and backed that company. Because I want it to happen, but maybe it'll happen soon. That'd be great.

Or no desal. No cloud seeding, boiling the ocean. Nuclear boilers on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly inland.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river. Atmospheric rivers. Right.

Many people have wanted to boil the ocean, but not literally. So we need more literal ocean boilers, for sure. I. I have a more personal question. How. How are you doing with all this? I care about, you know, I'm. I'm lucky to be an investor in Rainmaker, but I care about you even more on a personal level. I think your prefrontal cortex is about to maybe fully develop. Right. But you're under a lot of pressure for being in your mid-20s. Anybody who's had a post go viral or break containment knows what happens. Your message requests on every platform are probably very dark. And, you know, are you. Are you. You know, you seem like you're handling it incredibly well, but does it ever. Does it ever get to you?

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

Do not mess with the high school debate kids. They will go to war with you on the timeline.

Yeah, I mean, we kind of predicted, like. Like, the rise was so quick the mood would shift, but I didn't expect that. This was the instantiation of that mood, the shift around the vibe of the. The company. Right.

Yeah. And I just have to say, like, there's so many people rooting for you. Right. Like, you really are, you know, your critics that call you an industry plant, you know, in many ways, like, you are, you know, you are a product of our industry, and there's just a lot of people, you know, rooting for your success. So proud of you for not letting the.

Never back down.

Never back down.

Always claim victory.

Always claim victory. Don't let the haters get to you. And I would say, you know, like, have a good rest of your Friday, but I'm sure today's basically a Monday for the Rainmaker team. Job's not finished.

Yeah. I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go. How are you getting fitness in these days? Then?

I was. That was tragic.

Dude.

I am walking to and from the office because I live four blocks away in Gundale, and otherwise I'm going hard. Skinny Priest Mud.

I'm big skinny Skinny Priest.

You've been the muscular warrior I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly merchant. It's gonna happen. You're gonna. You're gonna IPO the company, sell it all, and become a private equity guy. Roll it up. The rest of the farm, rest of the world, something. Yeah. The portly merchant is the future for sure.

No, I'm excited to have you back on when you're doing some of the land stuff, because that does feel like verticalizing and capturing the full value that you guys can create over time is just very obviously, you should own the land that you're raining water down on and gain the full economic benefit of the work. So. So it's fantastic having you on.

Yeah.

This is great as always.

Thanks, guys.

Our weatherman.

Our weatherman.

We needed a weatherman. We got it.

Start forecasting for tvpn.

Yeah. Yeah, you should.

It's. It's. You can't do for, like, forecasting would just be too easy for you because, like, yeah, there's going to be rain, like, in that square mile over there.

Yeah. We need the the zoom background like the green screen and it's you and like the Matt, next time you're on fake zoom background with the, with the map of LA and you can tell us where it's going to rain this weekend. I'll have you on Friday. Hang out, be fun. Anyway, great hanging. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

That's great. And so next up we have Mike Noop from, he founded Zapier. He also founded Arc Prize, which we've talked about in the show before. So arkprize, I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them. So ArcPrize is a AGI eval, an evaluation that is designed to be hard for AI, but trivial for human beings. And so they look like puzzles and there's a grid of squares that are different colors. And your goal is to recreate the pattern or understand the pattern. It gives you a whole bunch of references and then you are tasked with creating the solution to the puzzle. And it's been very, very difficult for AI. AI has struggled with this, even though it looks like something that should be able to be one shot. And Mike is in the studio now. Welcome, Mike. How you doing? Hi guys.

Thanks for having me. I'm doing good. How's your Friday going?

It's great. How's yours?

Quite a excellent. Spent a lot of time with the research team.

Oh, awesome. Can you give us just a brief introduction, your background and then how you wound up working on ArcPrize and kind of what you're excited to announce most recently?

Yeah, so I guess probably best known for co founding Zapier about 15 years ago, an automation company that's been what I've been working on the last 13 plus years. And you know, I had sort of like calling AI curious. I got, I went sort of all in on AI early January 2022, when the chain of thought paper first came out out, all these like LM reasoning benchmarks were sort of like spiking up in performance. And it got me really curious, like, are we on path for AGI or not? And this ended up leading to Zapier deploying, I think a lot of AI products really early into the market. And there was this trend I had seen and heard. I spent, you know, probably hundreds of hours talking with customers around, you know, deploying AI agents. Zapier's been deploying them for a couple years now and the feedback was always consistent, like, hey, I get the, I get the hype, but, but they're not reliable enough yet. They don't work two out of 10 times. And that just doesn't work for these unsupervised automation products. And this was sort of in contrast to all this EGI hype that I see on Twitter all day long. Same thing I'm sure you guys saw in the 2023, 2024 era. And so I tried to set out to figure out, how do I explain this? Because I have two sets of lived experience that sort of don't match. And this is how I rediscovered Francois Chalet's ARC benchmark that was originally published in, in 2019. And I sort of expected to have gotten kind of beaten by this point. You know, first looking into probably again 2023, 2024, surprised that it basically hadn't. And not only hadn't it been beaten, there'd basically been no progress on it, which I thought was really fascinating given the fact that we've like scaled up these language model systems by almost like 50,000 times over the last, you know, three, four years prior. And so that was kind of the genesis of me leading to meeting Francois and kind of pitching with this idea of like, hey, I think this is literally the most important unbeaten AI benchmark in the world. I think it makes a really important statement that like pre training scaling alone is not sufficient to get to AGI and more people should know about this fact. And so we launched ARC Prize together to try to sort of raise awareness of the benchmark and just honestly inspire more people to work on new ideas again towards AGI.

Can you talk about a little bit about the prize money and then what happened with ArcPrize 1 and then what's happening now with the second iteration?

Yeah, so when we launched last year, you know, like I said, there's been very little progress towards, I think GPT4.0 had was scoring 4% on the benchmark. Four years in, five years in.

And again, an eight year old should be able to do these.

Yeah, especially RKGI1. It turned out to be, in retrospect, quite simple. It's a very binary sort of fluid intelligence test. And yeah, all the knowledge you need to solve this benchmark are doable by you acquire the knowledge very early on in childhood development. Sure, you can take the tasks in fact yourself. If you go to arcprize.org, we have a big player. I think what's special about ARC is that the design concept of it is it targets something that's quite straightforward and easy and simple for humans, but hard for AI. And this is in contrast to every other AI benchmark that exists today which are trying to challenge this PhD frontier, frontier math or humanity's last examination. These are sort of AI benchmarks that you really do need to be like PhD level plus to be able to even solve as a human. And in contrast, ARC makes a very different claim that hey, there's still a lot of very straightforward for human capability that these frontier AI systems don't have. And so that's why we launched ArcPrize during the contest. I think one of the things ArcPrize 2024 will be noted for is probably the introduction of this test time adaptation method. That was some of the papers that came out from the contest. We had a big million dollar prize in order to beat the benchmark to get to 85%. No one did. You also have to do it with a very high degree of efficiency. And we kind of expected that was going to be the case. So we also had this paper track where people could submit new ideas and push the conceptual forward force, which is where most of the coolest progress came out from last year. And then at the end of the year obviously last fall we started seeing things like 01 and 03 and this is a very big, this is a very big update I think because systems like O1, particularly O1 Pro and things like O3 are not just purely scaling up language models. These are not language models anymore. These are really AI systems. They have a big model as a component of the system, but they have some sort of synthesis engine on top that allows them to reuse their existing pre training knowledge at test time to recombine the knowledge and that allows them to make significant progress towards ARC. And we saw 03 in December for score at a pretty high degree of efficiency. Solve arca which you want. It's 75% so not quite at the 85%. And then OpenAI tested an even higher compute version of it that probably was probably a couple million dollars to test. They got 87%. I think that's crazy. And so that was kind of where we wrapped up last year. We've been part of work over the next couple years.

Actually just real quickly, while you were saying that fantastic setting the table, I went to arcprize.org play I did the daily puzzle. I still got it. I'm still at a job. You could do it at home if you want.

Arcprize.org play do you think with all the billions of dollars flowing around the ecosystem, do you think arcprize is capital constrained in any way? Like would would we have seen, you know Better results to date or is this sort of social status of just like, you know, achieve achieve kind of like scaling?

Are we compute bound here or is it algorithm bound right now?

I think arc agi2 that we just introduced this week on Monday is pretty direct evidence that we need new ideas still to get to AGI. We shared, I don't know if we can throw it up or we can put in the show notes or something. There's a chart I shared on Twitter that shows the scaling performance of even frontier AI systems like O1, Pro and O3 against the version one of the data set that we've been using for the last five years.

Years.

And then version two that we just introduced this week and basically it resets the baseline back to 0%. Language models, pure LLM systems are scoring like 0% now again on arc B2. Single COT systems like R1 and O1 score like 1%. And the sort of estimates we have right now for the frontier systems that are actually adding pretty sophisticated synthesis engines on top like O and Pro and O3, single digit percentages on their efficient compute settings. So I think there's a very interesting point that like, you know, we kind of moved from this regime where people are claiming, oh, we're just going to scale up language models, right? More data, more parameters, we're going to get AGI and people realize, I think that's not quite the story now. And then there's a new story that's emerged over the last like five months which is, oh, we're going to scale up this test time compute and that's going to get us to AGI. And I think what V2 shows is that that's not quite either. We still need some structural annuity in order to get to a regime where we can scale up to actually reach human performance on this stuff.

Do you think with how much human capital is sort of concentrated in San Francisco, do you think that is geographic concentration of so many of the brightest minds in AI is sort of potentially even holding back new random ideas. And that's why ARK can potentially sort of, if we need new ideas, maybe they don't come from the sort of the center of the AI universe and maybe they come from some random kid on the Internet who just has the time to think completely independently and practice scrolls adjacent. Yeah, exactly.

You put this idea out and a bunch of people can take wild swings at it and you get just new idea generation.

I got to say thank you to Nat Friedman. You were Talking about the CB's challenge, of course. Literally I was very inspired, inspired by what they were able to accomplish. And that was one of the motivations for actually running the prize in the way we did. I think yes, part of the goal of running our prize was specifically to try and reach independent researchers and teams and give them a problem to work on that they could actually make meaningful frontier progress on. I think especially in academia in the last maybe five years there's been this disheartening belief of like, hey, can we really advance the frontier? Because you have to have this billions of dollars in funding to scale up these language models, models and I think ARC shows that like, yeah, there actually are frontier problems that are unsolved, that individual people and individual teams can actually make a difference on today. Part of our whole goal of launching our Chrysler was reinspire a lot of independent researchers to work on things like this and bring new ideas to the fold.

I remember when ChatGPT got a computer and it was able to write some Python code, then execute it. Is there, are there restrictions on kind of custom systems that are LLM or reasoning model driven, but fine tuned to help with the execution of ARC prizes? Is that breaking the, like the rules or is that something that is actually encouraged and fine, how do you think about. I guess it all boils down to like overfitting on this problem. But it seems like even with the incentive to overfit, it hasn't really happened yet.

Yeah, this is one of the reasons ARC v1 lasted five years was because it was, it had very good design, original design built into it with a public test set and a private test set. And that private test set really prevented folks from being able to sort of overfit on it. And so there's actually two tracks for the ArcPrize Foundation. We have the contest track. This is on Kaggle. This is the big grand prize. All the prize money is attached to this. Kaggle graciously donates a lot of compute to allow us to host there. And the grand prize is basically to get to that 85% within Kaggle's efficiency limits. So this is about get about $50 worth of compute per submission that you send in. And this is like a pretty high bar for efficiency. And in fact this is not an arbitrary bar. We do think that efficiency actually the really, really important aspect of intelligence, you know, you can brute force your way up to intelligence, but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff. That's the contest. When we launched last year, there was a lot of demand from just the community of the world on like, hey, I. Okay, I get that, like I can't run my big language model on this, you know, in Kaggle, but I really want to know how to frontier AI systems do. And so we launched a second track that's hosted on arcprize.org, where we benchmark and test all the like frontier commercial systems to showcase what are they capable of doing basically as existence proofs that I think will eventually filter down to higher efficiency solutions and open source solutions that can be run on something like Kaggle. And even there within the sort of same efficiency and accuracy specs, we still haven't seen any frontier AI system beat RKGI2, let alone RKGI1. So there's still a long way to go.

What does that track actually look like? Does that mean that the team from OpenAI is writing the specific, specific prompt? Are they doing prompt engineering or is it your team is just taking the API and giving everyone kind of the same goal? Is there any standardization there?

There is. Arcprice does most of the testing today ourself, like we basically we wait for API access, either get early access or wait for the public access. And we have a GitHub repo where we just have a standard, very simple prompt that we use to baseline across all the sort of frontier systems systems that we test. OpenAI situation was a little different because they had reached out to us and said, hey, we think we've got a really impressive result on the public eval set and we'd like your help to verify on a semi private set, which is what we created that data set to be able to do. And in that case there was really very little prompt engineering at all. It was mostly just a verification of what we'd seen from them. So yeah, in all these cases, the amount of prompting that goes into these is extremely minimal. We're basically just giving it the sort of grid with numbers and asking it to solve it and it directly goes into it.

Very cool.

Can you talk about consumer AI agents we've talked about on this show? Like, it feels like, you know, once a week someone comes out and says they're building the consumer AI agent that's going to like book you a hotel or book you a flight or like do these things that sound really simple and then like nobody's delivered to our knowledge like a truly magic agentic consumer experience to book a flight. Even, you know, you could use like OpenAI's operator to do this. But like, even when you're sort of watching operator Work. It's like it feels like you're using. It doesn't feel like truly magic yet and just, you know, given like in many ways like Zapier is just like the, like such a foundational company when it comes to automating anything on the Internet. I remember that was magic to me as a kid where I was like, oh, did it, you know, a kid? I say like in like college, right. It's like, yep, wait, data came in here and then it just went and did this other thing or like I did this one thing.

Yeah, it feels like a superpower. Right?

Like, and so in many ways it's like criminally like underrated in terms of getting to that sort of like, you know, agentic Internet. But like, why haven't people been able to like, like I even saw like perplexity, like was saying last week, like we're building, you know, consumer agents that's going to like book your flight. So like, and Apple's promised this and everybody's promised it, but we haven't seen that magic experience yet. And I'm curious why you think that is.

We've been trying to deploy agents for two years at Zapier and this was kind of what led me to sort of originally getting interested in ARC is, you know, it's this reliability problem. Language models fundamentally are stochastic in terms of how they work work and so you're just never going to get that 100% accuracy directly from the model without adding a lot of extra additional guardrails, source like processing on top. We've done some of that for Zapier. The way that I kind of think about it, you got these concentric rings of use cases that kind of get unlocked as reliability and consistency goes up. And today we're pretty much still in the, and this is true at the frontier. We're pretty much still in the kind of concentric ring of like personal productivity and team based automation where the risk to failure isn't very high. Right. Like if, if you're going to start deploying one of these like completely unsupervised agents into the wild, you're going to have a pretty high bar, right. If there's a sort of high degree of risk, if this thing goes wrong, you know, I'll burn customer trust or brand trust or something like that. That's what we've been kind of seeing is companies and users sort of slowly increasing those concentric rings as the progress, as the technology is improving. I actually think we're going to start to see agents start to work this year specifically because of progress in arc. I think this is an underappreciated fact. Like, people always ask, like, hey, don't ARC looks like puzzles? Like, what's the economic utility of this stuff? One of the most important things that ARC tests for is your ability to adapt to problems you haven't seen before. That's really the spirit and the essence of what it is. It's saying, hey, can you solve problems you didn't just memorize, but you actually have used knowledge you did memorize to like solve new things that you've never seen before? This is fundamentally the same aspect, like thing we're testing for in terms of generalization or liability with agents. So I think because we're starting to see AI reasoning systems that are able to make progress against ARC AGI1, albeit relatively inefficiently, but the capability is sort of now existing. There are AI systems out there that exist, some degree of fluid intelligence that's going to start increasing the reliability and more and more of those concentric rings are going to get unlocked, I think. Starting to share.

I want to talk about just like AI, AGI, ASI metrics. I feel like ArcPrize is a fantastically important benchmark. I agree with you on that. Ray Kurzweil has been benchmarking against just like flops to human flops. Basically, he's put the singularity at 2045. He kind of nailed the Turing test date, I believe. But I've been kicking around this idea of like, maybe the real test of like, AI hitting some sort of like, tipping point is just like how much economic value is being created by AI. And once that hits some sort of like 10% of total global GDP or 50%, then we've reached the AI singularity or something. Are there any metrics that you're looking at for kind of this, like, intelligence explosion, asi, AGI, but outside of like an individual moment or application use case benchmark, something more global and human relevant.

Pragmatically, I think the definition that I use for AGI these days is basically when we stop being able to easily find tasks that humans can do that AI can't do, we've got AGI. And I think that's, like I said, a bit of a pragmatic answer. One of the things that surprised me about Arcagi 2 was the relative degree of ease by which we were able to create it. Given this big moment in December of 03, beating RKGI1, it was actually not too hard for us to come up with tasks that we were able to verify. We actually did a controlled human study to make sure every task in the V2 dataset was solvable by at least two humans on the same rule set. And we were able to find that relatively easily. So I think that shows we still have a ways to go. I think once we hit that bar, though, when the gap between easy for humans, hard for AI is zero, I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to argue the opposite side, that we don't have AGI. I don't find the economic measurements quite as useful for understanding the capabilities of what frontier AI does. I think it's a good measure of impact and I have no problems using it for that point. But I think if you want to use like an economic measure to make a statement about capabilities, the challenges it obscures and there's multiple ways to get to that outcome. And this is one of the challenges with, like, language models. Like, language models generally work in, like, a memorization style regime where they're right learning lots of data. They're able to apply it to very similar types of patterns that they've seen before, but not novel patterns. That's what RKGI shows. And, like, those have economic utility. It turns out that, like, intelligence that's just memorizing actually does interesting things for us. Zapier is making money with the current regime of AI today, today. And so I think if you really want to understand capabilities of frontier AI systems, to make predictions based on the capabilities, you need more precise, narrow wedges on that capability. And that's really what RKGI tries to be. Is this wedge on? Do these AI systems have the ability to actually adapt to problems that they haven't seen before and acquire skills rapidly and efficiently to apply it to new things that haven't been done before?

A little, a little more fun question. What was your reaction to this week's sort of Ghibli moment? It felt like we talked about this on the show earlier, but the funny thing for me is, like, so we had a couple posts each that sort of like, broke containment out of like, traditional, like, teapot or whatever.

Yeah.

And, you know, there was a lot of people quoting, like, normies, people quoting our posts being like, like, all right, the jig is up. Like, what app, what filter app did you use for this? So, like, there's still people out there that like, you know, are just like, completely unaware of, like, progress. But, like, for those that sort of use these tools every day, it felt like this magic moment where people are Just one shotting these sort of image generation models and getting these sort of incredible outputs. But, but, and yeah, it just felt.

And one thing we're excited about, like, I guess my question to you guys is, you know, do you think that the degree by which we saw, like, the, you know, ghiblization of, like, Twitter and X over this week, do you think that was the degree of baseline interest in that, like, series and movie prior to this week? Or do you think, like, most of the people that were posting that stuff were, this is the first time they've ever really got exposed to that kind of content?

Yeah, I, I, I kind of ran a test on this inadvertently because I posted both a scene from Oppenheimer Giblified. It got like 30,000 likes. And then I posted an actual picture from Spirited Away, a real still from the actual movie, 24 likes. And so there's a little bit.

I love the fact you're running experiments.

Yeah, yeah. And so there's a little bit of like, okay, it's not just the filter. It's this recontextualization. I thought a lot of it was like, the, There's a reason we're using Studio Ghibli specifically because there are other art styles that you can recreate with style transfer for a long time. But Studio Ghibli fits this, like, perfect. It doesn't quite go into the Uncanny Valley. And then if the AI, if you say, hey, I want you to recreate a picture of me, but use a Hollywood VFX pipeline to recreate the 3D model model, and then do exactly what they do in the Avengers and take it to the top level. It'll just look like a photo because VFX has now become photoreal. And so you, you can't go full photo real or else it just doesn't look like a filter at all. And if you go to stick figure, it's unimpressive. And so you need this, like, perfect art style that looks clearly different but still recognizable. And the level of alteration that happens in Studio Ghibli animation style is that perfect intersection where it feels, like, impossible to just create with a vanilla style transfer or, like, edge detection and just pixel manipulation. You're not just recoloring, it's not a filter. But at the same time, it's not just, oh, so it's so photoreal that it's just like, oh, yeah, you took a picture of me like this. And then it looks like this. And it's like, that's impressive. But it just looks like you took the photo like this. I don't know. That was my take, I guess.

Like, I just get it, you know. My, my own answer to that is like, I think it significantly increase, increased the awareness like this art style, this media totally. I, I, I don't, I, I, I don't know by how much, but clearly like people are doing it who've never even like seen Spirited Away or heard of the director or like anything like that. And so I do think that there's really important, you know, thing around the ease of use of the tools, you know, actually gets people like, I think exposed and empowered to actually like do this stuff on a very mass scale and very rapidly. I think is the other thing we saw totally this week that you actually really matter for mass adoption on this stuff. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm very excited to see it.

The human creativity. Like we had basic like AI image generation for a while and then we got the Harry Potter Balenciaga video and that was clearly like AI generated. But the idea to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, which are these two videos, very orthogonal concepts, like that creates the humor and that came clearly from a human. And so I'm excited to see like where this goes to where I will see a Ghibli or Ghibli inspired video and be like, oh wow, this is like actually entertaining to me, not just a tech demo. Jordy, what was your think?

So I'm curious to get your take. So you know, if you were running an image, it was a bad week to be running an image generation model because unless you're, you're having your users prompt and get that quality of output that consistently. And there's just sort of like a distribution effect too where like, you know, I'm sure they're, you know, even just like the user base increased, you know, dramatically just off of this one sort of meme cycle. Like where do, where would you, you know, if you were running one of these sort of image generation models, where would you go? And, and do you think that some of these players should be thinking in a more weird way, like kind of trying to generate these new ideas versus making like sort of derivative foundation model efforts?

There's an interesting tie in to things like ARC that we were talking about before and trying to assess capabilities and pushing new ideas forward. Right, like the stir, steering the conversation a little differently from how you sort of framed it there. But like, you know, one of the, you know, risks of like a sort of frontier of AI that is sort of dogmatic in Its view of scaling up is going to produce systems that end users are using that all look the same and have the exact same capability. And you know, our ARC shows is like, hey, there are still frontiers that are unsolved for. They're interesting things. Here's a benchmark that chooses. You can kind of go measure against and actually, you know, direct progress, inspire folks towards that potentially could have some sort of large step function change in capability of what these systems are actually able to do. You want people I think pushing and exploring that frontier and measures of benchmarks I think are actually good ways to help direct and guide research attention there. And I think I don't know the full details on how the new image generation from Aura works, but at a high level it does seem quite structurally different from the diffusion approach that even Dall E3 and a lot of that image generators are using. They're doing some sort of tokenization like system decoding system. They clearly have tried something new that doesn't exist, that didn't exist before this week that's allowing them to get these frontier results. I think we want to see basically that mindset continue to get pushed across the entire field, both on media obviously, but also on the sort of reasoning and AI side. I think that's going to unlock a ton of use cases that people have sort of written off AI for today. They're like, okay, I think I know what AI can do and can't do and you know, now I'm comfortable in my sort of, you know what my job or you know, the things I'm going to ask it to do and like, I think there's still a lot that we want it to do and can't yet and things like ARC are hopefully useful measures towards, towards those tasks.

Yeah, my reaction was just generally like if you have a hundred million dollars in a bank and you were in the bank and you were trying to do what OpenAI is doing now doing like remarkably better than you are doing then like maybe you need to focus on like you know, true innovation and trying to create these sort of like novel approaches to do said thing. Otherwise it may be different or maybe.

Some unique distribution or something.

Yeah, we talked about the enterprise.

I had this hot take like a year ago. It's like I think anyone who's like just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on fire. If you really want to make a unique difference, especially if you're a small startup like a founder, like you got to go take an orthogonal approach, you got to try something different than what everyone else is doing. That's the only way you're going to be able to, to potentially like, I think capture attention and provide a lot new value to the world.

Yeah, we talk, talk. I know we're probably over time, but like there, there's no capital constraints in early stage AI right now. Right. And like with Zapier, like, I think the number one, one of the number one reasons that I would like see you guys in headlines is like another story of like, oh, Zapier raised X, you know, single digit millions or whatever.

You want to hear the funny quick quib on that? It was about a million bucks back in 2012. We never spent the money. By time we actually got the round closed, figured out who we wanted to hire, got the payroll started, like revenue had caught up. And so literally I think you could trace every dollar we raised all the way to.

Yeah, there's sort of any, like, it's potentially a problem right now that people aren't forced to be hyper creative because they just are like, oh, well, we have $30 million. Like we might as well, like we were supposed to spend it. And like, spending money to be innovative is different than like, you know, like being innovative because you are constrained on the capital side.

Yeah, I have a follow up here. How should we be thinking about Gary Marcus these days? He wrote deep learning alone isn't getting us to human like AI. He's been an advocate for symbol manipulation. He's been kind of on the outs in inner AI circles. Rich Sutton wrote the, you know, scale is all you need. The bitter lesson, of course, but we're in this weird scenario where like we've done the scaling, we're still bullish on scaling. We are going to build bigger data centers and do bigger training runs, but then we might also need new algorithms. So he's like kind of right. How do you interpret maybe not just his legacy, but just the puzzle of how scaling fits into all of this.

This.

I generally think he's been more right than wrong. I think if you like just take a limited five year view on this from 2020 up until 2020, end of 2024, you know, I think it was a generally right, like he was making the right ideas. You know, I think one of the reasons I personally find things like ARC more useful is they provide a direct way to do sense finding on this stuff. You don't, I don't have to like rely on my trust of another individual or another human in order to make like, statements or build my confidence or intuition or my model personal model of the world based on like trusting someone else's analysis. I can just look at reality. ARC is a contact with reality mode. We can have AI systems. I could go try to do this stuff, have humans try to do it and measure the difference and actually look and like I've always found that that's a. Going straight to the truth is like a much faster way to get to the frontier of knowledge. If you really want to know what's true or not. You kind of just have to look for things like that that measure it as opposed to relying on proxies like other folks. But yeah, I would say Marcus has generally been more right than wrong. And for what it's worth, I think actually the bitter lesson is somewhat under like I think often gets misinterpreted makes a statement about search and learning as these general form methods of scaling button also makes the key point in the paper that hey, the thing that we are actually applying search and learning on top of is an architecture that was invented by human human in the first place. The core idea of the thing that we are scaling fundamentally came from a person, from a human. And that's still to do true today still. And I think that is very inspiring even in the current regime. We find ourselves here in March 2025 where yeah I think we actually do need some idea changes. I think we need some structural changes in terms of how the architecture, how the algorithms work here in order to certainly beat something like Archie J2 the high degree of efficiency. And yeah, there's going to be a scaling component to it but like don't miss that. Like ah yes, there's actually an idea component too that often gets like kind of brushed over.

Final question, who do you want to highlight that you feel like is doing important research in AI that's maybe under hyped but and not super online. But you know, whether they're attacking ARC or just generally doing work because there's a lot of people that love the sort of hyper commercial approaches to AI going and working at the labs. But it's totally valid if you just want to do research somewhere and just focus on that.

There's probably a few individuals that I think are doing really interesting work in and around program synthesis which is a sort of parallel AI paradigm to deep learning. Actually don't think either is sufficient. I think some merger of the two is what's necessary to get to AGI story for another day. But there's quite a few people that are sort of working in this alternative paradigm that are doing some interesting work on Twitter. This person's extremely online, but Victor Taylon's a really good follow on X and Twitter. Been working on the sort of alternative system called HVM that does this crazy enumeration of program synthesis really quickly. There's a couple academics that I respect a lot of. Josh Genebaum at mit, Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute, are two folks who've been really deep in this, the ARC world and the program synthesis world for many years and have sort of cultivated and steward some of the community over the last five years towards working towards new ideas. So I really do respect and appreciate those folks for that.

I have one last question and then we'll let you go. Would you recommend against learning to code and do you think it's possible to try and build an ARC pride for programmers, a task that a novice or reasonable programmer could do that no AI could solve?

Yes. In fact, let me answer the second one first. ARC is that challenge itself. So one thing that is somewhat maybe confusing is like we present the puzzles very visually for humans to take, right? They look like grids. You draw on the pixels. When these challenges are presented to computers, it's not an actual image processing challenge at all. It's just a 2D list of numbers. It's a matrix of numbers that represent the input grade. It's just 0 to 9 for each number represents a color and then you get an output matrix for the output. And your job as a programmer is to write a program that maps the input sequence to the output sequence. And that is absolutely a challenge that every programmer human today could do, because they'd be able to look at the pattern and say, okay, I'll just write the program that transforms this. I can figure out the rules. Because I'm like a smart, intelligent human. I have the capability of adapting to problems that I haven't seen before. And this is actually a program synthesis challenge. You literally are asking a human to write a program to solve it. And that's the same thing we're asking AI to do as well, is to produce a program that can solve it. And things like O3 are kind of unique because they're like language programs. They have this chain of thought. You can think of a chain of thought as a program in English that transforms the input to the output output. But yeah, literally ARC is the second thing that you ask for there on the first question, should you learn to code? I haven't thought super deeply about this. My hot take is, I guess, yes, you should still learn to Code primarily because it gives you leverage over technology today. And yeah, I don't see that leverage over technology going away anytime soon, particularly if you want to work on like, the frontier of this stuff. And so I sort of think that the arc of humanity's history has generally been to produce tools that give individual humans more leverage over the universe around us. And I still think code is that thing today. I think AI will probably eclipse it, but I don't think code is going to go away in that future.

Got it. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation we'll have back. I know that there's going to be more developments with ArcPrize too. I want to stay abreast of them. So please come back when there's big news.

Thanks, guys. Arcprize.org if people want to enter the contest.

Yeah, go check it out.

Cheers.

Have a great day.

Thanks for coming on.

Bye.

Bye.

I mean, I, I love, I love arc Prize. I think that they should take out like a huge billboard for it. Go to adquick.com they should be doing out of home advertising. Especially with ad quick. They could make it easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home technology.

Only wait, I have an idea.

Yes.

Let's donate them enough money just to run a billboard with ad quick.

That'd be fantastic.

Now we're talking.

I want everyone working on on arc prizes. It's. It's a fantastic project. It's very, very fascinating. We'll have to have Francois Chollet, the creator of the actual. The actual test as well, on the show at some point and maybe we can get him to pick up up a watch on Bezel because they have over 2500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts.

And you know, if any company running on ramp will save time and money and then they can sort of actually, you know, potentially do more distributions and then the shareholders would actually be able to spend more money on Bezel.

Oh, yeah.

Which is one of the many reasons to use Ramp.

That's great. And I mean, if they're doing all that, like, where should they stay when they're on vacation?

I would. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel degraded amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concierge service. Folks, it's a vacation home, but better. Do you want to do any of these in any of these timeline posts before we get out of here? It's already past two. We've done a great job this week. I think we've streamed a lot. I'm excited to get home and just start prepping Monday. Sleep on my eight sleep because there, that's right late sleep brings you nights that feel your best days. You can turn any bed into ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com tvpn.

I love the, I love the head fake. Oh, should we get into some content? Oh, another ad, baby, let's do it.

And I mean there's, there's some other news that we should cover. Crusoe raised $225 million in debt to buy more Nvidia GPUs and they're using current Nvidia GPUs, uses collateral. And people are saying this is very circular, but it makes sense. I mean Nvidia GPUs have, have value and of course they can be priced and leveraged.

Lever up, do it again 10 times. You know, just, just one hand washes the other.

I love it. We have, we also have a post that we should, we should shout out to Rob Schultz over at Snagged. They're officially launching domain sales and brokerage service. We're starting with a list of 50 plus premium domains like tribe, tuscany.com geeks.com and beverage.com.

You had me@tuscany.com, rob. Yeah, no, but here's the real story. Rob got us tvpn. He did calm and he did it in a shockingly little amount of time. It was like a lot of people.

Have been like, oh, TVPN kind of a mouthful. It's a lot of letters. But I'm like, okay, think of another4letter.com that we could get very quickly. And we have the four letter handle on X. And, and so I think that this, there's, it's underrated to find one of these, one of these short single word domains, single acronym domains, and then build your brand world around it. And I think even though it's probably harder to get people to remember TBPN the first time they hear it, after they hear it about 10 times, it has the ChatGPT effect where you're like, oh yeah, TVPN. It's a weird thing, but it just, it stands for what it stands for. It's great. Anyway, also, Xi Jinping advocates for stable trade at Beijing business meeting meetings. This is a bigger story I'm sure we'll be digging into later. But the Chinese president Xi Jinping engaged in a series of meetings with global business leaders and foreign dignitaries in Beijing, highlighted by his discussions with representatives of the international business community. C emphasized China's continued openness to foreign investment. He's saying let's open the floodgates, let's get some capital in here, let's build some tech. We'll see how it goes and we'll close them on the show with an Elon Musk post that you were alluding to earlier. Kitsie. He's quote tweeting Kitsie, who says finishing touches. We need more compute to cure cancer. Right. And you can see that the image is loading a looks like Simpsons character. And so it's very funny. We're in this.

Do you think that loading effect is just to make it more addictive?

It's not. I think it actually does relate to the change in the. The algorithm or technology because we're no longer using pure diffusion where it's all random noise and then you're de noising it iteratively at the whole image level, which is what you see on midjourney when they're sending you those updates. Now it is more going line by line because it's a token based system. So there's some diffusion that's going in and there's also some tokenization. And I think OpenAI the ghiblification kind of drowned out the technical discussion that should follow. Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. I'm sure there will be other deep dives and I'm sure there'll be open source versions of this like every time a new, you know, Manus came out and there was open Manus and, and people always love to dig into even though the papers aren't released. You know, this is not an open source technology. I'm sure we will see an open source version of this technology within six months to a year, probably two weeks if we're being honest. Because as soon as people see this tech, they, they want to build it, they want to figure it out. And so that's the story. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Fantastic week.

Go leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and stay tuned. We have a bunch of stuff lined up for next week. Already going to be doing more special days. We had a really fun time with Defense day today. Kind of turned into AI Author Day. There was also some terraforming day in there. But we're very excited for it.

You never know what you're gonna get.

You never know what you're gonna get. So stay tuned. Follow us.

We are excited for Monday and have.

A great weekend folks. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon. Have a good one.