#45 - Three Breakthroughs: 529s Are Dead, Sodium Batteries?, and 1 Billion Robots by 2030

We've got a cool one for you today. AI and Khan Academy, salty batteries, and your own Rosie robot.

But obviously here at AV, we are also kind of big believers that where companies go to die, which is to innovate in the area of education, you know, that there is new potential.

So if it— if sodium-based batteries can truly be scaled up and brought to market, it's going to dramatically reimagine, you know, how we operate with this stuff today.

These things tend to be introduced, hyped, disappointment, and then become part of life.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this episode of The Tech Optimist. We've got a 3 breakthroughs episode planned for you today. There's some really awesome topics that take place in this conversation, um, and just some really innovative topics that come up and some insightful conversation. So of course, we're gonna have Mike Collins here on one end of the table that's gonna bring us through, founder and CEO of Illuminate Ventures. And then his partner in crime is partner Michael Perry, but we also call him Mike. And then of course, you'll hear my voice. My name is Sam, and I'm the guide and editor for the Tech Optimist podcast. So a little bit more about the conversation today. One breakthrough that they start to talk about is about AI and education. That's a really cool conversation between Bill Gates and Sal Khan, the CEO of Khan Academy, and they talk about, you know, just AI and how it can— how it's changing the education sector. And then Mike Perry brings up a breakthrough involving sodium-based batteries, which in the long term are supposed to be more efficient, more cost-effective, and just better for the environment in general. And then lastly, we land with the topic of humanoid Now the discussion comes up about, you know, Tesla's robot, the robot from Figure, and a few other snippets sprinkled in here and there. But I don't wanna give away too much about the conversation. So without further ado, here is Mike and Mike as they dish about, uh, some of the breakthroughs that they wanted to share with each other this week. We hope you enjoy. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist Podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Tech Optimist Podcast brought to you by Alumni Ventures. On this show, I get together with You know, one of our big thinkers, and today it's Mike Perry, uh, and we talk about things that, um, are hitting our screen as far as breakthrough technologies, things that have potential to put a little dent in the universe. So I think I'm going first today.

All right.

So I just finished Sal Khan's new book. came out a month or so ago called Brave New Words.

Okay.

Which is, you know, Sal was kind of got an early peek into ChatGPT and obviously has been just an incredible entrepreneur, kind of flipping the script on education. I come from a long line of teachers and, you know, his work has really made a difference and I think he speaks really eloquently about something that I think a lot of us are really interested in, which is education and specifically how AI could be a game changer and how he thinks it is going to be a game changer. So I encourage people to check out the book. He also does a really good interview you can Google with Bill Gates where he talks about it. You know, the Gates family has been early supporters, constant, consistent supporters of Khan Academy. But obviously here at AV, we are also kind of big believers that what has been kind of where companies go to die, which is to innovate in the area of education. Right. that there is new potential. And I think I'm going to title this segment, which is Stop Investing in Your Grandchild's 528.

529. Yeah.

529. Excuse me. Definitely the 528 you don't want to invest in, but no, your 529, which by the way, I personally, 3 kids starting out consistently invested in, was a great financial move for me and my family. But I think if you're giving birth this year and you're looking 17 years from now, I'm willing to make a pretty strong prediction that their experience is going to be very different in 15 years.

Okay. So along these lines, I did a little dive and I looked up, you know, the interview between Bill Gates and Sal Khan, the CEO of Khan Academy. And I found a really fascinating clip from Bill Gates's podcast, actually, which is called Unconfuse Me, where they talk about how OpenAI approached Khan Academy and wanted them to sort of help train the, you know, AI assistant model to be able to do the AP Bio exam. And you know, when I was doing my AP classes in in high school, I can't imagine what what doors would open if I had AI as a tool to be able to help me study and to help me prepare for you know set exam. So I was very fascinated by this conversation. I'm going to cut it up so it's not the full length of the eight minutes, but here are just some you know snippets from that conversation. want to see the full video, we'll leave the link in the description, um, and in the show notes and all that fun stuff. But regardless, I think it's a really cool, um, really cool conversation. But first, uh, hang tight, we're gonna do an ad and then we're gonna go into the conversation with Bill Gates and, uh, Sal Khan, and then we'll get right back into the interview, um, you know, where Mike and Mike talk a little bit more about, um, the new state of education and sort of how it's affecting them both. Personally in how they, you know, helped raise their kids.

Hey everyone, just taking a quick break so I can tell you about the Deep Tech Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and best-performing VCs in the US, and we co-invest alongside renowned lead investors. With our Deep Tech Fund, you'll have the opportunity to invest in innovative solutions to major technical and scientific challenges, which can have a hugely positive effect on society. Companies that have the potential to redefine industries and create a more sustainable future and deliver significant financial returns. So if you're interested, visit us at av.vc/funds/deep-tech. Now back to the show.

Welcome to Unconfuse Me. I'm Bill Gates. Let's talk about AI. You and I have both been lucky enough over the last 6 months or so to have engagement with the mix of both Microsoft and OpenAI and have early access. And I remember some of the best examples of how to get the AI to do fun things were when you came up and saw me and we were brainstorming about this. You were the one who said, hey, if you tell it to write a speech like various politicians, including Trump and others, that it's stunning how it captures the voice of different people. So, you know, give us the— how you first were using AI, and then, you know, this is super timely because you've just recently come out with the, uh, Conmigo, if I'm saying that right.

That's right. Very good. Yeah, I mean, it was OpenAI folks reached out and they said, hey, you know, we're a couple of weeks away from having You know, the first training of our model. And they wanted to reach out to Khan Academy for 2 reasons. One was they said, we want to make this really good at AP Biology. And I only found out later, I don't know if this is true, they, they told me you gave them the challenge to make it.

That's right. In June, they kept showing me this thing and I was like, yeah, it's kind of an idiot savant. I don't think it's practical. Why don't you see if it can do with the AP Biology exam? And I'm not going to pay any attention until you can, like, get a 5. And I thought, okay, that'll gimme 3 years to work on HIV and malaria and these guys. And then it was so bizarre because Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in late August said, hey, we wanna come show you this thing. And so it was early September when there were like 30 people at my house. And, you know, I've said it's the most stunning demo I've ever seen in my life. I mean, right up there with seeing the Xerox PARC graphics user interface that, you know, set the agenda for Microsoft. for about 15 years, you know, this demo was so surprising to me, the emergent depth that as they scaled up the training set, its fluency. And, you know, you have to say understanding that, you know, computers could not read in the sense humans do, and it couldn't write in the sense humans do. And now, you know, with lots of footnotes about hallucination and things like that, but— Yeah. I'm still personally in a state of shock at, wow, it is so good. And okay, therefore, you know, let's see where we can put it to good use.

Yeah, no, 100%. And so thank you for that, um, challenge to them. I think, I think that helped that they, they came to us because we have a large library of AP biology questions, et cetera. They're like, hey, can we use that to either evaluate or train? And, and at the time I was like, well, what's in it for Khan Academy? You know, I'm, I'm in it. And they're like, well, you know, maybe you get access to the model. And I, I too was skeptical. I'd seen GPT-3 at that point and it was cool, but it wasn't— I don't see how we're, we're gonna apply it. 2 weeks later, they showed us the, uh, AP Bio question. He said, so Sal, what's the answer to this? And I was like, I read it. I was like, oh, okay, I think it's C. Then it said, oh, the answer's C. And I was like, oh, this, that's interesting. I started getting a few goosebumps. And then, and I said, well, ask it why that's the answer.

Mm-hmm.

It explained it.

Oh yeah, that's, it's so good at that.

Oh, yeah. And, and, and I mean, I think what folks need to realize, because, you know, everyone had that moment with ChatGPT, but this was— it was like that, but more because GPT-4 is even better.

Way better.

Yeah. And I said, can you say why the other answers aren't correct? Did it. Then I said, oh, you know, then I started like I was almost shaking. Then I said, can you write 10 more questions like this? Bam, bam, bam. And, you know, the first 10 I saw were all Pretty good. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all legit. And then the implications for Khan Academy started to go through my mind. And then we did start to get into some of its hallucinations and some of its math errors in those early days. But that weekend, they gave me and our chief learning officer access on Slack, and we just— I couldn't sleep. I was just having these in-the-rabbit-hole conversations with it. And then we had a hackathon for our team. 40 people on our team under NDA, and we said, like, just come up with stuff. We were having the debates that everyone was having around, well, the information's not 100% airtight. The math isn't great right now. The costs are not trivial. Can it introduce bias? What's the safety? Can you— how could you use the use of people's information, et cetera? But then we were starting to get it to work well as something that just helps you answer questions while you're watching a video. To work well as a tutor. And then every, honestly, every 10 minutes we thought about it, we're like, wait, it could also do this. It can also do that. It can also do that. And so we said, well, what if we could make it so you could talk to any historical character? What if you can make it so it gets into a debate with you? What if you can make it so it doesn't write your paper, but it writes it with you? What if it could do lesson plans for teachers? It could be the end of static curricula. I mean, you know, just the imagination kept going. And, uh, by December, January, we had our team in full rapid prototyping mode and Yeah, just, you know, recently we launched Conmigo and, you know, so far we're starting to titrate it out to the world, giving people access to it. But the feedback is very promising. What we're hearing overwhelmingly from social media and the press is that they're really happy that we've engaged in this and that we're taking a safe approach where parents and teachers can monitor it. We have a moderation filter. OpenAI has also gone through great pains to make sure that You know, things stay appropriate. You know, you and I have talked extensively about the math issue, and we've done some things that I think make it quite robust on top of the things that the model does. And the costs are coming down dramatically.

This is super timely. I mean, Mike, I think you know this about us. We have a soon-to-be 4-year-old and a soon-to-be 1-year-old. And, you know, my wife and I have constant discussions around what does the future of education look like for them? for them, right? From the cost associated with it. And yes, we started the $529 early too. So obviously cost front and center, but even just how curriculum and, you know, learning is going to evolve over time. You know, I think of that, the framework that OpenAI had put out. Remember, there are like 5 stages of artificial intelligence. Yeah. And I think we're in the early innings, but as you think about, you know, Level 3, 4, 5, meaning systems that can take actions, AI that can actually aid in invention, and then AI that can do the work of organizations. Like, how is that going to impact education? And our view is, do you have to have the human in the loop? You know, so much of that is the fabric of our DNA culture, you know, the personal skills. So certainly timely in the Perry household, we're talking about this almost on a daily basis.

No, and I think a lot of families are. And the money, obviously, kind of the, the unrelenting growth of the cost of education from, you know, $20,000 kindergartens to, you know, million-dollar college education— one, unsustainable, um, two, creates huge societal Problems. And again, tech optimist, you know, we believe that technology can be part of a solution. And I also believe that there is a lot more to education than imbuing information. And, you know, the whole high-tech, high-touch thing I think is absolutely at work. But again, I think, Sal, talks about it very eloquently in a very balanced, real-world way. And I think he believes that we're looking at really a fundamental change. And I think one way to think about it is everybody is going to have a personal university custom to their particular interests, needs, state, you know, learning proclivities. And I think it doesn't take a huge leap if you are using ChatGPT-4 every day like I do, doing my job. Yeah. That it is not a hard leap that people are going to have a customized personal AI partner in their educational journey from very early, really, beyond throughout their whole life.

Yeah.

I mean, I just got back from Europe, week vacation, and, you know, I nerd out on these places, and it's like I had a personal translator, tour guide, history teacher, culinary expert just literally in my pocket. And so, you know, and again, Just to plug a few of, you know, our 15 portfolio companies in this space because other partners will give me huge shit if I don't. But, you know, we are long on this, from professional education to, um, doing research. I'm just gonna have Sam put up a— Save my breath. I'm gonna put up a list of You know, 10, just to pick a few of our portfolio companies that are coming at this from different angles.

Ask and you shall receive. Don't worry, Mike, I got you. So some companies or some portcos that are under, you know, AV that Mike was talking about, just a few examples are Synthesis School. Synthesis School is an online program created at SpaceX that is now available to kids, um, to encourage creative problem solving and teamwork. From their website, education is too important to leave to school. Using advanced teaching techniques and progress in AI, parents no longer have to. Synthesis Tutor does what school was supposed to— show your kids that they can learn anything and that every boring topic is fascinating when taught well. The Synthesis Tutor is not ChatGPT, but something more effective and personalized. It's custom built with decades of DARPA research and is proven across thousands of children. The last 2 years at Synthesis showed that we are better than anyone at how to teach advanced concepts to children. Another company is Inspira Education Group. Inspira Education Group supports college and graduate school applicants with mentorship, counseling, and coaching. Wow, I wish I had this when I was going to my graduate school. That's awesome. Using AI-enabled tools, the company pairs students with consultants from the world's largest network of admissions counselors based on the individual personality and learning needs. It actively incorporates AI into its core services. The company uses AI-enabled matching algorithms to pair students with consultants, and it uses AI tools to support with counseling and coaching process. For college and graduate school applicants. We also have Panorama Education. Panorama provides a SaaS platform that gives educators tools and data they need to act on and improve student and school outcomes. So it's got AI-powered student support, so it utilizes leading multi-tiered system of support software to improve literacy, math, attendance, and behavior, social-emotional learning, building students' life skills with assessments, intervention tracking, and character surveys. Its platform measures factors related to social-emotional learning and student success in order to improve equity in schools and help educators improve core student outcomes. That's really cool. And then of course we have Rally Reader. Rally Reader was, um, uh, another episode on this podcast. You can, you know, go back and listen to that, but, um, Rally Reader offers an AI-enhanced and e-reading platform for elementary and middle schoolers to improve their reading and literacy skills while engaging educators and parents with detailed progress dashboards. So an AI-enhanced e-reading platform that acts as a personal reading coach is the AI that they utilize. So there's real-time error detection and feedback to improve reading and literacy skills, and there's personalized learning experiences through word-by-word accuracy tracking and progress Dashboards. Thanks, Mike. Back to you.

I mean, we could shout out one, you know, for our team here in Chicago, Consensus. Yeah, great example. Great example. Really reimagining, you know, the learning and research side of education. You know, that's just one of plenty. So that list that we're going to share is just representative, I think, of tip of the iceberg and really will start to allow our audience to think about just how broad this can be, right? It could go from research to creativity and book writing to, you know, full-on curated ways to engage in learning that just resonate with, with the, with the student at the end of the day.

Yeah. And again, just to bring it home personally, I'm sure my son will love this, but, you know, I have a son enrolling at Columbia. MFA program. And, you know, we talked for a half hour yesterday about how one can use this as— even when you're in school today— as a huge resource to make your work better. It is a tool. When I went to college, I had a typewriter, for God's sake. Word processing was like sent from heaven.

Yeah.

And so it's like same thing. It's like it is a tool. It is you and it and you back and forth with it, making the work better. So again, I am short 529s and I am long AI and education and lifelong learning.

Yeah. And call to action to anyone out there who's building in this space. We often joke like, oh man, the only thing you don't want to invest in besides healthcare is education because of the sales cycle. I think AI is going to be that breakthrough now. We're going to see this be able to penetrate, distribute in ways that we didn't think about not even 12 months ago, let alone years ago.

I mean, I think it's disruption theory, which is a lot of what people have been trying over the last 20, 30 years has been really trying to work with existing frameworks and that just absorbs and treats it like an antibody and kills it. And I think AI is going to kind of circumvent that and it's going to go right to the user and gradually becoming more independent as the child matures. But it is— I think this one is— the time is right. And I think we're going to see real big differences over the next 5 and 10 years in education that are going to be very transformative. Yeah.

Thanks for bringing this one, Mike. This is one I think we could talk about all day, every day, right? Especially for folks with young kids thinking about this. So yeah, definitely, definitely a great topic.

I mean, it's kids, kids hopefully in your future, kids on the plate, or grandkids potentially in the future. So it impacts all of us. So, and if it's none of the above, it's still a huge part of our society that we all live, work, and play in. So good. What do you got, Mike?

All right, I've got an exciting one for us today, one that could really change the future of energy storage. So on a personal note, my wife and I, we went down the rabbit hole on this topic because we finally upgraded to a plug-in hybrid car.

Yep.

So this breakthrough really caught my attention.

Welcome to the club.

We're here and we're loving it so far. It's been a very nice welcome to upgrade. So this is really about just reimagining a world in which batteries are not only more affordable, better for the environment, but also way more efficient. And I think the future is closer than we think. There's some groundbreaking collaboration between researchers at University of Chicago, so shout out my alma mater there, and UC San Diego. And they've been focused on researching and developing a new sodium-based battery that could be a total game changer for how we store and use energy. So for those out there that this might be new, like, you know, why is this a big deal? So unlike lithium-ion batteries, which we currently rely on, they use materials that are super expensive, scarce.

Rarer.

Yeah. With sodium-based battery, it uses sodium, super abundant, much cheaper, and it's just a much more sustainable option. Especially for, you know, large-scale energy storage. You know, you have renewable energy grids. We invest a lot in that, obviously electric vehicles. So, you know, they really leaned into this and they said, okay, we have to think about how to tackle challenges that have held back sodium batteries in the past because it's not a novel idea for them to innovate here. Yeah. And what they did is they started to design a new anode. material that's optimized for this electrolyte. And in the early indications, it's resulting in a battery that performs on par with or even better than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Plus, it works really efficiently at room temperature, which is a huge step forward. I think that was part of the big issue. So, you know, what does this mean?

How does it look at manufacturability? Because obviously that's, you know, there's You got to make this stuff at huge scale, right?

Yep. So that's it. I mean, this is where it's like, so what does this mean for the future? You know, it's got to get off the bench of research. So if sodium-based batteries can truly be scaled up and brought to market, it's going to dramatically reimagine, you know, how we operate with this stuff today. It's going to reduce Definitely dependence on lithium. It's going to significantly lower costs, and it's finally going to make renewable energy more practical and widespread. And I think about that, you know, just in my one use case, right? Electric vehicles, way more affordable, much more accessible, and just, it eliminates the, okay, how do I have to think about this on a daily basis? Yep. So it was a cool one, super timely for us, and it's always great to see some innovation out

So this innovation that Mike has brought to the table today also has been published in, you know, what seems to be this podcast's, uh, favorite, uh, you know, scientific paper publisher, which is Nature Energy and just Nature in general. Um, but yeah, so they published their paper in Nature, and I'm going to read the abstract. Um, because I think that sort of helps round out exactly what we're talking about here. So anode-free batteries possess the optimal cell architecture due to their reduced weight, volume, and cost. However, their implementation has been limited by unusable anode morphological changes and anode liquid electrolyte interface reactions. Here we show that an electrochemically stable solid electrolyte and the application of stack pressure can solve these issues by enabling the deposition of dense Furthermore, an aluminum current collector is found to achieve intimate solid-solid contact with the solid electrolyte, which allows highly reversible sodium plating and stripping at both high areal capacities and current densities, previously unobtainable with conventional aluminum foil. A sodium anode-free all-solid-state battery, full cell, is demonstrated with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. This cell architecture serves as a future direction for other battery chemistries to enable low-cost, high-energy density, and fast-charging batteries.

Yeah. And again, and if you were to pick up, all right, Kurzweil has really good graphs in his new book, basically showing all of these technologies and how they're geometric real-time And renewable energy, just, you know, last 10, 20 years, 90% improvement. Battery technology, 90% improvement over the last 25 years. These curves are all going in the right direction. Sometimes they stall out and then there's a step function.

Yep.

As you have to kind of change technology platforms, you've kind of squeezed out the inner, but they just keep going. And, um,

and you hit it, you know, Mike, I feel like you hit it on the head. I think there is definitely consumer demand or pent-up demand, certainly, you know, enterprise demand. It's just, can you do all of this at scale and not disrupt, you know, current operations for an enterprise or the day-to-day on an individual? I think once we get through that, it's going to be mass adoption almost overnight.

Yeah. And usually behind it, there's some, you know, obsessive, crazy entrepreneur who's going to build a factory to make the thing, right? Like Elon did.

Yeah,

right. So it's like, you know, it, it's a combination of the science, the lab, getting it off of it, and then finding an entrepreneur who's just going to drive it into the world. So, um, great. Last one today is the coming robots, right? And so listen, we, we— let's define robots broadly. You know, we, we had a portfolio company, Ghost Robotics, just had a really, um, nice exit that's doing stuff in kind of, you know, clearing buildings and Instead of sending in the Marines kind of robot.

Yep.

And then you've got obviously the huge factory robot where I think we've got now, you know, Amazon employs more robots than humans. And that— and those 2 curves are on kind of pretty fundamentally different scales right now. So, you know, the billion robots on the planet by 2030, I'm using a broad definition of robots, right? Um, but the one that just came out pretty recently that caught my attention, and I think people need to be aware of, is Figures, like, O2 version. So again, this is a company that is more in kind of the humanoid-ish-like space. I know that, you know, again, Elon's got his, you know, Optimus robot that is again— Yeah. Keeps getting better with kind of, you know, manual dexterity. His vision is one in every home. Again, everybody scoffs at that. I'm old enough to have them, you know, scoff at a desktop, you know, a computer on any— every desktop was scoffed at. Yeah. So again, I just think that we just keep seeing these, These improvements that are happening before our eyes, where it's like every 6 months, every 12 months, you know, we're seeing capability improvement that is remarkable. I mean, my car really drives me to work now in kind of full self-driving mode. I don't, you know, I'm paying attention. I'm not reading the newspaper. And I'm in, you know, in ungodly early hours, so it doesn't have to, you know, deal with a lot of stuff. But, you know, it's basically push a button and it's driving, and I'm listening to a podcast. So, you know, that didn't exist 2 years ago, even, you know, even though it was promised maybe 5 years ago. These things tend to be introduced, hyped, disappointment, and then become part of life. And so I just think, I think everybody's talking about AI, but I think the robots are coming too.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, we know we have portfolio companies that are doing this in food service.

Yep.

I think, you know, people can see these changes with like, oh, now I'm, Checking in my bags. Now I'm ordering my salad at a kiosk. Yeah, come on. The next logical step is they're gonna make your salad, right? Kind of thing.

Yep.

And we're— I think we are 2025 gonna see, you know, pretty high-volume retail shops with kind of a skeleton crew of humans.

Now, I don't mean to freak anyone out, but this is kind of already happening. Not so much robots, but just the concept of retail stores shifting to that sort of skeleton crew that Mike is talking about. And, you know, one of these retail stores that has kind of taken this by the horns is Zara. Now, everyone loves Zara, right? It's a really awesome sort of shopping experience, um, and they have implemented, um, self-checkout in their sort of boutique-style stores. Um, so they've newly revamped the spaces and it presents a completely fresh new image with new product display areas and highly efficient technology to provide only the best customer service quality. This new technology also comes with more in-store features, a fitting room screen-out A dedicated space for online order collection and Zara's advanced self-checkout area. I'm going to throw some images up right here of a store in the Philippines which, you know, really took this thing by the horns. Um, it's really fascinating. So Zara has made in-store shopping more convenient in more ways than one. Now customers can browse items from a wide selection of women's, men's, and children's collections and have the option to reserve fitting rooms through the Zara mobile app. This just flips what shopping is on its head. You know, it's really crazy. And I got some of this information from an article from L'Officiel that was published May of this year by Bea Maris. So we'll throw again the link into the show notes if you want to read the rest of the article. But here are a few images from that.

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Yeah.

And I think we are within a couple years of a consumer version of a family helper in the house doing stuff. And so I want to call out Figure, check it out. This is not a portfolio company. Not everything we do here is shilling for our companies, but we have, again, I'll have Sam put up a bunch of them, but robots are coming. I also, and kind of final point, which is I think AI and robotics are going to increasingly be the story.

Yeah.

That, you know, we're talking about both in one thing, in the software and hardware. And when you combine the two, it's really hard. But when you do it really, really well, you get incredible results, i.e., Apple. Right. So I, you know, one of the things we're doing at AV, we're putting together 2025 funds. We're kind of bringing together robotics and AI funds into one fund next year. 'Cause we just think, you know, that there are so many super great opportunities that are one or the other, but even more exciting both.

It's super hand in glove. I mean, you had hit on this, right? early innovation tends to be laughed at or dismissed, right? You think of early robots, you know, we had a vacuum cleaner going around our house and everyone's like, oh, okay, you know, it got wrapped around a cord, this thing sucks type of thing. Yeah. It's like, all right. But point being, as you're seeing, you know, AI just go astronomical in terms of the innovation that's there, it only makes sense that the deployment of that in robotics is going to be an ultimate showcase or mantle for what this can actually do. Beyond the commercial context, right? I think it's, it's very easy to think about that Amazon context, the government, you know, defense contracts.

Drones.

Certainly drones, even on the biotech or surgery side.

Yeah,

right. What's interesting there is you have mass adoption in these large regulated industries. If we're seeing that innovation happen there, you only know the consumers are, are sitting there saying like, It's a matter of time before we see this in everyday life.

Yeah.

Right.

Now, again, one of my— one of my top 10 investments of all time, Intuitive Surgical, right? It's just early on and they just keep creeping, creeping, creeping into more and more things. And, I think those kinds of companies that are doing surgery or human-assisted surgery, again, we are going to see a geometric progression instead of a linear one over the next 10 years and that kind of stuff. There's so many benefits to it.

Yeah, no doubt.

And, um, yeah, really exciting time. So yeah, another good episode, another good week. Thank you, Mike. We'll do it again next week.

All right, see you, sir. Have a good one.

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