Vinod Khosla Predicting the Future | Ep. 15

We're gonna be in an era of abundance that's so large, it's very hard for people to imagine. The simplest way to say it is the need to work will go away. People will work on things because they wanna work on things, not because they need to work on things to pay their mortgage.

All right, I am super excited to be here with Vinod Khosla. Thank you so much for doing this with me today. I really am looking forward to this conversation.

Look forward to it.

When you first walked in here, uh, before we got started, you were saying, wow, you know, the world's crazy. Um, and you've invested through many periods of time. Obviously, you know, there have been a lot of ups and downs, but, um, you said the world's particularly crazy now. Can you share why you said that or why you're feeling that way?

I've been doing venture capital for 40 years, so I've gone through every large innovation cycle. Uh, I've never seen a cycle like this. To put an order of magnitude on it, almost every job is being reinvented. Every material thing is being reinvented differently with AI as a driver. Probably the best way to describe it, if you look 15 years hence, and that's too far to look, We'd have to look back at least 50 years, maybe in the 1960s, to see the delta in change. And so we're going to see this large change in, in sort of such a short time. It's almost hard to imagine how society adjusts. And if I go even further, Almost certainly within the next 5 years, any economically valuable job humans can do, AI will be able to do 80% of it. With a few exceptions like heart surgery or brain surgery, but by and large, 80% of 80% of all jobs can be done by an AI. And if that's happening in the next 5 years, The world is going to be a very different place. So I see this sort of like invention happening at a frenetic pace that is so large compared to even the dot-com phase when the internet first came and there was Netscape and TCP/IP and all that. It's almost hard to imagine, no matter where you look. Everything's being reinvented in some fundamental way using often the innovations from AI and the capability from AI, but also a few other vectors like stuff happening in biology, stuff happening in fusion and other areas. So everything's up for grabs.

So, so I guess that's then leading to a frenzied pace of investment, companies being created, you know, new ideas getting tried all at once. Is your overall read based on, you know, on one hand it's crazy and frenetic, on the other hand everything you just said about, yeah, but like maybe a billion jobs are going to be, you know, done by an AI in the next couple years or several years or something like that. Do you net out to being very optimistic about this moment in time for tech, or do you think there's gonna be a lot of carnage, or how do, how do you think?

So my view, the next 5 years to 2030 will look like productivity improvements, the way economists would say productivity is going up, GDP is going up, or accelerating on GDP, things like that. And then if I look to the 15 years hence, 2040 and beyond, we are gonna be in an era of abundance that's so large, it's very hard for people to imagine. The simplest way to say it is the need to work will go away.

Yeah.

People will work on things because they wanna work on things, not because they need to work on things to pay their mortgage.

Is that gonna require us to change anything about like the social contract to get there?

Like a re— Yes, I'll come back to that.

Yeah.

What I want to say is somewhere starting in 2030, the changes are going to be so disruptive that it's hard to imagine how it sorts out. And it'll sort out differently by country, by region. Different governments will play different roles in allowing it to happen or not allowing it to happen. And so we'll see this very, very disruptive almost dystopic type of AI is taking all the jobs kind of thing, but we will have enough productivity, enough goods and services produced to share broadly.

Is what you're saying that basically the changes that are already happen— happening will compound to a point where it'll now just be this big disruption? Or are you saying the tech by the year 2030 is then going to be so disruptive that it's going to create all these changes? In other words, are we already on that trajectory or you're just saying the tech's gonna get there in a way that will be that disruptive?

What I'm saying is tech is disruptive in some areas.

And it will be everywhere.

Uh, and it'll be everywhere, but almost no corporation, uh, by 2040, these are Fortune 500 companies I'm talking about, should run the way it's running even remotely. I should say most Fortune 500.

Yeah.

One of my predictions is the 2030s will see a faster rate of demise of Fortune 500 companies than we've ever seen. It's actually pretty high anyway, but we'll see a rate accelerate dramatically. So let me put it diff— differently. If you're a healthcare company, and I speak to a lot of healthcare company boards, You look at AI and say it's an opportunity and we'll get more administrative efficiency or something like that. But if I said to you, which I've said to a couple of boards, if all medical expertise is free, you have an unlimited number of primary care doctors, oncologists, gastroenterologists, mental health therapists, you, you name it. How would you redesign the healthcare system?

Be crazy.

Uh, that transition won't happen from existing companies. Almost somebody new will reinvent this. Now, there's the issue of regulation. The American Medical Association doesn't like the idea.

I was gonna say, there'll be a lot of people fighting against this.

Yes.

Who have a lot of power, who will be good at fighting it for at least some amount of time.

For some amount of time.

Yeah.

But fortunately, we have a small part of our healthcare system, very small part, where payments are capitated, what's called the capitated system or Medicare Advantage, where you get paid a fixed amount to take care of a patient, roughly.

Yeah.

That world will be so much more effective because they won't care about reducing costs, which AI can do. Reducing costs for a hospital system is reducing their revenue.

Of course.

For a physician, reducing costs is cutting their cost down. Now, I, I think that the general model, I think for the next 5 years, when I talked about productivity improvements, you will see almost every professional start to get interns working for you.

Mm-hmm.

So every MD, a practicing physician, will get 5 fresh MDs as if they're fresh out of Stanford Medical School that'll work for them and increase productivity, maybe provide a higher level of service to their patients, all that. But that then turns into something much more catastrophic over time. So by and large, next 5 years, I think we should assume that every all professionals start to get interns working for them who can, who are trained in their profession, whether you're a structural engineer or a salesperson who work for you. Good, nice interns behave well. But at some point, these interns grow up. They will have way more expertise than the physician. And then it's hard to roll this clock back.

It's going to go fast, too.

It is, it'll go fast except in some areas where there's regulatory or other constraints. Take the example of the Screen Actors Guild last year. Anybody who signed up for the Screen Actors Guild thing will go out of business. But that change will be slower. Outside that system, people will be producing movies for $100,000, not $100 million.

Yeah. Right.

The dynamics will be different by sector.

If this does play out even directionally the way you're saying, and now it's 2040, what do you think is left for people to be doing? Like, there must be some things left. Like, are people going to be still all employed or employable via creating their own businesses and pointing AI around or, you know, we have a lot of two-person billion-dollar companies. Does it go that way or does it actually just go to like a lot of people are just gonna consume a lot of leisure and that's it?

I'm waiting for the first entrepreneur to call me and say, we can build a billion-dollar revenue company with 10 employees. You can definitely do it with 100 employees.

Yeah.

We haven't gotten there yet, but we will. That company's already been started.

Yeah.

I mean, somebody will leverage it tenfold again.

Yep.

There's a question of, will there be jobs that need people? If you have a billion bipedal robots by 20— in the 2040 timeframe, could be 5 years later, could be 5 years earlier, but let's say that that was one of my dozen predictions I made when I spoke at TED last year. Almost certainly, they're doing more work than human beings do labor today.

Yeah. And they'll be smarter and they won't sleep. They'll never complain.

And you won't have silly notions like a primary care doctor and oncologist.

Right. The same robot that, like, cleans your house is also your doctor.

Yeah. Yeah. It's this superintelligence idea. I think people will have lots to do, but it won't be because they need to work for a living. Look, the first thing people forget, most of the jobs in this country or on this planet are not really jobs. There's what I call servitude. If you're a farm worker working for 8 hours a day picking lettuce and you do that for 40 years, or you're an assembly line worker at GM mounting a tire on a car for 8 hours a day for 40 years.

Yeah.

Those aren't jobs. They are servitude because you have to survive.

And what a great thing if we could give those people their lives back and the time, those hours of their lives back.

What will people do? Humans will be humans. They'll still compete. We love sports. We love entertainment. We love, uh, being great at something. Whether you're even a mediocre artist loves painting for themselves, not because it can be recognized by a New York auction house, art auction house. So people will excel in what they do, you know, exporters, skiing, you name it. I love the idea people have a lot more time to talk, care about their children. Yep. Actually not be frustrated because children are a conflict with work requirements or career requirements, working a lot more with their elders, parents. So there is going to be a lot to do.

What's your confidence level that this is the future?

High.

80%?

Higher. I have very high confidence this world happens. I think greater than 50% that it happens by 2050. The timing is hard to predict.

But like, you're 100% sure that it happens before like 2200?

Oh, no question about it. Yeah. So I'd be shocked if it didn't happen by 2060, where we live in a world of abundance. Nobody has to prove they can buy a more expensive car than somebody else. That part, it may still be there. Humans like competing, including ego. But I do think something fundamental will change. A 5-year-old kid going to kindergarten today is being told by their parents, go to school, study hard, get into a good college, and then you'll get a good job. That won't be the paradigm.

So my kid, my oldest kid's 5, and then I have 2 other younger ones, if you're me, like, what are you thinking right now in terms of like what's important for like little kids right now?

Because curiosity, for me, when I'm in a position where I can do anything I want, I could go play golf, which I don't love, or go sailing, or you pick your favorite. I'm mostly driven by curiosity, you know. I want to learn new things. So anytime I can learn something, I'll take a meeting. Um, and I'm fortunate people will teach me, but in the future, you won't need somebody to be willing to teach you. It'll happen. For me, it's that. For others, it'll be producing the best music they can relative to their own bar. Not— and clearly people will still want to be like Taylor Swift and—

Will there be like the last person— one of the places my head was going was somebody still has to build the AI, build the robots, program everything. Will we get to the last person who needed to do that at some point? And then that's actually— even that job goes away?

First, high degree of uncertainty with respect to the configuration of what people are doing. I don't believe they'll be working 40 hours a week for meaning in their life.

Yeah.

Unless it's something they really want to do independent of earning a living. Okay. So that we should be clear. And I just recently gave a talk last month on AI dystopia or utopia. And I, by the way, cover all the dystopian scenarios in it. First.

Oh God.

Before I get to the utopian scenarios. And so it's on our website, um, and it's on the internet, so you can— anybody can find it. What's very clear to me is the dystopian views will be a choice society makes. The utopian view is going to happen anyway. The world of abundance, only a matter of when, not if. And within our lifetimes.

It's amazing.

And when I say my lifetime, I at least look at 25 years. I'm 70.

Easy.

Clearly.

More. When you're talking about this dystopia, I think what was implied in what you just said was sort of a self-inflicted dystopia where we just, you know, humans don't decide to organize correctly to take advantage of this amazing abundance.

Absolutely.

Do you worry at all about like the AI doomerism version of dystopia at all, where like the AI goes awry? Is that something you think about at all?

Yeah, so let me answer the question in two parts. Certain societies will choose not to do it. We saw it with the Screen Actors Guild. They essentially signed existing traditional studios up to a paradigm that makes them order of magnitude less effective in content generation because we are building an AI videographer in our portfolio. You specify, you don't just generate video, you specify what the lighting angle is and what the, how you pan and zoom the camera and those kinds of things. So the people who resort to traditional means will not do well., people who do, do movie production. Today we can't do a full movie that way, but that's only a matter of time. Right? Only a matter of time. Yeah. Today, almost all commercials can be done by an AI.

Yeah, and the example you gave of, you know, reproducing a $100 million budget thing with $100,000, of course that does, you know, of course that's going to go that way.

And we know Coca-Cola got a lot of flak last summer, last Christmas, because they produced some commercials with only with AI. People nitpicking anomalies and stuff. Most people didn't know it was done by an AI. And they did great. And I'm glad they did it. Broke the ice. So there will be a flood of that. So there's that version of dystopia, displacement. Disruption's always fun for the disruptor, very not fun for the disrupted. And so one has to keep that in mind. We have to take care of people who are disrupted in this paradigm. The other end is sentient AI that kills us all.

Exactly.

I wouldn't say I don't worry about it. I do worry about it. But I look at it as a complete basket of risks humanity faces. We've gone through an era where a planet— asteroid hit planet Earth and most life was destroyed. So we know that was a risk and risk still exists. An asteroid could hit the planet. More likely, a much worse epidemic than a pandemic than COVID. Yeah. You know, COVID only killed 7 million people. It's possible it could kill 700 million people.

Totally.

Right? In fact, I would say that's almost likely. So there's a whole basket of risk. Do I worry about sentient AI killing everybody on the planet? Yes, but more than I worry about President Xi doing nasty things? No.

Yep.

So when it comes to AI, I want us to have the Western world to have the best AI so that we are not subject to President Xi or President Putin. Uh, that is by far the greatest risk.

That makes total sense.

And this is what the people who call to slow down AI research. Miss. Putin isn't slowing down, not that he's very good at it, but Xi in China definitely can do this. You know, it's a world in which the—

in—

and you can't argue with it. They sort of say the end justifies the means. Yeah, we in the Western world care more about the means.

Marc Andreessen made this point on the podcast too, which was basically the— so much of culture and production is going to live in how the AI is programmed. And if it's our doctors and our teachers and our lawyers and everything like that, you really want it to be.

Well, we've seen it with TikTok.

We did.

Right? If you're on TikTok, you're more likely to be China inclined, favorably inclined towards China. That's culture. And President Xi had said in one of his speeches, not very long ago, the next battle will be fought on the internet. It'll be a battle for people's minds. He was clearly thinking TikTok. So there is, you know, dystopic AI killing humans and all that, or AI in warfare, you know, weapons and robot soldiers and all that.

That seems very important too.

Yeah, that's very, very important, but it's even more important that we win the race to have social influence. If I'm giving all the entertainment, uh, to the rest of the world, if I'm giving all the free doctors, if I'm giving all the few tutors, my philosophy, political philosophy prevails. So I do think by 2040, The biggest risk we might face that I worry about is China using both good AI, cyber AI, warfare AI, but also socially good AI, like free doctors to everybody on the planet, and to embed their political philosophy.

Yeah.

I think that's a real— it's probably the single biggest thing I worry about.

In some ways, it seems like politics, both sort of the way we think about it normally, but also just sort of broadly socially, is going to get even more important than it is right now over time.

Yeah. Look, we live in a capitalist system, but people forget capitalism is mostly by permission of democracy.

Yes.

In our system. If democracy sustains, um, I, I, I think we will adjust easier. Now, China has the advantage of using what I call Tiananmen Square techniques, uh, to enforce whatever they want. Um, so it, it's going to be an interesting 15 years, um, and, you know, it's going to be interesting but also critically important 15 years to what philosophy starts to dominate the planet.

I want to spend most of our time continuing to talk about the future, but I have one historical event I want to ask you about. The tee-up to this question is going to sound like, you know, just an opportunity to, you know, talk about being a great investor. But I specifically want to ask you about your OpenAI investment. And, um, the angle I want to ask you about it from is to try to figure out what, if anything, we can learn from how you did that, um, and how you decided to do it. I know that you were sort of like the first, you know, venture investor to do it, and you did it in real size in something that probably at the time a lot of people didn't want to do, maybe thought it was a science project. There was a lot of lack of clarity on the whole thing. Um, I think that like, you know, now it's, you know, it is what it is, but at the time it was probably an extremely hard bet to make. And so what I was hoping was to try to as much as possible play back The tape inside your brain to see what we can learn from that.

So it was a very large investment, more than twice the largest investment, initial investment I'd made in 40 years of venture capital. Wow. So it was a conviction bet. Uh, but I want to go back to, uh, a different era and talk about this idea of people like to be in herds. When the herd mentality was crypto and a couple of other areas. And by the way, I've never called myself an investor in 40 years. I always say I'm a venture assistant helping entrepreneurs.

That's better.

It's a much better mental model for me. Not the investing is a side effect, so I can keep doing it. I'll give you another example that relates to this. While people follow herd instinct, I like to think about what are the fundamentals and can they happen. Fundamentals don't always happen, but they can. And in 1996, I invested, uh, I started a company, uh, called Juniper. We worked on a business plan in my office for 6 months with the founder, Pradeep Sindhu. Why? Because the world was saying The internet would be a protocol called ATM, asynchronous transfer mode. So every major company had given up on TCP/IP for the public internet and were only gonna use ATM because the telcos were specifying ATM. I talked to the senior management of almost every telco and every single one said to me they wouldn't use TCP/IP. I talked to the CTO of Cisco who said they have no plans to ever do TCP/IP above 155 megabits, which is my home service. It's far below my home service for a public router. But I looked at the data. TCP/IP usage had been climbing. And I said, this will scale. And every expert is wrong in the field. We should come back to that if you remember, uh, this notion of experts. And the data said TCP/IP was exponential and we were the knee of the— near the knee of the curve. Uh, so fast forward to today, and by the way, I'd invested in TCP/IP and it was a core part of what Sun did in 1982. And this was 14 years later. You see the exponential in TCP/IP as a communications medium. And we bet heavily. By the way, we made $7 billion on a $3 million investment when almost no venture investment ever made even a billion.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it sounds good. 2,500x our money.

Yeah, I'd like one of those.

Yeah, you only need one, but hopefully OpenAI for us will do better to go back to your question. But fast forward, in the year 2000, I gave an interview which is in the New York Times, so it's on the record, that said AI will have us redefine what it means to be human, which is this utopia thing we were just talking about. Will people need jobs? That was the year 2000 or 2001. 2012, I wrote two blogs. One was called Do We Need Doctors? Under the premise AI will do all the doctoring expertise that we need.

This is 2012.

2012. It's in TechCrunch. You can look up. And the second was called, Do We Need Teachers? Idea that all tutoring will be done by an AI too. So those were 2012.

What gave you confidence at that point that that was gonna happen? Because this was before the breakthroughs with Transform, way before all that stuff.

So Uh, and, and this is where I, I was getting to. What I looked at was the best talent was going into AI. You went to MIT or Stanford or Caltech or wherever, people wanted to work on AI. Toronto, of course, pretty important place in this history. Um, best talent was going. In 2016, I I gave a talk at the National Bureau of Economic Research. I should probably release those slides. My first slide was the top 20 occupations in the US by number of people. And I said, I can't see which ones of these can't be displaced.

Hmm.

Now this was to a bunch of economists. That was 2016. I was convinced, but in that talk I had human performance, and current AI performance. And most people were making fun of AI because you're telling, ask an 83-year-old man if they were pregnant. It made silly mistakes. I looked at the rate of progress and the rate of talent influx. Those two things convinced me the moment for AI was soon. Now this was 2016. So by 2018, when Elon backed off funding OpenAI, he'd committed a lot of money that he didn't meet his commitments for. And when Sam called me, I looked at that and said, you have the right team. I was very worried about China. I thought there was only two other teams. One was inside Google, which is moving very slowly, and another in Baidu, which was stealing Google's people by setting up an office down here and stealing their expertise. I'm very hawkish on China. And OpenAI needed to exist as a separate vector of AI progress. And it had the right team with Sam running it. When Sam called me, it was almost a no-brainer.

'Cause you were such a prepared mind for this by that time.

Yeah. I was convinced the impact could be large. Now, I had no idea when there would be breakthroughs. Obviously, I couldn't predict transformer models, even though the paper was out, was going to be that large an impact. In fact, transformers wasn't what OpenAI was working on. So how wasn't this— this technique works? It was more like talent and the rate of progress. And I actually thought it'd be multiple techniques. I remember talking to Sam as I have a Lego block model. The more different types of Lego blocks you do, the more the combinatorial possibilities explored. I think it was following the data and not the herd.

So was there a couple-year period where you were basically very primed that you were just waiting for the right team at some point. Like, it seems like between 2016 and 2018, you probably believed this pitch from just— you just needed the right team.

Well, I, I was convinced of the following: AI would have a huge impact because the rate of progress I was seeing on these benchmarks against human performance, even though they were way down there and almost silly performance, but the rate of change was high. And the rate of talent influx was high. Elon backing off funding OpenAI was fortunate. I can't say I engineered it. I wish I had.

Yeah.

But it is following the data and not the herd instinct.

Yeah.

And frankly, 2018, when we made the decision, it closed in early 2019. Everybody thought AI was not a real thing.

People thought it was a science project.

It was a science project. OpenAI was not using transformer models. It was just my belief. You put the right resources and they'll figure it out. I told my partner, I have no idea whether it happens in 3 years or 10 years, but the IRR would work out. It was too important to not try was the phrase I used.

Yeah.

Some things are too important to not try, and I often try those. At the same time, we invest in fusion at Commonwealth Fusion. Again, started it from practically scratch because Bob was a senior fellow at the MIT Fusion Lab. This idea that some things in society are too important to not try, and I'd rather try and fail than fail to try., and most people, most of the time, just failed to try. And so this combination of factors and knowing AI would have a large impact once we got it, uh, was what got me convinced.

Okay. So that's a perfect setup into now looking to the future. That construction got you to a big bet in AI. What are the other areas right now that you feel maybe like, you know, the same way you felt in 20— 15 about AI. What do you feel that way about now? You mentioned fusion, but like, what are a few of the areas that you feel this way about the future now?

Well, first, related to AI, robotics will take a little longer, but I think we'll have the ChatGPT moment in the next 2 to 3 years.

What could that look like?

A robot that doesn't need to be programmed. It learns. It isn't programmed to do tasks.

And it's a generalized— you know, maybe physical robot in our— in our space?

Well, the world is organized around the humanoid form factor, and so it's probably a humanoid. Humanoid is the only common enough form factor to get to high enough manufacturing volumes to get the cost down. Almost everybody in the 2030s will have a humanoid robot at home. Probably start with something narrow, like do your cooking for you. It can chop vegetables, cook food, clean dishes, but stays within the kitchen environment. And, you know, if you have a Prius, it costs $300, $400 a month. The robot will cost $300, $400 a month. It won't matter. And, you know, for anybody making more than a certain amount of money, they already have somebody helping. And so this is help. Yeah. I think that's how it'll start in the home, but factories, farms, uh, farm workers is a massive area that's mostly unaddressed.

What part of the humanoid intelligent robot are we most limited on right now? Like, is it about the robotics? Is it like the intelligence? Is it—

it's the intelligence. Clearly we've seen out of China many, many hardware form factors. They're pretty damn amazing. If you see them boxing or running a race, or it's pretty cool, but they're not learning robots. You change the environment and they don't do as well.

Yeah.

I think this intelligence that learns and adapts, uh, and doesn't need to be programmed to do a task. You know, if you walk a human in here and say, clean up, They'll know what to do. Uh, a robot needs to do that.

Why is this not going to be like Apple? Like, and I know that, like, you know, I'm not saying I think it is, but like, why do you think that we don't already have the sort of prototypes of this out from the biggest, most well-equipped hardware companies in the world?

So I've been doing innovation for 40 years, and innovation only. I can't think of very many large examples that we had large innovation came from somebody who was large or in the business.

Yeah. Can you, can we go through some of them?

Yeah. Retailing, you know, when we invested in Amazon, I was at Kleiner in '96, nobody thought you could compete with Walmart. You'd think Walmart would, in a way.

Yeah.

Look at media. Was it NBC or CBS, or was it little things like Netflix and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? And nobody even knew they were in the media business.

Mm-hmm.

Uber. Did that come from Hertz or Avis car rental or taxi companies? No. Airbnb. That come from Hilton or Hyatt.

Yep.

They have more rooms than Hilton and Hyatt now. SpaceX or Rocket Lab instead of Boeing and Lockheed, you'd expect to be able to do space launches. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, my own history, I got enamored with the fact that when I was at Kleiner, they talked about Genentech, started by an associate at Kleiner when nobody believed biotechnology was a field. No pharma company was doing it.

Yeah.

All the biotech.

Yeah.

We saw the cloud. We saw self-driving electric cars. Everybody had given up on it.

How about cloud actually? Because that was Amazon. So you can kind of give them—

Yeah. Cloud is interesting. I think I should say founder-driven companies have permission to try crazy things.

Like Apple when Steve was there with the iPhone.

Yeah. When Steve was there, they tried the iPhone.

Yeah.

And if you go back to the press in 2007, everybody said a phone at $600 or $700 that has no keyboard to dial?

Right.

Like, what a silly idea.

Yeah.

Right? So it's founder-led companies that innovate. No, way more clear. Self-driving would be 15 years away if Larry and Sergey hadn't said, we're going to do self-driving at Google.

Yep.

Or Elon had said, well, I'll do electric vehicles.

Yeah.

Right? So—

So basically Tesla should be much more likely on humanoids than Apple, for example.

It is founder-driven and Elon is paying attention to it. So they're definitely a good candidate, but so are a number of other companies. And I have—

Definitely.

A lot of faith in the startup ecosystem of founders with very creative ideas.

Yeah.

So that's an area worth delving into in a separate podcast. Yeah. How, but, but that's an example of large innovation. So no matter where I look, so the cloud definitely happened. You know, when we, when I was starting Sun, everybody said there's these DEC VAX computers and IBM mainframes and why don't you build a graphics terminal for them? And I said, no, I'd rather just replace those companies. Neither of those companies are in the computer business anymore. And frankly, it took 5 years to get DEC out of the computer business into mostly a customer support business after we started.

Yeah.

Which is pretty stunning to me as a 20-some-year-old kid.

Totally.

So repeating that pattern, right? There's zero chance. A company like Siemens or GE could do fusion, right? Zero chance.

What's the mechanic for what I of course agree, but what, what's the mechanic that's stopping them? Is it risk? Is it talent?

Here's the first thing I would say in these 40 years, in all the examples I've just cited for you, and I could give you more, none of them were done by somebody who knew the area.

Mm-hmm.

Experts. Are terrible at predicting the future. They extrapolate the past. Entrepreneurs invent the future they want. It's a bastardization of an Alan Kay quote, but you know, so you imagine the world and you try and make it happen. And you are not biased by— what is experience? Experience is a set of biases that prevent you from making mistakes. And that's what experts do. And that's why very rarely do experts innovate in their area.

Yeah.

Look, even the COVID vaccine came from two startups, right? Moderna and BioNTech. You'd think the pharma was well equipped to mobilize. Not a chance. So, you know, it's a— It's why the US has done so well. People have permission to try. And if you try and fail, it's, you don't ruin your career. In a big company, you'll ruin your career.

Right.

To your question, right? You, you can't afford to fail. Yeah. So you start with, I can't fail, which means you can't take a large risk. My view is very simple. Most people reduce risk. To increase the probability of success. I do the opposite. Start with, I want high consequences of success. I don't care about the probability of failure.

I think that is like one of the best things about tech as an ecosystem is, you know, I think not everybody thinks quite like what you're saying, but in general, in tech, you can fail and it's okay. And I think even in other, you know, I worked in finance in New York for a hot minute, and even there, it's just like It's just not how it works.

Jack Dorsey's great on paper, but when we invested in Square in 2010, the following was the situation. He had just been fired from Twitter. Twitter was a tiny company. He'd just been fired and he had like 4 failed startups. His history on Wikipedia, like he had 4 failed startups. So, you know, Traditional wisdom would say, don't back him.

Was your mindset around risk always just increase the consequence of success, or did that evolve over time?

It was very much that from, you know, my first startup was go on, take on the computer business. Everybody big is dumb, which is a little bit of an arrogant viewpoint, but if we hadn't had that kind of hubris, we probably wouldn't have attempted what we attempted. So I think hubris is an important ingredient of great entrepreneurship.

Yes.

We'll build an AGI, right? Like, that's hubris. It's arrogance. Only I can do it. So these are entrepreneurial characteristics that are very important, but also Thinking from first principles, which is why experts do poorly in their areas because they have too many biases of what works and what doesn't or how to do things. While somebody new in the area reinvents the area, they figure it out from first principles in the new environment. That's an essential characteristic. So, you know, one thing I always get asked is, what do you look for in entrepreneurs? You know, I seldom look for deep expertise in their area. I do look for people who are thinking from first principles and learning rapidly. Even in YC batch, if I'm talking to a YC partner about some startup, the question that's most important to me is how much have they changed their plan over the last 3 months?

Yeah.

Rapid evolution, rapid thinking, rapid learning. Uh, is what matters. So this went into all over the map.

No, it was, this is, I love this, Eddie, but I want to keep getting sort of the other areas you're very excited about. Um, that was robotics. Um, which I agree, humongous. If, you know, some ways that's like, that's like the final, you know, thing to figure out. Um, you mentioned fusion as a big thing.

I'm very bullish about energy.

All sort of many formats of energy.

So, uh, I think there's two large formats. Fusion is one, and there's multiple appro— uh, approaches to fusion. But the— I'm also very excited about super hot geothermal. Um, so again, this ties to this risk idea, right? In geothermal, completely uneconomic business. You buy power because it's green, not because it's cheap and people like cheap stuff.

Yep.

Turns out almost all geothermal in the US is at 200 degrees or 250 degrees max. If you increase the temperature to 450 degrees, you get 10 times the, 6 to 10 times the power depending upon conditions from the same well.

That's surprising.

For two reasons. One is Carnot efficiency goes up, but the heat content also goes up. So the energy content of the steam goes up and the efficiency percentage. So you get a multiplier effect. Don't need to get into technical details, but now it's cheaper than natural gas if you can get to 450 degrees. Nobody has to worry about super hot geothermal is green. It's just cheap.

Wow.

Right? And so why don't people attempt it? Because people decided you can't drill at 450 degrees because drill bits collapse.

Got it.

So I sort of approached it differently. I said, what would it take to drill at 450 degrees? If I can solve that problem, everything else takes care of it. And we know there's 450 degrees in most parts of the Earth. It's only a matter of how deep you go. And so I set off on that problem. I think we are making great progress. So I think it's as powerful as fusion.

Wow.

In supplying most of Western United States. Yeah. Uh, is you can get that, uh, our location in Oregon, one location could you produce 7 gigawatts of power. And I hope this year I can prove we can do all 7 gigawatts competitive with natural gas. Wow. Without worrying. It works in the Trump era where he doesn't care, believe in climate change. It still works. And I love that kind of project. I'm also very bullish Commonwealth Fusion will do well. I don't know enough about Sam's project in Helion, but I'm glad diverse techniques are being allowed.

But both of these are areas where you're like, the science is going to work, the impact will be enormous.

Yep.

Yep.

It's worth doing.

Solar also, is that on your radar?

We are doing solar. We probably have in the Western world that China has some great solar technologies, the next generation of solar called perovskite silicon, perovskite solar cells. We're working on that, but there the impact isn't as large. Yeah, right, right. We are in, and that power is already so economic that there's other uses for that power. So we are doing that, but, but Look, I'm relatively optimistic. I see our path clear to getting to zero emissions by 2050. I think most of the technologies to do that will be proven in the early 2030s.

Is there any sort of a countervailing force with the fact that we're going to be consuming a lot more power via AI?

People always ask me that. I think if we get fusion right, I think very early 2030s, we'll get our first power plants.

And that power curve—

That power curve just catches up.

Yeah.

So there'll be this period between now and 2035 when these things aren't scalable yet.

Yeah.

But beyond that, I don't think—

It should catch up.

Yeah, we should, power will be cheap and plentiful and zero emissions and zero resources. And by the way, if you're creative enough, you can do this in every area. We are producing cement today where we not only don't say like environmentalists do, let's go shut down cement plants every time. There's one in Cupertino that the environmentalists have been trying to shut down. My approach is very simple. They're emitting carbon dioxide. Let's capture the carbon dioxide and turn it into carbonates. We get more cement out of the same amount of limestone mined at a lower cost per ton. Now, what's there not to like? Do you have to care about climate to have that work?

No.

And we are in production on this now. So I'm sure cement is solved. Steel is same way. I'm pretty certain we'll be able to produce steel with zero emissions or low emissions initially at a lower cost or similar cost to today's steel. I'm pretty damn excited. I think this is mostly solved. So You know, climate is a very solvable problem.

Yeah.

Even without AI, and AI will only turbocharge climate.

So that's energy, generally speaking, slash—

Energy, resources, steel, cement. Yep.

Robotics we got.

Robotics we got.

What else?

Well, I'm super excited. So I was mentioning this talk I did. It's called Plausible Tomorrows. So you can Google that too. Um, I have a dozen predictions that look really implausible unless somebody sits down with me and I walk them through each and they say, I see no reason this won't happen. I think by 2050 we can replace most cars in most cities.

Self-driving or just don't have cars?

Public transit that meets the following requirements. It's always cheaper than cars. And cheaper than today's public transit, cheaper than today's public transit without losses for the transit agency, that's always faster than public transit because it's like Uber. It's hailed, not scheduled. It's all personal. Yeah. It's 2 and 4-person vehicles, not— and it fits in a bicycle lane.

Wow.

Not only By the way, public transit, Fusion, OpenAI, I invested in the same timeframe roughly.

Yeah.

Around 2018. So I'm very proud of that vintage year.

That's a good year.

But people said, public transit startup? You must be totally crazy. And I said, Google suing Waymo is the wrong way to do transit.

Because the vehicles are too big or what?

No, it just increased congestion.

Okay, so what should it be?

So, uh, and I think Waymo will have a great business for delivering people from transit routes to the last mile. There's only one question in a city when it comes to traffic: can you increase throughput 10x for the same street width without redoing the street width? So we designed a public transit system of self-driving vehicles in bicycle lane width. So it's easy to insert in a city, has 10 times the capacity of a light rail system or, or car system. So more capacity than light rail system in a bicycle lane width. And it's on demand because the cars just, you hail them like an Uber. So turns out every single project we have bid so far, We bid a lot. 4 have been decided. We won every single one for a public transit system from a startup. And the startup wasn't invited to bid on any of these projects because nobody knew about us.

Yeah.

Nobody invites a startup. San Jose invited 32 bidders to build a transit system from the airport to the Google campus and then to the Apple campus in San Jose. We bid over the transom because most of these bids are open and we won it outright. Think about it.

But is this, so what is the, what's the vehicle?

It's a little pod. Think Disney World.

It's like a little narrow car.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It fits in a bicycle lane.

Yeah.

By the way, it can fit above a bicycle lane too.

Yep. Uh, you can go twice as many as cars on a street or something like that.

So it turns out it has way more capacity than cars. In a street, or even if everybody took buses, this would have more capacity in passengers per hour given for a given street width.

Are they also coordinating with each other so the cars are closer together? Is that part of it too?

Absolutely, you can coordinate. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah, so you basically just—

If you build a raised infrastructure, it's so simple you can do prefab. Yeah. You don't have to do the Boston Tunnel dig for 20 years. Right. Wow. You just do a prefab, put it in place.

Yeah. So that's a good one.

It is thinking from first principles.

Yeah.

That matters and it leads to, and being ambitious.

Okay. And how about medicine? 'Cause that's like 20% or more of GDP. That's a huge one.

Yeah.

Obviously AI is a big part of this, but you spend a lot of time in medicine separate from AI, with AI.

So, so, uh, off, which is a big part of our GDP. A quarter of that spend is medical expertise, is phys— think doctors. Mm-hmm. Okay. Almost certainly that goes to zero. Can go to zero. So what are we doing? We're building AI primary care doctors, AI phys— mental health therapists, AI physical therapists, AI oncologists, AI, you name it.

Actually, maybe just to like take, just to get specific about what you mean about that going to zero. If we have, for every 100 doctors per capita we have today, in like 2050, do you think we have like zero or 10 or like what, like what do you think this is?

I don't know the answer.

Uh, but there are some, you will always have some to learn from, right?

For the AI to learn from, for the AI to learn from, though the AI can boot itself to be much better.

Mm-hmm.

And I'll give you today's data of a multi-center study at Stanford. They took the best academic institutions and judged complex AI diagnosis. Physicians only. And these are academic learning centers with the best physicians. 73% accuracy. So 27% of the patients were getting the wrong diagnosis.

That's like a lot. That's like one in 4. Yeah, that's a lot.

It's wonderful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Think about it. And this complex means it was a serious thing. It wasn't just the flu. AI alone, 88%.

Accurate. Accurate.

But then they gave the AI to the doctors. The doctors improved from 73% to 76%. The AI got degraded from 88% to 76%.

That's funny.

And this is a serious multicenter study. I love medicine. What will happen is everybody on the planet for less than a dollar a month will get a free primary care, free physician initially called primary care, but they'll be, do everything. My son's company, Curi, is called multi-specialty primary care because the AI knows enough gastroenterology to provide that. Now, the hard problem is the, American Medical Association won't let the AI write a prescription.

Yeah.

And so we, we have human physicians who approve the diagnosis and the prescription or testing recommendation or whatever. Yeah.

I was going to say, I mean, if the humanoid at home plays out too, then it's probably also doing some amount. I mean, it's not going to do surgery, but it might be doing some amount of giving you a physical or giving you an injection or whatever else you need.

Watch your gait and say, hey. Yeah.

Yeah. Something's up.

Yeah, something's up. Yeah.

So that's a quarter of medicine. What about the other three quarters?

A quarter is pharmaceuticals.

Mm-hmm.

That we are seeing an explosion in AI in drug design.

Yes.

Both small molecule and—

Are you pretty bullish on that?

I'm very bullish on that.

Do you think it will speed up rate of drug discovery/make it cheaper, or do you think it's more about it will help us discover undiscoverable things?

Probably a little bit of both. The hard part in that is the regulatory cycle. Uh, we have a separate effort to say, could you trust, uh, test anything against lots of human genetics and lots of human organs? So we have an effort to do 10,000 tests. And it could be 1,000 different genetics. So people, people and 10 organs each in one week in one untouched robot. So it just does the test, screens the drug and looks for effects and growth and all that. Maybe something like that would replace human trials. Most likely at some point soon, it'll reduce the size and length of these trials. So I think drug discovery will see not only better molecules. The bigger problem in drug discovery is not to do what's called lead compounds for a disease, for a drug, but to increase the probability of success. The probability once you have a lead drug candidate to actual FDA approval is so low, like out of 100, less than 5 will make it. Yeah, right. So it's increasing that probability because you're starting with a better candidate and you're managing the process better. So that's a quarter. I do think there is diagnostics imaging. And by the way, we have the most coolest self-driving for MRI machines, so you don't need MRI machines. Now, you need today technicians to run MRI machines, but if you have a self-driver, you don't need that. Cardiac MRI is so specialized because the heart is moving, um, that you can't staff centers with cardiac MRI technicians. We turn an hour and 15-minute exam into 20 minutes, single button press. You You can even do it remotely.

Yeah.

Because, so we did the same for ultrasound, self-driving for ultrasound machines. An ultrasound machine might cost $25 grand, but a technician to do a cardiac MRI will cost you $150 grand. So why care about the machine? It's the person. If you have self-driving, we had this company that GE actually acquired from us. So, All I'm saying is diagnostics and imaging is a quarter of the spend. It'll get cheaper.

I'm shocked it's a quarter of the spend. I didn't realize that.

Testing of all sorts. Yeah. And then a quarter is in-hospital care. These are very rough numbers, but in-hospital care, and that will improve too.

So the net of all of this is like a multi-trillion-dollar retrofit, I guess.

Yes.

Yeah.

But if expertise is free and you can give somebody 10 times the amount of care, the average US citizen gets one primary care visit a year, roughly. In Australia, it's 4 or 5 times that. So we are poor anyway. If you provided way more Care upfront, you reduce disease burden downstream. Fewer people would have heart surgeries, which are super expensive, or emergency room visits because you took care of them at the beginnings of the detection of their disease. So whether you— every expensive disease, whether it's cardiac, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, we are well on our way to discovering them 10 years before the symptoms manifest. So I've argued a piece I did called 20% Doctor Included in 2016. I said symptom-based medicine will disappear. You don't detect disease from symptoms. You detect disease based on what's going on in the body. So that's medicine.

Yeah.

I'm pretty excited about it. The level of precision that's possible, I think in the next 5 years or 10 years, biological intervention will approach computer programming in being able to precisely program things, design molecules. So we are starting to— we have a couple of startups looking to do drugs for one patient at a time. So the whole drug only applies to one patient for one genetic anomaly.

And that's because that includes like the patient's DNA is factored in or something?

Yeah. Their disease, their specific mutation.

Yeah.

Can be addressed for them.

Wow.

There's also broader categories like a single-shot treatment for sickle cell disease, right? Massive problem.

Yeah.

If you can do a genetic treatment, one shot, I think that'll happen in the next 10 years.

As I'm listening to you talk about all of these different areas and like you think on such a grand societal scale, but you probably also have a bunch of sort of, um, maybe seemingly boring, but like good ideas kind of come through Khosla Ventures all the time too.

Yes.

Do you still enjoy making those kinds of investments, uh, as well? Is that more where you have like a partnership and there's other people on your team who are more interested?

Well, one, there are other people in the partnership. Who enjoy just successful startups. I do too.

Yeah.

Look, I enjoy winning. You know, when I do a GitLab, that's a win. When we do Cognition, it's a win. When we do Replit, it's a win. I mean, the growth rates for some of these companies are stunning.

Shocking. Yeah.

So, um, yeah, it's still fun to be disruptive.

Yeah. It's just like sort of a different bucket of, Enjoy that.

It's a different bucket.

Yeah.

I would say in the more societally impactful technologies, I will go through actually starting the company.

Mm-hmm.

Like fusion. Bob was a senior fellow, Commonwealth Fusion. Bob was a senior fellow at the MIT Plasma Fusion Lab when I met him. And he had ideas and I got him sort of like instigated, so to say.

Yeah.

He's done all the work and then he instigated the field of fusion. So whether he succeeds or not, there's so many different startups now. One will succeed.

Yeah.

So Commonwealth Fusion or Helion don't have to succeed for fusion to succeed. So I like instigating things. The same thing we did. Yeah, it was very profitable to make 2,500 times your money.

Yeah.

And in having the world be TCP/IP instead of ATM. And it's interesting to look back at the press from 1996, just assumed it was gonna be, the internet was gonna be ATM. So I'm actually, you know, I always tell Pradeep, the founder of that, if we hadn't done that, the internet wouldn't be TCP/IP, which is horrific to think about. It'd be in the hands of AT&T. Engineering the protocols.

Yeah.

Which they had done. And this is why Lucent went out of business. Practically, they're still around. Alcatel, Newbridge, Nortel, all the telecom players sort of gradually disappeared because they didn't win place or show in the race for the internet. And the same will happen in other areas.

You, um, you used the word instigating when you could have maybe used a word like incubating. I also heard earlier in the conversation, I think you, you know, you talked about like not being an investor, you know, I think also like the way that you work with founders, and I've heard you talk about not being founder-friendly, or that there's a different way to think about being founder-friendly. What I'm curious about is there's a lot of sort of new ways to describe what VCs do and how they describe themselves and mindsets around it. Do you think that in general, the role that venture investors see themselves playing, do you think we're trending in a direction where it's getting better all the time? Or do you think that in any ways the industry has lost its footing on some of these concepts?

Look, there's all kinds of VCs with all kinds of approaches. Some are marketing labels. Founder-friendly is a real disservice to founders. It's like if you said to your kids, if you told your 5-year-old, do whatever you want, do whatever you want, I will always say yes.

Yeah.

That's, you want to pay the price.

You want to go swimming without me? Yeah. Like whatever. Yeah.

Or eat as much candy or eat as much Coke. And by the way, my kids, when they were growing up at age 5, they could eat as much candy and as much Coke as they wanted, as much junk food. We always had it laying around. They could— they didn't have to ask us, but we taught them how to measure themselves on how much Coke they drink, whether it's good or not. So I would say we taught them control, not gave them yes/no permission.

Yeah, but the most important thing was that you set those parameters for a kid.

Yeah. And yeah, right. And Literally, at age 12, I thought of they can make 10% of the important decisions. By age 18, they have to make 90. And my job is to teach them how to make the leash longer.

Right.

But the same is true of entrepreneurs. Look, a brilliant engineer from DeepMind starts a company. What do they know about finance? What do they know about marketing? What do they know about even hiring or managing. Our job is to teach them, just like I taught my kids. By 18, my kids were pretty independent. I didn't worry about what they did in college. All 4 went to college 5 miles from our house at Stanford. None of them had this, I want to get away, because they felt they had enough leash. They had enough permission. They didn't need to quote unquote get away.

Can I put up a, like a steelman argument that, uh, of the other side to hear your reaction to it? Basically, it would be something like the, the sort of the strongest entrepreneurs, which is where all the returns are, don't really need much help or much management. And so better to just invest in the people who didn't need help in the first place.

I disagree. That is very much the Founders Fund argument.

Yeah.

They do very well with that. Great founders do well. Whether you like it or not.

Yeah.

Whatever you do. Where I will disagree is they can do even better if they have a debating partner. So my view is very simple. I almost never vote at a board, so I don't even go to boards now.

You won't show up to a board meeting?

I don't get on boards.

Yeah.

I see. Okay. Yeah. And Square is a great example. I, I got off the board, uh, the, the week before the IPO and everybody was like, hey, this is sexy IPO. Why are you getting off the board? I don't like the burden of the governance, the governance and all that. My responsibility shifted from having Jack do better, uh, to governance for the public markets.

Mm-hmm.

It's, it's, it's not very fun. It sounds glamorous, but it's not. You know, Jack and I would do, uh, regular monthly dinners and I'd always challenge him and always push him. And he loved that. So he took the time to do these dinners. You talk to Max Levchin at Affirm, it's a public company. We long ago distributed stock. I still do quarterly meetings and challenge him for an hour every quarter. Mm-hmm. Right? Even the strongest founders like Jack and Max and need this.

It's like even a pro sports player has a coach.

Yes. You, you want people to challenge you and debate you, but not make decisions. I find it silly that boards want to take a vote. I won't even take a vote on the acquisition. Mm-hmm. I'll just say I'll support whatever management wants to do, even if I disagree strongly. But I do want to have the opportunity to debate it with the management team. So Jagdeep Singh is a founder, one of our robotics companies. I've done 6 companies with him. There was a company, I'm forgetting the name, called Light something, optical company. The team wanted to sell. I only asked to give me 2 hours with the whole team to make a— and I did over the weekend the presentation I gave to them on why they should not sell. But before that presentation, as long as I had the 2 hours, yeah, uh, I signed the papers and said, you have my vote anyway. Yeah, you can choose to use it or tear it up.

I love that. Yeah.

So I will always give the final say to, to the management team. Yeah, but I do want to debate it. And I think every strong founder loves feedback that challenges them.

Yes.

And it's the only thing really valuable to a strong founder. Great founders love that. Not so great founders are so uncertain of themselves, they don't like that. And there I prefer to teach them how to be a great founder.

Yeah.

But almost every strong founder loves feedback.

I had, um, I had Keith on this podcast and what you're describing is a big part of, I think this, you know, what drew him back to Khosla.

Yeah.

By the way, on that topic, I'm curious, like I, I read that as one of the sort of like generationally great sort of recruiting or re-recruiting. Um, moves that has happened. And I think he's an amazing investor, obviously. Did you know for a while that you wanted that to happen?

We are a different kind of firm. And I said earlier, we are not in— I've not called myself an investor ever. Right? I always say I'm a venture assistant. If you look at our website, since we started the firm in 2004, the first tagline is Venture Assistance. By the way, another phrase that has stayed on our website since 2004 is, I prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness. And when most VCs give polite feedback to an entrepreneur, they're doing a disservice. They're basically saying, you're doing great. Don't examine anything. You know, makes you feel good as an entrepreneur, but doesn't help you build a better company. And the only things that make you feel better are things that change your thinking or challenge your thinking. So it's an important characteristic for founders to keep in mind. What are they looking for? The best help or just people who will go, why?

Yeah.

So it's a style that's different. We don't think of investments. We've never calculated— never means not in the last 10 years I can think of it. I can't think of a single instance where we calculated an IRR.

Mm-hmm.

Not one.

Mm-hmm.

An investment firm that never calculates IRRs because we want to build something significant and then the economics will work out. So that's our approach. But we do want to make— increase the probability of success of the founder. And we want to increase the magnitude of the potential success also. By thinking about should you do X or Y, founders underestimate that. So let's say a founder is selling 10% of a company, um, $10 million at $100 million post. The founders forget they're keeping 90%. And what happens to the price per share of that 90%, whether it's they give up 10% or 12%, 90, keep 90 or 88.

Yeah.

Trivial compared to the 500% swing you can get by taking one path or a different path. That's where the opportunity for maximization is. That's where it's not about investing, but getting the best help building a company. Yeah. And that's what I sort of spend all my time doing.

Yeah.

Just yesterday I was talking to this founder. It's, it's a very cool company. Self-driving for these heavy machines, bulldozers and loaders.

That is cool.

Yeah, right? And we had an interesting session and I reframed his business from automating big Caterpillar machines to, I'll just rent you the driver. You have trouble staffing drivers. Most of these are in mines and remote places, equipment. A multimillion-dollar piece of equipment sits idle because you don't have an operator. I said, just do rental by the hour and guarantee you will always have a driver available. Always have a driver. This reframing, the entrepreneur was pretty excited about. It's the same thing, but it's not.

Yeah.

He's, um, it's a much easier sell. It's not saying change your equipment. It's saying, hey, you can't keep your equipment running all the time because you don't have operators. I'll run it for you. You're paying operators. I'll do it better, faster, more hours. You get more out of your equipment. It's a simple framing change, but you could have a similar technology discussion too.

I know you're, you're gonna have to go in a minute. So I just want to ask you, uh, there's one, and there's a million more questions I want to ask, but There's one I really wanted to ask, which is, um, you've been not just like doing venture, but you've been doing it like really successfully and in a super relevant way for a long time through a lot of cycles. Before we started, you said, you know, you're turning 70, or you turned 70 this year, you feel 25. This is kind of like the dream. And do you know what you attribute all of this to?

Like, yeah, um, very importantly, I give a talk at Stanford in 2015, Stanford Business School, 2015. I said, I'm internally driven. I don't care what others think of me. So it feels obnoxious sometimes because I'll do my thing independent of what others think. I'm doing this because it's fun. You know, I get somebody teaching me about con— mining and constraints in construction or self-driving an MRI machine or a big loader. They're the same thing. Clever ideas like public transit, or can we make fusion happen? So I'm in it because it's fun for me. And most of the people at Khosla love what they're doing and would do the same thing if they didn't get paid. And so we do it for a different reason than making the most money because we focus on larger impact. The returns really do well or take care of itself. You know, it's sort of like what's motivating you. In fact, this was conversation I had Sam when we invest in OpenAI. He knows I care about the impact, something happened, making something happen. Fusion's too important to not try it. I want the impact of fusion. There's nothing I could do in making money that would impact me more saying, other than saying I played this tiny part in getting fusion to start and hopefully happen.

Yeah.

Even if Commonwealth Fusion doesn't do it, almost all the companies have been enabled in investing in the field has been enabled because people looked at Commonwealth Fusion. So this idea of instigating change is very motivational. It's way more impactful and also fun and way more learning than almost anything else. I say I'm like totally— I have one addiction, which is to learning. I can't learn enough new things, whether it's about biology or an AI algorithm or hypersonic flight. We are doing Mach 5 flight too. And we haven't talked about national defense. We are spending a lot of time there.

Would've loved to.

But all these areas are just fun.

Yes.

And, and that's why I don't mind. I still work 80 hours a week and I hope, uh, 25 years from now I'm working 80 hours a week, health permitting, touch wood. But that's, I think it's a very different motivation of why we do things. I tell our LPs, I'm probably the only one foolish enough to tell my LPs, if I can have more impact and less return, I'll pick more impact every single time.

Yeah.

As long as they get a minimum return that they're comfortable with.

Yeah.

So they can—

Well, you seem to be getting both. Vinod, thank you so much. This was amazing. And I am super appreciative of your time and all that you've done for the industry.

Great. Thank you. It's a lot of fun.