The Limitless Podcast

Speaker2: Picture a guy who treats the frontier like his backyard. That's Sean McGuire,

Speaker2: and he was gracious enough to join us on the show today to discuss energy breakthroughs,

Speaker2: factory floors humming with humanoid robots, brain machine computers, and space exploration.

Speaker2: In fact, Sean's even invested in a company who shoots satellites into outer

Speaker2: space to beam light rays back at Earth and turn night into day.

Speaker2: It's crazy stuff. And he walks us through exactly which of these sci-fi visions

Speaker2: are already sneakily here today, which will upend entire industries in months,

Speaker2: and which have the opportunity to reshape entire civilizations over the next

Speaker2: couple of years. Some of the timelines even left me speechless.

Speaker1: And that is what the Limitless podcast is all about.

Speaker1: So Bankless Nation, welcome to Limitless, where we explore the frontier technologies

Speaker1: that are poised to reshape our world.

Speaker1: I'm David Hoffman, joined by my co-host, Josh Kale. And our very first guest

Speaker1: is Sequoia Capital Frontier Tech investor, Sean McGuire.

Speaker1: Now, if you are hearing this on the Bankless feed, don't worry,

Speaker1: Bankless isn't going anywhere.

Speaker1: And if you found us on the Limitless feed, congrats, you're ahead of the curve.

Speaker1: Limitless is a brand new podcast.

Speaker1: Out of Bankless, focusing on

Speaker1: frontier technologies and getting ahead of a rapidly accelerating future.

Speaker1: Bankless will return to focusing on crypto and markets with Ryan and me at the helm.

Speaker1: And Limitless is where Josh, Ijaz and I, and also sometimes Ryan, will chase the future.

Speaker1: How AI and other frontier technologies are going to impact our lives and what

Speaker1: we need to know and do about it.

Speaker1: If you're familiar with the bankless cadence, you'll find yourself right at

Speaker1: home with Limitless. On Monday, we're going to do deep dive interviews with

Speaker1: founders and investors that are building the future.

Speaker1: And then on Thursdays, we have the weekly AI roll-up, our fast-moving recap

Speaker1: of the week's biggest AI headlines.

Speaker1: Now, I'm pretty biased here, but I think the AI roll-up is truly the most accessible,

Speaker1: informative, and engaging AI news show out there.

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Speaker1: Your support, of course, powers everything we do.

Speaker1: And so thank you for coming on the ride with us as we push into brand new frontiers.

Speaker1: Now with that, let's get right into the debut episode on The Limitless Podcast

Speaker1: with Sean McGuire from Sequoia Capital.

Speaker1: Bankless Nation, today on the podcast, we have Sean McGuire.

Speaker1: He's a partner at Sequoia Capital.

Speaker1: Sean's got one of the more interesting backgrounds that I've ever seen.

Speaker1: Starting out working as a physicist, working on quantum gravity,

Speaker1: then spent time working at DARPA, where he was deployed to Afghanistan,

Speaker1: Then shift gears into startups and investing.

Speaker1: He co-founded a cybersecurity company called Expanse, which was later acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

Speaker1: And then he's also been an early backer of companies like Visa, Watershed, SpaceX.

Speaker1: At Sequoia, he's focusing on early stage investments, especially in hard and

Speaker1: frontier technologies, which is why we wanted to bring him on the show today.

Speaker1: Sean, welcome to Bankless.

Speaker0: What's up, guys? Thrilled to be here. First of all, did not start with quantum gravity.

Speaker0: Started probably with an F in Algebra 2. So I've had a lot of failures before the successes.

Speaker0: And unfortunately, I was on early background. Visa, I think you meant Vize.

Speaker1: Vize, excuse me.

Speaker0: Just all good. Visa would have been pretty legendary, and hopefully Vize becomes even bigger.

Speaker1: Yeah, I guess Visa is just the wrong generation. It was a little bit earlier than all of us here.

Speaker1: So maybe with that, since I need a little bit more help kind of understanding

Speaker1: your background, just expand on your perch a little bit for listeners who just

Speaker1: might need more context about, you know, what your deal is, who you are,

Speaker1: and especially as we get into more modern times with all of the crazy technologies that we have today,

Speaker1: just explaining a little bit of your context and what interests you and how

Speaker1: your arc has been, I think would be pretty helpful.

Speaker0: Sure. Thrilled to be here. I've been a big fan of.

Speaker3: The pod for

Speaker0: A long time. Appreciate it. So I'll try to keep this pretty brief,

Speaker0: but I would say kind of my childhood was characterized by just like not listening to what I was told to do.

Speaker0: Instead of paying attention in school or like even going to class a lot of the

Speaker0: time, I just stayed home or would do, or even in school, would focus on my own learning.

Speaker0: And I've basically been obsessed with computers, the internet.

Speaker0: Like then physics, then math.

Speaker0: Basically my entire life, like computers really started at the age of seven.

Speaker0: And so I kind of sacrificed not learning English very well for learning a lot

Speaker0: about computers at a young age.

Speaker0: And, you know, I took it pretty seriously. I was really into building computers,

Speaker0: really into like honestly understanding like how computers are made,

Speaker0: understanding silicon at a pretty young age and understanding a lot of industries.

Speaker0: I've just kind of been driven by curiosity my whole life.

Speaker0: I was really obsessed with the chemical industry as a kid.

Speaker0: I'm happy to talk about the chemical industry today to me. It's honestly one

Speaker0: of the most fascinating industries in the world.

Speaker0: It's five trillion a year in sales. No one knows anything about it.

Speaker0: It's bigger than oil and gas. It's where everything comes from.

Speaker0: But it's just like I'm giving that as an example that I have a hundred anecdotes like that.

Speaker0: It's just kind of being really interested in different things and spending time

Speaker0: going pretty deep at a young age.

Speaker0: And you Now, as an investor, I get to kind of invest in those things.

Speaker0: Basically, I get to invest in things that were childhood passions.

Speaker0: And so I can make chemicals instance.

Speaker0: I'm an investor in a chemicals marketplace called Node, K-N-O-W-D-E.

Speaker0: And almost every investment I've made at Sequoia can be traced to some deep childhood obsession.

Speaker0: Like with SpaceX, I was completely obsessed with space from a very young age.

Speaker0: I started off at the age of nine being obsessed with the solar system, but

Speaker0: then like starting to learn about rockets and you

Speaker0: know like taking that all the way to having a failed space launch company in

Speaker0: my early 20s but kind of i think that's what people need to understand about

Speaker0: me is that the investments i make now like it's not coming from two years of

Speaker0: thinking about something it's coming from you know 20 to 30 years i.

Speaker1: Think that that background is really helpful because the reason why we want

Speaker1: to get you on today is just really just to talk about all the frontier technologies

Speaker1: that really seem to be maturing seemingly all at once.

Speaker1: People often joke that the world has not been the same ever since Harambe was killed in 2016.

Speaker1: But I think I want to actually take that a little bit more seriously and fast

Speaker1: forward to the world has not been the same ever since ChatGPT 3.5 came out in 2022.

Speaker1: Because now just a few years later, Elon is catching rockets flying out of the air.

Speaker1: We have actual robots walking among us. I just saw a video today of a robot

Speaker1: boxing league coming out of China.

Speaker1: So that's pretty crazy. Driverless cars are actually in production, driving people around.

Speaker1: And then now also, of course, we have people talking about actual AGI coming in in two years or less.

Speaker1: So it just feels like this current moment of time seems especially unique.

Speaker1: And it seems like you've been thinking about a lot of these things as they have been maturing.

Speaker1: From your vantage point as an investor in Sequoia, how does this just period

Speaker1: of history feel for you right now?

Speaker0: Well-articulated, I mean, this period feels insanely exciting.

Speaker0: I truly feel like unbelievably privileged and lucky to be an investor in this time.

Speaker0: I have been very passionate about the history of venture capital,

Speaker0: you know, for honestly, for over 20 years.

Speaker0: And I think that if you look in VC, there were kind of like,

Speaker0: depends how you define it, but like two to four really great periods before

Speaker0: today. And I think some examples were the early computing era.

Speaker0: It depends how broad your interests are, but early internet era, then the dot-com era.

Speaker0: I would say, in my opinion, the early mobile era was incredible,

Speaker0: with giant companies being created very quickly.

Speaker0: And now we're in this kind of new era where you have both AI and a resurgence

Speaker0: of hardware happening simultaneously. And so, I truly feel incredibly lucky

Speaker0: to be an investor right now.

Speaker0: And I think that, to build on that, I think the AI stuff is more obvious to the public.

Speaker0: Like, it's talked about all the time.

Speaker0: Like, you're, you know, it's kind of incredible.

Speaker0: And NVIDIA has become, like, a hardware company has become such a popular, hot company.

Speaker0: But to take a bigger look at this.

Speaker0: I wrote a manifesto at Sequoia about three years ago. It was like a hardware manifesto.

Speaker0: And basically what I said in it was, if you look at Sequoia,

Speaker0: 53-year-old firm now, I was 50 years old when I wrote this.

Speaker0: For the first 25 years of the firm, Sequoia made almost all of its money in hardware.

Speaker0: In the last 25 years, we've made almost all of our money in software.

Speaker0: And the question I asked was like, is hardware dead, long-lived hardware?

Speaker0: Or was there some weird kind of quirk of history or secular trend of why,

Speaker0: you know, hardware was not as popular, not as great of a way to make money,

Speaker0: and that might come back.

Speaker0: And I'm like, it was a straw man question. I'm strongly in the latter camp.

Speaker0: And if you want, like right now, I can kind of drill into some of the,

Speaker0: like, insights I have there.

Speaker0: But I really think we're entering this dual kind of golden phase of both hardware

Speaker0: returning in mass at the same time that AI,

Speaker0: which has both the hardware element

Speaker0: and the software elements happening simultaneously. So it's pretty wild.

Speaker1: I think that actually is where we want to go first in this agenda,

Speaker1: not specifically through hardware, but also discussing manufacturing.

Speaker1: There's a bunch of subjects that we want to go one by one, starting with hardware and manufacturing.

Speaker1: We also want to talk about energy, space exploration, everything Elon Musk is

Speaker1: doing, hardware, human connections, even chemistry, if we can find time.

Speaker1: But let's start there about manufacturing, because as you said,

Speaker1: the first 25 years of Sequoia returns were all hardware investments.

Speaker1: And I think this question of manufacturing is also especially timely,

Speaker1: given that we are in the midst of this Trump's Liberation Day maneuvers,

Speaker1: trying to bring back manufacturing back to the United States.

Speaker1: Maybe just talk about the importance of hardware manufacturing,

Speaker1: generally speaking, for software, and then also how important it is for here

Speaker1: inside the United States.

Speaker3: Yeah, I mean, I'll start with,

Speaker0: I mean, whatever one's view of politics are,

Speaker0: like, America found itself in a position over the last 25 years where very little

Speaker0: of advanced technologies are made in America anymore.

Speaker0: And this makes it much harder.

Speaker0: This is one of the reasons why it's been hard to create hardware companies in America.

Speaker0: I think it was much bigger than that. It's not like the primary thing,

Speaker0: it's just where we were in Moore's Law and where we were in different big platforms.

Speaker0: But whenever the hardware supply chain is in a place, it's much easier to innovate

Speaker0: on the final end product.

Speaker0: And if you go back, so I'll give an analogy from history.

Speaker0: I was incredibly lucky as a child, like genuinely just insanely lucky.

Speaker0: I met this man named Arnold Beckman.

Speaker0: I met him, he was being pushed in a stroller and he asked me a bunch of science

Speaker0: questions. It's kind of a crazy story. I was like eight years old,

Speaker0: or sorry, I was nine years old.

Speaker0: And this guy, I think Arnold is probably the most underrated person in the history

Speaker0: of American technology, quite literally. Like I think the most underrated person.

Speaker0: I'll spend a couple of minutes on this. I think it is like very important anecdote

Speaker0: to understand kind of the challenges of manufacturing in America today.

Speaker0: So, basically, Beckman was a professor at Caltech.

Speaker0: He was a chemistry professor. He invented the... So, he was doing advanced chemistry,

Speaker0: but he invented the portable pH meter to help farmers measure the acidity of

Speaker0: oranges and when it was the right time to pick oranges.

Speaker0: And that ended up becoming a company called Beckman Instruments,

Speaker0: which ended up, at its height, employing about 2,000 chemistry PhDs.

Speaker0: And they made many, many different instruments, primarily for the chemicals

Speaker0: industry and then for early pharma industry.

Speaker0: And so anyway, so he was doing that. And he was known as one of the apex minds

Speaker0: at Caltech, and there was an undergrad named Bill Shockley.

Speaker0: Shockley was a brilliant guy, and he was attracted to Beckman,

Speaker0: and so he became one of Beckman's kind of protégés.

Speaker0: And then Shockley went to MIT to do his PhD.

Speaker0: Then he went to Bell Labs, invented the silicon transistor. When he was at Bell

Speaker0: Labs, Shockley's a much more common name than Beckman.

Speaker0: Shockley got the Nobel Prize for inventing the silicon transistor.

Speaker0: He went, this is the part of the story that people don't know.

Speaker0: So Shockley ended up going actually back to Caltech after Bell Labs for a couple

Speaker0: of years to be visiting faculty, kind of figure out what to do next,

Speaker0: and kind of back to work with his mentor, Arnold Beckman.

Speaker0: And this is where they decided to start Shockley Semiconductor.

Speaker0: Something that people don't know has kind of been lost in history is Shockley

Speaker0: was actually not an independent company.

Speaker0: It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Beckman Instruments of this chemical instrumentation company.

Speaker0: And so I started Shockley. Beckman was the chairman.

Speaker0: You know, they hired brilliant people like Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and all

Speaker0: these people that became the Traders 8. They left to start Fairchild.

Speaker0: Then, you know, Intel spun out of that.

Speaker0: Beckman continued to be mentor to, like, the Intel founders as they built the company.

Speaker0: Okay, so here's where we get to the core point.

Speaker0: For probably the first 30 years or so of building silicon, the hard thing was making wafers.

Speaker0: Like, it was making very pure wafers and other chemical processes.

Speaker0: Like, to make a silicon wafer has about 20 chemical steps.

Speaker0: And then a bunch of the other hard problems early on were all chemical problems.

Speaker0: In the last 20 years, the hard problem has become lithography.

Speaker0: It's etching out these very fine, you know, features.

Speaker0: But for 20 to 30 years, the hardest thing was chemicals.

Speaker0: And having this guy, Arnold Beckman, that had this insane chemicals company

Speaker0: with 2,000 genius chemistry PhDs that were always making new equipment,

Speaker0: having that sit literally right next to Intel meant that whenever Intel was

Speaker0: running into a problem, kind of scaling the next generation of, like,

Speaker0: silicon, trying to push, you know, Moore's Law forward.

Speaker0: They would basically just share in real time, like, hey, we're running into this problem.

Speaker0: They'd share it with Beckman and his chemists, and they'd be like,

Speaker0: oh, you know, this might be able to solve it, or if not, they would come up

Speaker0: with some new instrument that could solve it.

Speaker0: And having this coupling of the people that were pushing silicon forward,

Speaker0: sitting right next to people that we're pushing chemicals forward and chemical

Speaker0: instrumentation and sensors, et cetera, is what led to being able to scale the

Speaker0: whole system lightning speed.

Speaker0: And the thing that we've lost in America in the last 25 years is we've lost

Speaker0: this supply chain. We've lost this coupling, you know, and so you have.

Speaker3: A couple very unique instances,

Speaker0: You have Elon, basically, that has gone and into these kind of totally new areas,

Speaker0: and built his own supply chains, kind of himself, for his own companies.

Speaker0: And so he's able to have this tight coupling because he's basically doing everything

Speaker0: within his own companies.

Speaker0: But for almost every other company, like, if you are a drone company and your

Speaker0: limiting factor is making motors.

Speaker0: Like, the motors are being made in China. At least the best ones are being made in China.

Speaker0: And, you know, it's much harder to talk to the engineers. I mean,

Speaker0: and now with what's happening in the world, like, we can't even buy motors from

Speaker0: them for a defense-grade drone.

Speaker0: But you don't get to go talk to the people building the components and learn

Speaker0: what's coming one year from now.

Speaker0: And you don't get to tell them what are your problems and have them go start

Speaker0: putting them in their roadmap right now.

Speaker0: And kind of getting that back, getting the whole supply chain back,

Speaker0: the whole, like, all these different components, it is not something you can do in five years.

Speaker0: Like, it's not even something you can really do in a decade.

Speaker0: Maybe in individual verticals, like, if we decide, you know,

Speaker0: making drones is a core national priority, then we can probably bring the supply

Speaker0: chain just for drones into America in less than 10 years.

Speaker0: But if you wanted to do leading-edge chip fabrication.

Speaker0: I think America would really struggle, even with 100% max effort,

Speaker0: to catch up to where the cutting edge will be in 10 years over the next 10 years,

Speaker0: because the supply chain is a few orders of magnitude more complex than for drones.

Speaker0: And so this is kind of... It was one of the biggest mistakes,

Speaker0: I think, in business history or in national history for America to let its entire

Speaker0: supply chain kind of go, starting in the late 90s, to China.

Speaker0: And I personally think it's very important that we bring it back.

Speaker0: And I have a bunch of theories and philosophies about how we should do this.

Speaker0: I think my view is kind of different than how most people are thinking about it today.

Speaker0: But if your view of the world is that there will never be conflict again,

Speaker0: like we're at the end of history, then sure, globalization is great.

Speaker0: Outsource your supply chain, just buy from everyone.

Speaker0: But if you believe that we're not at the end of history, then I think it's pretty

Speaker0: important to make at least critical components in America.

Speaker0: But I think we can't be naive about how hard this will be. And you have to do

Speaker0: it kind of systematically.

Speaker2: Yeah, that's what I was super interested in talking to you about,

Speaker2: is where those constraints actually lie when it comes to manufacturing here.

Speaker2: What does the optimistic bull case look like for bringing that back onshore?

Speaker2: And you said that you made this point a little while ago that I really liked,

Speaker2: which was that every software evolution is preceded by a hardware revolution.

Speaker2: And I guess I was really interested on where we are on that spectrum of progress

Speaker2: and where we are on the spectrum of progress and how we're able to get to the

Speaker2: place where we have this optimistic case for manufacturing.

Speaker2: It's like the example was like because of the iPhone we got the App Store,

Speaker2: because of the GPU we have AI mining.

Speaker2: Are we software constrained or are we hardware constrained? And where are those

Speaker2: limitations and how do we break through them to bring the manufacturing back to the United States?

Speaker0: Man, thank you for asking this. What a layup. This is my favorite question.

Speaker0: I would say there were two parts to it.

Speaker0: On the point that hardware revolutions precede software revolutions,

Speaker0: I really strongly believe this.

Speaker0: I think it's almost a definitional point.

Speaker0: You know, if you want to have the App Store, which enables creating a bunch

Speaker0: of, you know, creating Uber and a bunch of these big companies,

Speaker0: you have to have the iPhone.

Speaker0: To have the iPhone, you have to have Qualcomm, you have to have Broadcom,

Speaker0: you have to have 20 years of building out networks, of building out comms,

Speaker0: technology, almost all of that was on the hardware level.

Speaker0: If you want to have deep learning, you need to have the GPU,

Speaker0: that's 20 years of progress.

Speaker0: If you want to have cloud computing, you have to have very cheap commodity.

Speaker0: Kind of the whole point of what is a cloud, it's basically the idea that you

Speaker0: can put a bunch of cheap commodity hardware in one place and then put distributed systems.

Speaker0: They basically use algorithms on top of this commodity hardware to kind of handle

Speaker0: failure, handle things breaking in the hardware in a fault-tolerant way,

Speaker0: which gives you a giant cost advantage over hosting your own hardware.

Speaker0: And basically, we had to have 20-plus years of memory and CPUs,

Speaker0: et cetera, getting cheaper to do that. You know, part of why VR is not better

Speaker0: right now, I mean, this is what people talk about.

Speaker0: The hardware is not that great, and it's gotten a lot better,

Speaker0: and the Vision Pro is a lot better, but we're still not there.

Speaker0: I, with AI, I personally, and I think this is much more obvious now,

Speaker0: but I've been saying this for many years, I still think we're wildly hardware limited right now.

Speaker0: And so even if we have AGI in two years, the number of units of AGI we would

Speaker0: have would probably be very small.

Speaker0: In a hypothetical world, let's say it takes a gigawatt data center to have one

Speaker0: AGI. you know, we won't have that many gigawatt data centers at that point.

Speaker0: And for any gigawatt data center, you can probably do the same thing with, call it 10 megawatts.

Speaker0: Like 100x more efficient, not even on the algorithm side, purely on the hardware level.

Speaker0: Like if you start using more silicon photonics, like optimized chips,

Speaker0: just way better interconnects, these types of things.

Speaker0: You know, you can probably get like a 100x improvements simply just by better hardware.

Speaker0: Anyways, I think that AI is going to be limited by hardware for the next five to 10 years.

Speaker0: And don't get me wrong, I think we're going to make unbelievable progress on

Speaker0: the software side as well in parallel.

Speaker0: This is one of these beautiful periods where like the software and hardware

Speaker0: are co-evolving with each other.

Speaker0: But the software basically always evolves faster than hardware.

Speaker0: So anyways, on a much bigger level, I think we basically hit the end of a bunch

Speaker0: of software revolutions more or less at the same time.

Speaker0: And so it didn't really leave many places to go.

Speaker0: We hit the end of the mobile revolution roughly at the same time that I think

Speaker0: we hit the end of the traditional cloud revolution. I'm not talking AI.

Speaker0: AI is the one area of software that I think is kind of at the beginning of a

Speaker0: giant, giant revolution.

Speaker0: Powered by hardware though and i will just say even in ai hardware like what

Speaker0: we're seeing right now wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for nvidia

Speaker0: buying melanox you know or melanox existing,

Speaker0: independently if not if nvidia was still able to use it this thing melanox is

Speaker0: an internet connect company it's actually an israeli company sequoia was the

Speaker0: seed investor it's acquired by for eight by NVIDIA five or six years ago, I can't remember when.

Speaker0: And basically, Mellanox is what lets NVIDIA have good, full systems,

Speaker0: not just single GPUs, but full systems and ultra-high bandwidth in these systems.

Speaker0: And it's probably the real reason why NVIDIA has a moat over AMD and Intel today was Mellanox.

Speaker0: But there was a lot of progress on the hardware side that's enabling the AI revolution.

Speaker0: We're seeing right now, kind of on the first question, which was how do we bring

Speaker0: back manufacturing to the West? What would that look like?

Speaker0: I think we should all learn from the best examples we've seen.

Speaker0: To me, the two companies in America doing manufacturing the best right now are SpaceX and Tesla.

Speaker0: I'm wearing a SpaceX hat right now. Nice. Amazing company, my favorite company in the world.

Speaker0: I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to take favorites, but come on, SpaceX.

Speaker0: Likewise, badass. It's just an incredible company.

Speaker0: But basically, look, I think SpaceX is one of the only...

Speaker0: I think it's maybe the only company I can think of, along with actually Mellanox,

Speaker0: that is outperforming China across the board.

Speaker0: Even Tesla is facing very real competition from Chinese auto companies,

Speaker0: and there's certain areas where Tesla's ahead, There are certain areas where

Speaker0: the Chinese EV companies are ahead.

Speaker0: But SpaceX is very far ahead of every Chinese rocket company.

Speaker0: SpaceX should not take this for granted. They will never take it for granted.

Speaker0: They work at maximum speed.

Speaker0: But I think we should learn from the fact that these two companies were able

Speaker0: to build supply chains, build giant manufacturing companies in America that

Speaker0: are the best in the world in their categories.

Speaker3: And I think, basically,

Speaker0: The lesson that I would take away is, you know, they started off with,

Speaker0: initial vehicles that were like, that had a market, but were like a low enough

Speaker0: level of complexity that a company could do it.

Speaker0: So like the Roadster for Tesla or the Falcon 1 for SpaceX, which was,

Speaker0: you know, Falcon 1 was not a great rocket, but proved that they can do it.

Speaker0: And then it became the Falcon 9, which was like an okay rocket.

Speaker0: Before the Falcon 9 could be reused, like it was still not at the state of the

Speaker0: art, you know, in the history of rocketry. Like, there were probably some better

Speaker0: rockets than the Falcon 9 Expendable.

Speaker0: But by starting with these things and vertically integrating along the way,

Speaker0: it put these companies in a position to where then, when they got to,

Speaker0: like, the Falcon 9 Reusable, or call it the Model S, they had actually intersected

Speaker0: and become, like, best in the world in their classes.

Speaker0: And they controlled their own supply chain.

Speaker0: And so then, as the companies scaled, they could keep investing in the supply chain.

Speaker0: You know, SpaceX announced recently that with Starlink user terminals,

Speaker0: they're now even making their own PCB, you know, doing their own PCB assembly.

Speaker0: Which is a much easier problem than, say, like making a leading edge chip.

Speaker0: But we haven't been doing much of this in North America recently.

Speaker0: And so, like, the fact that you start off as a rocket company and it leads all

Speaker0: the way to be doing, like, PCB assembly is just very bullish for manufacturing in America.

Speaker0: And then once you have a big factory doing PCB assembly, you know,

Speaker0: the people that work at SpaceX doing that, someday some of them will leave,

Speaker0: and they'll actually know how to do this, and they'll probably start doing...

Speaker0: Maybe they'll start a company that just does PCB assembly for other American

Speaker0: companies, and just these things catalyze entire supply chains and then ecosystems beyond that...

Speaker0: And so anyways, for me, I think a giant mistake would be America trying to intersect

Speaker0: Chinese manufacturing in areas that are already mature or already on exponential trends.

Speaker0: I think we have to go try to find what are the next areas, like what are the

Speaker0: things that are relatively new where we can go kind of invest in them now and

Speaker0: get ahead and then build vertically integrated supply chains there.

Speaker0: And we have like roughly two today in, you know, electric vehicle manufacturing

Speaker0: with Tesla and SpaceX with Space Launch.

Speaker0: But I think we need like 10 of these.

Speaker0: And honestly, I think that if America had, I think it's as simple as if you

Speaker0: have roughly 10 SpaceX's and Tesla's that are vertically integrated,

Speaker0: primarily manufacturing in the West, that alone will basically make all of manufacturing,

Speaker0: That's like enough to revitalize all of manufacturing in the West.

Speaker0: And so to take this like one step further, I am unbelievably bullish on a 20-year

Speaker0: time frame on silicon photonics.

Speaker0: So almost everything that we use today, you know, with silicon are silicon electronics.

Speaker0: So, you know, a GPU is, it's electronics.

Speaker0: Like the computation is happening via electrons, not photons.

Speaker0: You know, almost every sensor we use is an electronic sensor.

Speaker0: So, like, a lot of the sensors in the iPhone, etc., are, like, electronic sensors.

Speaker0: Almost every... Anyways, like, CPUs are electronic. Almost everything is electronic.

Speaker0: Silicon Electronics is so far along in its manufacturing curve that getting

Speaker0: to the leading edge is very hard.

Speaker0: I mean, like, hundreds of billions of dollars minimum, plus 10 years at a minimum,

Speaker0: to even have a chance of getting to the leading edge. And I think even there,

Speaker0: it probably wouldn't catch up.

Speaker0: Silicon Photonics, in my opinion, is just now, like, just now getting to the

Speaker0: point where the first real commercial applications have started to happen.

Speaker0: And once you have first real commercial applications of something,

Speaker0: that's when you get this feedback loop where you start to get revenue,

Speaker0: which causes investment, and that drives the cost down.

Speaker0: Because now you're building fab facilities that are optimized for photonics, not for electronics.

Speaker0: And then as the cost goes down, you can make other products.

Speaker0: And then the supply chain gets better, and we get better at making reliable

Speaker0: lasers that go on chip, which are a prerequisite for Silicon Photonics.

Speaker0: I mean, I could talk for a long time about Silicon Photonics,

Speaker0: but I think Silicon Photonics will be as important in the 21st century as Silicon

Speaker0: Electronics was in the 20th.

Speaker0: And I think that no one is ahead right now.

Speaker0: Like, this is something where America can easily win in Silicon Photonics manufacturing

Speaker0: if we're to kind of do it the right way and be smart about it right now.

Speaker0: That said, both China and Taiwan, they feel the same way.

Speaker0: And I think they've identified in the last, really just in the last 18 months,

Speaker0: silicon photonics as critical technologies for the next two decades.

Speaker0: And so they're now just starting to very heavily invest in it.

Speaker0: And I'm going to take this a little further.

Speaker0: These things are of national strategic importance. And so with TSMC,

Speaker0: until about 18 months ago, TSMC was willing to, so when you make a chip,

Speaker0: there's many steps to it.

Speaker0: You know, one step is fabricating the, you know, the device.

Speaker0: Another step is packaging it, which is kind of when you take the chip or whatever

Speaker0: and you kind of more or less like put the hood on it and put all the wires that

Speaker0: come in and out of the chip and you test and make sure that everything is kind

Speaker0: of like, of working properly and.

Speaker0: A few other steps in there. Until about 18 months ago, TSMC was willing to package.

Speaker0: So packaging is incredibly hard. Packaging is probably harder than fabricating the chips.

Speaker0: And most people don't understand this, but packaging is probably harder than fabricating the chips.

Speaker0: And TSMC was willing to package silicon photonics chips made by other fabs.

Speaker0: Like if you had a chip made by Global Foundries, TSMC was still willing to package

Speaker0: it, because TSMC is the best in the world at packaging chips.

Speaker0: But in the last 18 months, they basically stopped packaging silicon photonics

Speaker0: chips made by other companies.

Speaker0: So you have to now do everything with TSMC, which basically makes a strong incentive

Speaker0: for the leading companies to only work with TSMC, which makes it hard for any other company,

Speaker0: to kind of get inroads in silicon photonics.

Speaker0: And so I think this is like highly symbolic of how strategic Taiwan and TSMC

Speaker0: view, which are deeply intertwined, view silicon photonics.

Speaker0: For instance, I think that's smart of them. Like, I don't blame them.

Speaker0: I think that's brilliant. Like, great leadership by Taiwan.

Speaker0: They're playing the game the right way.

Speaker0: But it's just, I think, real confirmation of my point of how important silicon photonics is.

Speaker0: And this is one area, like, if America can stay at the cutting edge of space,

Speaker0: stay, like, you know, get to the cutting edge of silicon photonics, you know.

Speaker0: Stay at the cutting edge of EVs.

Speaker0: If Tesla and then others can basically get to the cutting edge of humanoid robotics.

Speaker3: Is something that, like,

Speaker0: I strongly believe is coming. And I think Tesla... Tesla's very well-suited

Speaker0: to manufacture these things at scale.

Speaker0: And, like, I hope the space... I hope there are many winners in America.

Speaker0: I hope it's, like, a highly competitive space with many winners.

Speaker0: But manufacturing things at scale is really, really hard.

Speaker0: I think Tesla's very well-suited for making humanoid robots.

Speaker0: Just as a, like, I'll kind.

Speaker3: Of end this

Speaker0: Monologue in one second, but something that I think is oftentimes missed when

Speaker0: people look at hardware companies, well,

Speaker0: basically, I think hardware companies, so with software companies,

Speaker0: software companies usually get harder to build.

Speaker0: The bigger you get, like, it gets harder to acquire customers once you,

Speaker0: because there's not, it's not that hard to replicate the code of a software company.

Speaker0: Once you prove that a market's good, competitors will come in,

Speaker0: and then it becomes harder to acquire customers and all these things.

Speaker0: With hardware companies, it's really hard to get them to work.

Speaker0: But once they work, they actually generally get easier with scale.

Speaker0: There's many reasons for this. It's insanely hard to get the supply chain working.

Speaker0: It's very hard to make the thing.

Speaker0: It's very hard to work out all the kinks in the system.

Speaker0: There's usually a baseline number of things you have to build to get the system to work.

Speaker0: But once you have a working... If you look at basically every hardware company

Speaker0: in history, almost every hardware company has produced many of their own products organically.

Speaker0: You know, Apple has so many products. Tesla has many products.

Speaker0: NVIDIA has many products. Broadcom has many products. Qualcomm has many products.

Speaker0: Like, any hardware company has lots of products.

Speaker0: And so, if you use Apple as an analogy, you know, Apple isn't fabricating their

Speaker0: own devices, but they are designing them.

Speaker0: The Vision Pro reuses a huge number of components from the iPhone.

Speaker0: So like the, you know, face ID is reused.

Speaker0: A bunch, you know, the accelerometers are reused. The magnetometers are reused.

Speaker0: Like I think I may be wrong on this, but I think the Vision Pro has about a thousand sensors in it.

Speaker0: And some of those are like, you know, 10 of the same sensor.

Speaker0: But I think my estimate is something like 950 of the thousand were reused like

Speaker0: ported over from other Apple products and there's called 50 that were like net

Speaker0: new designed for the Vision Pro,

Speaker0: this is such an advantage of hardware companies like once you get going of getting

Speaker0: to reuse other products and this is something where for Tesla with Optimus like

Speaker0: I think quite there's there's There's a lot of things that get to be reused from,

Speaker0: and even if not of specific components,

Speaker0: the processes or supply chain to make them is basically the same supply chain as making cars.

Speaker0: And so, it's like, by starting off, by getting really good at making cars in

Speaker0: America, it can lead to making many other products, and even reusing a lot of

Speaker0: the components in there.

Speaker0: This is kind of like, my core thesis is, we have to have about 10 SpaceX Teslas,

Speaker0: and that's how you really bring manufacturing back to America.

Speaker2: Man. And there it is. I personally, I love the monologue.

Speaker0: That was great. I think you're really.

Speaker2: Good at explaining things on first principles. So I kind of want to apply that

Speaker2: to the next category, which is how do we power all of these things that you just spoke about?

Speaker2: It's how do we power the robotics, the electric cars, the actual manufacturing

Speaker2: and factories that are required to build all of these things?

Speaker2: Do we have the energy capability now to even do that?

Speaker0: Or are there key.

Speaker2: Unlocks that need to happen on the way before we could start making things at

Speaker2: the scale that you're describing?

Speaker0: I mean, another great question. I'm very happy that America has woken up to,

Speaker0: like, just how fundamental energy is.

Speaker0: And this was kind of lost from the conversation for a decade or so,

Speaker0: as, like, climate change took priority over kind of growth.

Speaker0: And I understand that philosophy. but GDP is just extremely correlated with power production,

Speaker0: electricity generation, and we really stopped investing in power generation in America.

Speaker0: I don't mean fully stop. We've had a lot of growth, but we have not been investing

Speaker0: in it anywhere near the same, to the same level as China.

Speaker0: I think probably, like,

Speaker0: if America were to fail in, like,

Speaker0: manufacturing resurgence, I think it would be because of just power constraints,

Speaker0: just not having low enough power costs and not having enough just power generation.

Speaker0: So, I think this is the most important question.

Speaker0: And how do we get there?

Speaker0: I mean, look, so obviously we need to start...

Speaker0: We need to invest in things that will be good long-term power generation sources.

Speaker0: But I think the only thing that lets you, like, really have lots of power generation

Speaker0: in the short term is using fossil fuels.

Speaker0: And it's kind of, this is maybe an unpopular view, but I basically view the

Speaker0: world as like there's peacetime and there's wartime and kind of different,

Speaker0: you should have different optimization during peacetime versus wartime.

Speaker0: You know, obviously there's hot wars, things like World War I,

Speaker0: World War II, where a lot of American industry got devoted towards making,

Speaker0: you know, equipment for the wars.

Speaker0: But then you have the Cold War, which is something slightly different where,

Speaker0: you know, this is, again, an unpopular view, but you have a different set of rules during war.

Speaker0: And personally, I'm glad that America fought the Cold War.

Speaker0: I think there were many blunders during the Cold War.

Speaker0: You know, like, many aspects of the Vietnam War were giant mistakes and stupid.

Speaker0: But I think it would have been a much worse outcome for the world if.

Speaker3: America would have just

Speaker0: Ceded the world to the Soviet Union and basically let communism spread.

Speaker0: So I'm generally very happy that we did this.

Speaker0: I personally think we're going through a very similar thing right now with China.

Speaker0: It's Cold War 2.0, and...

Speaker0: China is not playing by their, like, you know, they have a wartime attitude.

Speaker0: And I think it would be foolish for the West to not simultaneously have a wartime attitude.

Speaker0: And kind of an end byproduct of this is, I think that we need to be investing

Speaker0: like crazy in fossil fuels right now.

Speaker0: Because I think the stakes are too big. Like, I think, like,

Speaker0: liberal democracy is at stake. That's my personal view.

Speaker0: I'm happy, like, I'm happy. A lot of people disagree with me on that.

Speaker0: And I don't think it's as clear. I think that China has been very strategic

Speaker0: with not making this as obvious as it was during the Cold War.

Speaker0: I think they learned from Cold War 1.0 and some of the mistakes made by the Soviets.

Speaker0: But I think basically in the short run, we have to really deregulate fossil

Speaker0: fuels. Granted, we should do it as clean as possible, and this is something

Speaker0: where there's a pretty big narrative violation.

Speaker0: If you look at the CO2 emissions of a clean coal power plant versus a dirty

Speaker0: coal power plant, you can have wildly more efficient coal power plants.

Speaker0: And hopefully we don't use too much coal, but things like natural gas,

Speaker0: we should be using huge amounts of gas right now.

Speaker0: But at the same time, we have to be investing in much better,

Speaker0: longer-term technology.

Speaker0: And to me, that's like solar is unbelievably important.

Speaker0: Solar is basically at a point right now where the price per watt,

Speaker0: like nothing will ever catch up to the cost of solar.

Speaker0: Or sorry, nothing in the next, nothing that is even close to working today.

Speaker0: Like fusion could get there, but with uncertain timeline.

Speaker0: Nuclear, I don't think, can catch up to solar is my kind of personal opinion

Speaker0: on this full systems level given where solar is now.

Speaker0: If we were to go back in time, if we had a time machine, we went back 30 years

Speaker0: and we deregulated nuclear 30 years ago and let nuclear go down an exponential

Speaker0: cost curve starting 30 years ago, I think it would probably be way ahead of solar today.

Speaker0: And I don't think solar would have even gotten to where it is now because we

Speaker0: wouldn't have needed it. nuclear would have been so good.

Speaker0: But I still, I think America should be investing very heavily in nuclear,

Speaker0: even though it won't be as low of a cost as solar.

Speaker0: One, I think China has basically a lock on large-scale solar manufacturing for

Speaker0: at least the next decade or so.

Speaker0: And they have, they basically control the supply chain of a lot of the.

Speaker0: The components that are required to make solar panels.

Speaker0: And so just from a strategic perspective, I don't think we can only rely on solar.

Speaker0: And so I would be investing in nuclear.

Speaker0: To have nuclear be even reasonable cost, you basically have to build at least 100.

Speaker0: You have to build a bunch of nuclear power plants using the same design,

Speaker0: basically the same construction crew, et cetera, where you get economies of

Speaker0: scale and people kind of learn what they're doing on the first one.

Speaker0: And then do it more efficiently by the fifth and then tenth one.

Speaker0: I would love to see America, you know, start building another hundred nuclear

Speaker0: power plants, if nothing else, for the strategic significance.

Speaker0: But in the immediate term, I think we need to really invest more in natural

Speaker0: gas and other fossil fuels.

Speaker3: Awesome.

Speaker2: Yeah, I was super curious in the dynamic between fossil fuels, nuclear, solar.

Speaker2: Which one will be more important on what timescale? It sounds like solar is

Speaker2: the best medium term prior to getting nuclear, which leads me to a fun question

Speaker2: that I'm just super interested in because it seems too good to be true.

Speaker2: You're invested in this company called Reflect Orbital, which is literally planning

Speaker2: to take rockets and send satellites up into space and reflect them down onto

Speaker2: solar farms at night. Is this possible?

Speaker2: What are the dynamics of this? Is this where solar is headed to?

Speaker0: So it's a complex thing to answer.

Speaker0: So, one of my lessons of being an investor now for basically a decade and being

Speaker0: in startups for 20 years is, so I'll use an analogy from Varda.

Speaker0: So did you guys know Delian's company, Varda?

Speaker2: Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker0: So, I love Delian, he's a character, smart guy. I passed on the Varda seed.

Speaker0: And I have no idea if they'll make it as a company. Like, it's always impossible

Speaker0: to predict these things.

Speaker0: But I didn't like their initial idea.

Speaker0: Their initial idea was trying to make, you know...

Speaker0: So I love the general idea of build a space company.

Speaker0: Because I just thought the timing for it was very good, that launch costs over

Speaker0: the next decade are going to drop dramatically,

Speaker0: and mass orbit is going to increase dramatically, and that, like,

Speaker0: a really smart team will figure out some way to, like, by assembling a really

Speaker0: smart team, they'll figure out some way to profit from that.

Speaker0: But their initial idea was making this thing called ZBLAN.

Speaker0: ZBLAN is ultra-pure, like, fiber-optic cables.

Speaker0: It's especially good for really long-range, like, data transmission.

Speaker0: Like, I just personally don't think ZBLAN is that important.

Speaker0: I think it'll be a shrinking market, especially with Starlink.

Speaker0: Like, Starlink is just the best way to send data over long distances.

Speaker0: And so I passed Von Varda because I basically felt like they had the right macro

Speaker0: idea around like building a space company now, assembling the talents.

Speaker0: But I felt like they had the wrong micro idea of ZB LAN as a starting point.

Speaker0: And a lesson for me from that was like, if you think that the macro on something

Speaker0: is unbelievably good and the team is insanely good,

Speaker0: even if the, and it's a seed investment, even if the micro idea is,

Speaker0: you know, you're not fully certain about it,

Speaker0: then you should still make the investment and that an unbelievable team will, like,

Speaker0: take advantage of the macro tailwind.

Speaker0: And so for Reflect, it's a very similar thesis for me.

Speaker0: The, again, I think.

Speaker0: Almost everyone's underestimating what the space economy is going to look like in a decade.

Speaker0: Like, in 10 years, people's minds are going to be blown.

Speaker0: You know, like, we are certainly going to have some infrastructure on Mars.

Speaker0: You know, like, Elon's talking about, you know, there's a Mars launch window every 26 months.

Speaker0: The next one is end of next year. SpaceX is trying to send some,

Speaker0: like, uncrewed by human, but crewed by Optimus starships to Mars,

Speaker0: then I hope they make it. I think they have a real shot, but I don't think it's guaranteed.

Speaker0: But I think in 2028, in the next window after 2026.

Speaker3: I think it's

Speaker0: Basically guaranteed that SpaceX sends some starships to Mars.

Speaker0: And I think in the window after that, which I think would be like early 2031,

Speaker0: I think it's basically guaranteed that SpaceX starts to send some like,

Speaker0: forward cargo and stuff to Mars, a useful cargo, whether it's solar panels,

Speaker0: you know, sending stuff that will be infrastructure for humans to go eventually.

Speaker0: And by the time you get to 2035, I think we're going to have...

Speaker0: I just think people are going to be shocked at the amount of masks going to

Speaker0: orbit, the amount of money made in space, You know, Starlink is one of the fastest

Speaker0: growing products in history in terms of revenue.

Speaker0: If you fast forward 10 years, I'm very confident Starlink will have over $100 billion of revenue.

Speaker0: I think there will be other space businesses that have lots of revenue.

Speaker0: And there's only like five credible teams, in my opinion.

Speaker0: There's a bunch of teams, but there's like five that I think are heads and shoulders

Speaker0: above the rest. that are really kind of building towards this feature right now.

Speaker0: And whatever, I can't tell you exactly what they'll do that will be valuable,

Speaker0: but I think just learning how to actually do things in space and assembling

Speaker0: teams that are absolutely cracked, that know how to do things in space right now,

Speaker0: I think it's like buying land next to the railroad stops.

Speaker0: Like, when you knew, like, you already knew that they're being constructed.

Speaker0: You knew the railroad lines were being constructed, and you knew where the stops

Speaker0: were, and you go and buy the land at the stops.

Speaker0: And you maybe don't know exactly how you're going to develop it,

Speaker0: but you sure as hell know it's going to be really valuable.

Speaker0: And so that's kind of how I view, honestly, that's how I view Reflect.

Speaker0: Like, I bought gold, like, A-plus real estate.

Speaker0: It's like I bought the real estate right next to the San Francisco station at

Speaker0: the end of the Trans-Pacific Railroad.

Speaker1: Listeners broadly, the base case for maybe not just listeners,

Speaker1: because the bankless audience tends to be pretty optimistic and curious about their future.

Speaker1: But the average person in the United States, when they hear about how much investment

Speaker1: or how hard we are going to invest in getting into space, their first reaction

Speaker1: might be, how does that benefit my life? And we have space.

Speaker1: We have, God, I'm forgetting the name of the satellite, the Wi-Fi,

Speaker1: Elon's Wi-Fi satellite. Starlink.

Speaker0: Starlink.

Speaker3: Okay. And we have Starlink,

Speaker1: Which is a very awesome, very strong example. Like I've run into businesses

Speaker1: in like, you know, United States national parks where there's no Wi-Fi and they

Speaker1: have a Starlink so they can actually hold, maintain their business.

Speaker1: It's great. But that's just like one example.

Speaker1: I think understanding that Elon is trying to like reduce the costs of getting things into state.

Speaker1: He's trying to bring it down to zero, trying to get it as close to zero as possible.

Speaker1: Like all technology, people are still having a hard time imagining how that

Speaker1: benefits them, like how, how that impacts their life.

Speaker1: And I know maybe Sean, like the takeaway from what you just said is like, Oh, I don't really know.

Speaker1: I just know that some teams are going to figure it out. Therefore I'm buying

Speaker1: the real estate, but are there any, like any things you could leave the listener

Speaker1: with to go explain to the rest of the world?

Speaker1: Like why like fundamentally cheap space travel will unlock so many things that

Speaker1: will actually turn into quality of life improvements for the average person

Speaker1: who's left on planet earth

Speaker0: I'll say a few things first of

Speaker0: all this is not directly into your question it's an analogy to

Speaker0: the past but like what's you

Speaker0: know people have this mental model that space is very hard

Speaker0: and expensive and space is very hard and will always be hard but space didn't

Speaker0: make much progress for about 30 to 40 years and when a field is stalled for

Speaker0: like 40 years it gives people bad intuition when the field starts to go through

Speaker0: exponential progress because like you're,

Speaker0: overweighting the stalled period if you look at the cost per

Speaker0: kilogram to orbit it's basically stalled for like 30 years around 100 000 a

Speaker0: kilogram spacex is going to push that the starship when it's fully reusable

Speaker0: down to like 20 a kilogram this is like a 50 000 x reduction in cost,

Speaker0: whenever in history, something like that has happened.

Speaker0: And it's not just the cost, it's also the amount of stuff you can put in space.

Speaker0: It's been very limited in the past, but we're going to be able to put up,

Speaker0: call it a million times in 10 years, like a million times more stuff per year

Speaker0: than we were able to put up, you know, 20 years ago.

Speaker0: And when those two things happen, like cost goes down by 50,000x and amount

Speaker0: of stuff you can send up goes up by a million.

Speaker0: Literally, the only analogies I can think of that are semi-appropriate are early railroad era,

Speaker0: where you went from needing to take a horse-drawn carriage across America,

Speaker0: where you had a very high chance of dying or getting a vicious disease along the track,

Speaker0: to you could just very easily and comfortably send extremely large amounts of

Speaker0: stuff very cheaply across America and all the businesses that unlocked and what

Speaker0: it did to the value of real estate in the West.

Speaker0: And the other analogy is early shipping and the invention of the ship and then

Speaker0: discovery of new places and what that did to the global economy.

Speaker0: I really can't stress how... This is basically the same thing.

Speaker0: We are going to have railroads to space. We're going from horse-drawn carriages

Speaker0: to space to railroads to space. That is happening right now and over this next decade.

Speaker0: And in terms of what the businesses will be, I think that,

Speaker0: again, I would look at when NASA was at its peak and was still able to take

Speaker0: risks before the Challenger shuttle disaster.

Speaker0: They invented, like, when you have this clear goal of, like,

Speaker0: we need to win the space race, we want to put humans on the moon,

Speaker0: we wouldn't spend a lot of money to do it.

Speaker0: There were so many spin-out technologies that came as a result that deeply benefited

Speaker0: just regular people, whether it's breakthroughs in radio technology,

Speaker0: or, you know, like the microwave oven, or all sorts of materials that were used

Speaker0: in many different products, you know, on and on and on.

Speaker0: As SpaceX builds a city on Mars, whatever you think of the value of that city,

Speaker0: the technologies that are going

Speaker0: to go into building that city will be unbelievably valuable on Earth.

Speaker0: And there's something very ironic that when you try to solve the even harder

Speaker0: problem where you're more constrained, it's actually in some ways easier to

Speaker0: solve some hard problems.

Speaker0: And if you want, I can get into why I think that is. But here's some of the

Speaker0: things that are going to come from building a city on Mars.

Speaker0: We're going to have better farming tech than we've ever had before.

Speaker0: It's basically going to force us to

Speaker0: figure out how to actually do vertical farming, which no one has like...

Speaker0: You haven't had SpaceX-level engineers go and try to solve that problem.

Speaker0: We're going to probably... Like, I think that they'll...

Speaker0: There's going to be huge breakthroughs in power production. I don't know exactly

Speaker0: what will make sense on Mars, whether it would be like nuclear or solar,

Speaker0: but there will be huge breakthroughs in that.

Speaker0: There will be, like, I actually think there will be huge breakthroughs in electronics fabrication.

Speaker0: So we'll basically have to build autonomous fabs or very, very low human labor fabs.

Speaker0: I'm not saying that will happen in 10 years, but I think 30 years from now,

Speaker0: you know, the goal is to have Mars City be fully self-sustaining,

Speaker0: which would mean that it has to have a fab, and that will have to be like a

Speaker0: basically autonomous fab.

Speaker0: And that fab will probably be even better than the fabs we have on Earth.

Speaker0: And anyways, when you try to build a fully autonomous city on Mars,

Speaker0: like it forces you to rethink from first principles almost every technology

Speaker0: that we consume today, every input down to like, how do you have...

Speaker0: I'm going to say something really crazy that is the truth.

Speaker0: We don't even have clean food in America today.

Speaker3: Like our food, dear America,

Speaker0: I love you. This is tragic. Our food supply is literally poison.

Speaker0: Our food is filled with arsenic, lead, and forever chemicals.

Speaker0: And it's in the soil all over the country.

Speaker0: And we can't get rid of it. or we haven't built technology yet to figure out how to get rid of it.

Speaker0: I really only started to understand this over the last six months or so.

Speaker0: A founder that I work with, who's a very smart guy, like, started measuring,

Speaker0: like, doing detailed chemical analysis of soil all over America.

Speaker0: And it's basically, it's really all contaminated. And...

Speaker0: If on Mars we start figuring out how to make food kind of with,

Speaker0: in a fully closed system, we can use that same technology to make safe food in America.

Speaker0: Like, we're going to basically get to the point where we don't even need soil to make food.

Speaker0: Even though the soil is contaminated, it's okay. We'll be able to,

Speaker0: you know, make food without soil, you know, and measure what's in it and get back to basics.

Speaker0: And I know that sounds crazy, but like, the path towards having clean food in

Speaker0: America might actually be Mars.

Speaker0: And I hope we figure it out sooner than that, but that's the sad reality of

Speaker0: where some of our industries are today.

Speaker3: Yeah, I love

Speaker2: That as the accessible bull case for Mars. I definitely share your optimism,

Speaker2: sometimes over a little bit too much in terms of timeline and what we're actually capable of,

Speaker2: and find us in the minority, because it is so challenging to wrap your head

Speaker2: around the fact that we actually can place things on another planet within the

Speaker2: next decade, which is super exciting.

Speaker2: But there is one part of this that is slightly disturbing in the sense that

Speaker2: a lot of this has to do with one single person, one single company. And this is SpaceX.

Speaker2: This is Elon. And this is true in a lot of other categories where they are the

Speaker2: leader in autonomous robots.

Speaker2: They are the leader in robo-taxis. They are the leader in a lot of these categories

Speaker2: that we're talking about that are the future.

Speaker2: And you are someone who's uniquely positioned to talk about this because of

Speaker2: your exposure to, what is it?

Speaker2: I think it's SpaceX, a boring company, XAIX. You are mega Elon supporter,

Speaker2: mega Elon bull, like bull case for Elon.

Speaker2: And also why there's no clear first or second best in these industries.

Speaker2: And where can we find more people like this to build these important projects?

Speaker0: In my opinion, Elon is by far the best entrepreneur in the world today.

Speaker0: And almost certainly of all time.

Speaker0: I think it comes from many places. One is his like radical first principle thinking.

Speaker0: Another is his, like, psycho-level work ethic.

Speaker0: You just can't... I don't think anyone should...

Speaker0: People can't comprehend how hard the guy works unless you've seen him do it.

Speaker0: Like, most humans would drop dead trying to work as hard as he does.

Speaker0: And I think he ramped up to that capability over many decades.

Speaker0: But I actually, so I think Elon is the most important entrepreneur in the world.

Speaker0: But I actually think most of his companies would be fine today if,

Speaker0: you know, in the worst case scenario, God forbid, something happened to him, such as if he got sick.

Speaker0: You know, I think that it would severely impair the long-term potential of the companies,

Speaker0: but it's kind of like how tragically when Steve Jobs passed away,

Speaker0: you know, from Apple, like, they had already designed the iPhone,

Speaker0: they already had a roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years, and other people were

Speaker0: able to execute on that roadmap.

Speaker0: Well, I think that Apple hasn't innovated anywhere close to as much as it would

Speaker0: have with Steve still there.

Speaker0: But I want to be clear, I actually think that, God forbid, in the worst case,

Speaker0: if something happened to Elon, I think that Optimus would still happen.

Speaker0: I think that autonomous vehicles are mature enough, like that would happen.

Speaker0: I think that Mars would still happen.

Speaker0: Starship would definitely still happen.

Speaker0: Starlink would get to absolutely insane scale. The direct-to-sell program would really still happen.

Speaker0: So I just, I actually, I'm kind of of these two minds.

Speaker0: Like, I think humanity would not move nearly as fast as it will with him.

Speaker0: And like overall innovation be way lower.

Speaker0: But actually, I wouldn't underestimate just how far along and mature these different

Speaker0: product lines are today.

Speaker0: And so sorry, the first question was like, or so what was the second part of

Speaker0: the question? What did I miss? How do we find more Elon's?

Speaker3: Yeah, where are the other,

Speaker2: Where are the second best companies? Where are the companies that are also going

Speaker2: to take us to Mars? Is it just one and will it just be one? Or are there other people capable?

Speaker2: And what does it take to build a company like that so that there is more people

Speaker2: working on these hard problems?

Speaker0: I don't think you can create an Elon overnight. I think Elon is...

Speaker0: Elon, as an individual, is the product of 50 years of pain, suffering,

Speaker0: work, compounding all of this.

Speaker0: I really believe that. I also think that something that is underappreciated

Speaker0: about how effective he is today is that over the course of the last 20, 30 years,

Speaker0: he's been able to assemble a group, a collective of, call it,

Speaker0: 20 people around him that are some of the most talented humans on the planet.

Speaker0: That it's like, you only come across one of these people every,

Speaker0: or call it a couple of these people every year.

Speaker0: And it takes a decade of testing someone and testing what they can do to really

Speaker0: learn their true potential and learn that they're reliable.

Speaker0: So if you go look at SpaceX, there are people like Mark Giancosa,

Speaker0: or a Boring Company where there's Steve Davis,

Speaker0: you know, or basically every one of his companies has five or so people that

Speaker0: are just out of this world, talented.

Speaker0: And you can't, and all these people have a mind meld with each other.

Speaker0: They know how to work well.

Speaker0: They know how, like, they don't even need to speak to know what needs to get done.

Speaker0: And you can't rush that. It literally takes, like, 20 years to kind of build

Speaker0: an organism, almost, that is self-sustaining and, like, maximally evolved to be effective.

Speaker0: So, I think to have second Elons,

Speaker0: if you wanted to have one emerge over the next decade, it would have to be someone

Speaker0: that's already like 10 plus years,

Speaker0: into doing really incredible things, to where their own personal rate of learning

Speaker0: has been on this maximum trajectory for 10 years.

Speaker0: And they're kind of like, the leverage they have in the world is on a maximum trajectory.

Speaker0: Leverage, meaning, you know, like, building these insane teams,

Speaker0: building trust with these people, acquiring, kind of, credibility,

Speaker0: acquiring capital, you know, building manufacturing capability, etc.

Speaker0: And so, some candidates, I mean, there are people like John and Patrick Collison,

Speaker0: who are unbelievably talented humans, and they're still quite young.

Speaker0: And, like, I think they love Stripe so much.

Speaker0: And I think they see that, I think, for them, like, Stripe will be the vehicle

Speaker0: through which they do most of their other projects over the course of the lives,

Speaker0: rather than how Elon has started a bunch of different companies.

Speaker0: But, like, I could see John and Patrick, 10 years from now, really surprising

Speaker0: the world with, like, what they're, the scale of what they're able to do.

Speaker0: And leveraging the learning they've had over the last 10 years and the position

Speaker0: they're in now to push an order of magnitude or two beyond where they are now.

Speaker0: But I think you basically have to look at other really, really great founders

Speaker0: or companies that are already quite far along right now to find the people that

Speaker0: are even eligible to kind of be the next Elons in 10 years.

Speaker0: And what happens a lot of times is people, it's really hard to sustain,

Speaker0: like, look at Warren Buffett's net worth, and this is a weird analogy,

Speaker0: look at Warren Buffett's net worth, and it's like only,

Speaker0: only in the last 20 years or whatever that he's actually become so insanely rich.

Speaker0: If you go back to the 90s, he was a billionaire or whatever,

Speaker0: but it was like single-digit billionaire.

Speaker0: We can't underestimate compounding. And Elon is one of the only entrepreneurs

Speaker0: that hasn't stopped his rate of compounding because he's still willing to work

Speaker0: at this maximum intensity.

Speaker0: And it's very hard to do that. It's very, very, very hard to keep going and

Speaker0: work 100-hour weeks every single week and embarrass yourself.

Speaker0: By definition, to be at maximal rate of compounding, the way you really learn

Speaker0: is by making mistakes and to still be willing to embarrass yourself,

Speaker0: take enough risks that you make mistakes, test starship in public where inevitably

Speaker0: a lot of them are going to blow up and the media is going to write bad articles.

Speaker0: Like, it's just exhausting.

Speaker0: And most people get burned out from doing that.

Speaker0: And so, like, to have another Elon or more of them, we need,

Speaker0: it would require some of the people that have compounded at incredible rates

Speaker0: early on to keep going and push through.

Speaker0: And I think that's where Elon's personality of, like.

Speaker0: You know, growing up in South Africa and dealing with, like,

Speaker0: a lot of challenges at an early age and, like, the infinite grit,

Speaker0: and also just probably some singular aspect of how he was born,

Speaker0: how he was raised, you know, like, who his mother is, like, I think all these

Speaker0: things play in, it's like, you need...

Speaker0: You need someone to do enough early on to where they're compound at the maximum

Speaker0: rate, and there's only maybe like one person a year that breaks through,

Speaker0: you know, to like level two of that or whatever.

Speaker0: And to go to level three, you also need kind of these very unique personality

Speaker0: and kind of crazy, challenging life and upbringing.

Speaker0: And so, anyways, I hope we get more. But we should all appreciate like how lucky we are.

Speaker0: And I'm sorry to like get into this because obviously Elon is a very controversial

Speaker0: figure right now but and so you have people like attacking Tesla dealerships and all that and here.

Speaker3: I am like I

Speaker0: Honestly think we should all whatever you think of the man's politics like we

Speaker0: should celebrate his work ethic and like celebrate what he's done to push technology

Speaker0: forward in the world it's like it's really really important Yeah.

Speaker1: I think most listeners are going to be familiar with basically every company

Speaker1: and project that Elon has, except for maybe his most recent foray into robotics.

Speaker1: That's, I think, the most opaque one. That's just the newest one on the scene

Speaker1: that I'd like to dive into a little bit more.

Speaker1: As we're talking about space and colonizing Mars, I would imagine the order

Speaker1: of operations is to not put humans on Mars, but first put robots on Mars.

Speaker1: And we can even see the robots that he's debuting here on Earth,

Speaker1: and it's all very iRobot-y.

Speaker1: It turns out they actually are just looking like actual humans.

Speaker1: Maybe you could just kind of ground us and the listeners. I'm pretty unfamiliar,

Speaker1: Josh is far more familiar than me, about just like the state of robotics as

Speaker1: an industry, why they actually ended up looking exactly like humans.

Speaker1: Is that the way things are going to be?

Speaker1: And just overall, where are we in the robotics arc of technology development?

Speaker0: So on the question of why are robots looking like humans, I think there's two

Speaker0: primary answers for that.

Speaker0: One is that the world has been designed for humans.

Speaker0: And that may sound simple. That's actually incredibly important.

Speaker0: You know, like, humans can go upstairs, no problem.

Speaker0: If you're a wheeled robot, going upstairs is hard. if we were to go start building

Speaker0: new cities for robots, you probably wouldn't put stairs in there,

Speaker0: and then you can have wheeled robots everywhere.

Speaker0: And wheeled robots are easier than robots that have actuating legs.

Speaker0: But we've already built cities for humans. They go upstairs since there's stairs everywhere.

Speaker0: Warehouses are built for humans. And so the height of where things are and the

Speaker0: layouts, they work for humans.

Speaker0: So basically, if you deviate too much from the human form factor,

Speaker0: it actually starts to become, like, all sorts of things become really hard to

Speaker0: do, just simply because of how the physical world was designed,

Speaker0: almost from, like, an architecture perspective, and from a, you know, from a form factor.

Speaker0: And then the second thing is, I think, less important, but it's the psychological thing, which is.

Speaker0: I think humans just react better when robots look like humans.

Speaker0: If you take a robot and you make it some very different form factor,

Speaker0: even the face, if you don't have the eyes, if you make it just a fully black

Speaker0: face, it's fine we can start to...

Speaker0: Like if you put in like three eyes or whatever instead of two,

Speaker0: I think that's kind of scary, honestly, for some people.

Speaker0: And it's just like, it's unnecessary.

Speaker0: Like why, if you don't need to do that, why to just kind of conform to what

Speaker0: people are already comfortable with?

Speaker0: But I think the first reason is way more important.

Speaker2: There is one thing that is absent from the portfolio that I saw that is one

Speaker2: of Elon's ventures that I'm super excited about and also a bit dystopian, which is Neuralink.

Speaker2: And it is the connection between this new form of intelligence that we have

Speaker2: and our analog biological meatspace selves.

Speaker2: And I'm curious of your takes on just brain-machine interfaces in general,

Speaker2: the practicality or even realistic version of what those look like.

Speaker2: Will we actually get there? Are they critical? Who are they critical to?

Speaker2: And kind of what is the order of operations that we get to this point that Elon

Speaker2: is guiding to, which is basically a merging with artificial intelligence is

Speaker2: we are pretty slow. We are building this thing that's very fast.

Speaker2: Is there a peaceful coexistence of those two things through companies like Neuralink?

Speaker0: You're asking great questions. So Sequoia were not investors in Neuralink,

Speaker0: but I have personally known a lot of the, like, I mean, I followed the company

Speaker0: from the very beginning.

Speaker0: I have some very close friends that were there, basically, from the beginning.

Speaker0: Like, I knew most of the founding team as social friends, and some of whom were

Speaker0: actually Burning Man campmates back when I used to go to Burning Man a long time ago.

Speaker0: I haven't been in a long time. But believe it or not, like, a lot of the early

Speaker0: team was from my burning aid camp. We were called the phage.

Speaker0: It was a bunch of scientists, especially a lot of biologists.

Speaker0: It was like Matthew McDougall, who's the chief scientist of the company,

Speaker0: was in my camp for a long time.

Speaker0: I think that Elon's philosophy with starting companies has...

Speaker0: People will not believe me when I say this, but I really think he's basically

Speaker0: said, what are the biggest existential risks for humanity?

Speaker0: And then once he finds one, he goes and starts a company to actually try to address that risk.

Speaker0: And in the case of SpaceX, it's like, God forbid if some astronomical event

Speaker0: happens that destroys life on Earth, such as an asteroid hitting our planet.

Speaker0: We need to have humans somewhere else and have a fully self-sustaining city in that place.

Speaker0: So another one is Tesla, where he saw the challenges of climate change early on.

Speaker0: And, you know, I think there are many other challenges too, but he saw it as a challenge.

Speaker0: And I think he also had very strong intuition for what was happening with both

Speaker0: solar production and with the ability of batteries to create a Tesla.

Speaker0: With OpenAI, which he basically started,

Speaker0: I think he was, I mean, in his words, he was afraid of other people building

Speaker0: AGI or superintelligence that he,

Speaker0: you know, that were not maximum truth-seeking and were not taking safety as seriously as he wanted.

Speaker0: And so he decided to create an AI company or AI nonprofit to go try to be the

Speaker0: first to superintelligence.

Speaker0: I'm sorry, I said AGI and superintelligence.

Speaker0: They're different, slightly different things, but let's say superintelligence, not AGI.

Speaker0: But to try to be the first to superintelligence and to do it in a maximally

Speaker0: truth-seeking and safe way.

Speaker0: In the case of Neuralink, I think once he started working on AI.

Speaker0: Felt like the timescale for superintelligence is closer than most humans would

Speaker0: have thought a decade ago.

Speaker0: And that we should have a company that,

Speaker0: or sorry, on superintelligence, even in the case of trying to do it in the safest way,

Speaker0: I think the numbers he's said in podcasts and things like that are even doing,

Speaker0: even in the best case, he thinks it's something like 80% chance that superintelligence

Speaker0: is safe for humans and that everything happens very smoothly.

Speaker0: And, you know, hopefully, he's wrong. Hopefully, it's 100%, 99.999% or whatever.

Speaker0: But I think he said about 80%.

Speaker0: And I think Neuralink is a hedge against that.

Speaker0: And granted, when you started the company, I don't think anyone knew the exact

Speaker0: timescale of when we'd get to superintelligence.

Speaker0: Now, I think most people in the field would say we're probably going to get

Speaker0: superintelligence meaningfully,

Speaker0: before we have high bandwidth, like, readily manufacturable brain-machine interfaces.

Speaker0: But if you go back, like, seven years, and if you would have thought it was,

Speaker0: like, 20 years for superintelligence, we maybe could have intersected that,

Speaker0: you know, kind of, or even got there ahead of time with brain-machine interfaces.

Speaker0: And there's actually a hedge against.

Speaker3: Call it, slightly dangerous superintelligence,

Speaker0: Because, and it's like a radical idea that a lot of people would disagree with,

Speaker0: but you can basically merge with that superintelligence.

Speaker0: And I'm not, I don't want to put words in his mouth. Like, that may not be how

Speaker0: he was thinking about it. But I think that no matter the level you want to take

Speaker0: this, I think that's the furthest extreme.

Speaker0: And I don't mean merging the Borg. I mean having a symbiotic relationship where

Speaker0: humans get leverage from this and are

Speaker0: better able to understand the superintelligence and what its goals are.

Speaker0: Anyways, I think that basically everything, you know, the last one of The Boring

Speaker0: Company, maybe that was not an existential... I think that's probably the only

Speaker0: one that's not an existential threat to humanity.

Speaker0: But traffic is really damn annoying.

Speaker0: And we can have much, much higher quality of life by solving traffic.

Speaker0: And then with X, I think that was existential to humanity.

Speaker0: Maybe not like X... maybe not to human life, but definitely to democracy.

Speaker0: And I'm strongly in the camp that freedom of speech was on the way.

Speaker0: Like, the way out the window.

Speaker0: And so I personally think it was necessary that something had to be done with

Speaker0: X, which I think has had a cascading effect across other platforms.

Speaker0: In other words, I think this is the lens through which he started these companies. And...

Speaker0: It's definitely a narrative violation from like the perception that Elon is

Speaker0: just like a greedy guy or whatever he is.

Speaker0: I really believe he started these companies because he felt like these are the

Speaker0: most pressing problems facing humanity.

Speaker0: And he wanted to play a role in trying to make these things happen well.

Speaker1: I think identifying all of these industries that are critical for humanity is

Speaker1: definitely the main motivations for the topics that we discussed in this podcast today.

Speaker1: We talked about a lot of just frontier technologies. We covered a lot of ground,

Speaker1: but I want to ask this one final question as we wrap things up here.

Speaker1: A lot of the things that we discussed today are like kind of scary.

Speaker1: Super intelligence, like space travel.

Speaker1: There's just like a lot of kind of scary things out there, like human robots

Speaker1: walking around the world. I think if you go and pick a movie out there that

Speaker1: has human robots walking around the world, it's actually not a good movie. It's not a happy movie.

Speaker1: And so I think maybe rightfully so, the average listener or average person out

Speaker1: there is looking at all of the topics that we are talking about today.

Speaker1: And they have experienced fear as an initial gut reaction.

Speaker1: Maybe you could assuade that reaction or maybe give your take about why you're excited,

Speaker1: why this is good, why people ought to be excited, and why people ought to invest

Speaker1: their time understanding each of these verticals that we've talked about today,

Speaker1: because whether we are scared or not, they are coming.

Speaker0: Well, space exploration, we should not be afraid.

Speaker0: I mean, sure, like, the astronauts that go on early missions,

Speaker0: like, they're very brave, and things may happen to those individuals.

Speaker0: But for humanity, I think that this is only a giant net positive.

Speaker0: And is a prerequisite to really understanding the universe we live in and,

Speaker0: like, making progress towards answering questions like, where do we come from?

Speaker0: On The Boring Company, traffic sucks.

Speaker0: Like, no existential risk. On The Humanoid Robots, I personally only see that as...

Speaker3: Upside.

Speaker0: On superintelligence, I do think that superintelligence is one that I'm scared of, to be honest.

Speaker0: And I'm scared of it not being developed properly.

Speaker0: So I'll give you an example. I'm Jewish.

Speaker0: Jews are a very small minority in the world, less than 20 million Jews.

Speaker0: We're always outnumbered, so things like Wikipedia, Jews are always going to be outnumbered.

Speaker0: And when AI models use Wikipedia as a source of training data,

Speaker0: that honestly scares me.

Speaker0: There's a lot of things on Wikipedia that are just not accurate.

Speaker0: And especially when you have some controversial topic and one group is a minority,

Speaker0: it's very easy to have bias.

Speaker0: On those topics, and, like, here, I don't think there's anything that can stop AI progress.

Speaker0: I think it's a human incentive.

Speaker0: Like, if America were to, if the West were to stop all AI research,

Speaker0: China's not going to stop.

Speaker0: You know, like, the West stopped a lot of cloning research 20 years ago, and China did not stop.

Speaker0: You know, like, COVID was almost certainly a lab leak. You know, like, China was...

Speaker0: Like pushing the limits on virus evolution.

Speaker0: And I would much... Like, we're going to have superintelligence someday.

Speaker0: And I think it will be much safer if there's multiple kind of competing superintelligence,

Speaker0: some of which hopefully are good and developed, hopefully all.

Speaker0: But like having some developed by people that I like... And when you have the

Speaker0: diversity of these things, I think it helps a lot and they can keep each other in check.

Speaker0: And, you know, if they're all developing and they have roughly the same level

Speaker0: of performance, it may, like humans, we make it to the point that humans can't

Speaker0: even find the mistakes in the superintelligence.

Speaker0: One superintelligence will be able to find the mistake in another.

Speaker0: And, you know, that's actually very useful for keeping these things honest and

Speaker0: pushing the development in a safe way.

Speaker0: And I just, like, cat is out of the bag. It's going to happen.

Speaker0: And, but I think, like, the...

Speaker0: We do not want only one person to have this capability.

Speaker0: I think I'm, you asked me to be positive, and I'm not being positive,

Speaker0: but, like, nuclear weapon, like,

Speaker0: when nuclear weapon research, when you get to the point in science where the

Speaker0: jump from the science to a working product is not that far,

Speaker0: call it a trillion dollars in today's dollars.

Speaker0: If it's valuable enough, a government will make that jump.

Speaker0: And nuclear weapons are an example.

Speaker0: And I'm really glad that America got nuclear weapons before the Nazis.

Speaker0: And then when multiple people have them, I think it's very important that we

Speaker0: kept it to only nation states having these tools, because nation states have

Speaker0: a strong incentive to not use them.

Speaker0: Terrorists don't have that strong of an incentive. If you don't control a large

Speaker0: landmass, if you don't have a city that you're responsible for,

Speaker0: et cetera, the mutually assured destruction theory breaks down.

Speaker0: With superintelligence is going to happen,

Speaker0: I think there's like a 95% chance, in my opinion, that it is very positive and everything goes great.

Speaker0: But the 5% chance that it's not that great, I think it'd be very bad to only

Speaker0: have one group have superintelligence.

Speaker0: And it is for sure going to happen. And so the biggest mistake we can make is

Speaker0: like, try to stop progress in the West.

Speaker0: And I don't know, with all of that.

Speaker3: Humans are resilient.

Speaker0: We're going to figure it all out. It's all going to be fine,

Speaker0: and, you know, I don't know what else to say.

Speaker2: That's a nice place to leave it. I think that you've just laid out a very nice,

Speaker2: pragmatic, optimistic outlook of the future.

Speaker2: I think there are certainly some controversial things, and if people find them

Speaker2: disagreeable, I think that's good.

Speaker2: I would encourage everyone to go check out your X feed, because I think at one

Speaker2: point you had a chain of like 12 posts in a row that I favorited.

Speaker2: I think one of the things I admire is your ability to just break down things

Speaker2: into very clear first principles, but doing so for ideas that are often controversial

Speaker2: and not broadly accepted.

Speaker3: So I think

Speaker2: It's great to open up the conversation. I would encourage everyone to go check

Speaker2: it out. And just thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker0: Last thing I'll say, I mean, thank you. Other than thank you for having me.

Speaker0: Look, I'm going to be wrong all the time. I'm going to say things people disagree with.

Speaker0: I like, I think it's, I think we lost the ability in the West to have reasonable

Speaker0: disagreements in the last decade or so.

Speaker0: And I'm sure I'm wrong on a lot of stuff. I welcome the conversation and I hope others do the same.

Speaker1: John, thanks for coming on today.

Speaker3: Thank you guys.