Shaun Maguire: This Is Far Bigger Than The Internet Boom

Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia and former physicist turned investor, joins the Limitless Podcast to explore why we’re on the verge of a technological renaissance. 

From AI and silicon photonics to humanoid robots and space infrastructure, Shaun makes the case that the next 20 years will make the internet boom look tame. We dive deep into why America needs 10 SpaceX-level companies, the return of hardware innovation, the energy constraints of the future, and how frontier technologies like Neuralink and Mars colonization might reshape civilization.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
3:42 Who’s Shaun Maguire?
6:31 Investing in the AI Age
10:12 Hardware Manufacturing 
19:05 Hardware Precedes Software Revolutions
37:30 Energy
45:02 Space Solar Reflectors
50:55 Space Economy
59:25 Elon Musk
1:09:34 Robotics
1:12:49 Neuralink
1:20:32 Doom Scenarios
1:27:11 Closing Thoughts

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RESOURCES

Shaun Maguire
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire 

Sequoia Capital
https://www.sequoiacap.com/ 

Josh Kale
https://x.com/Josh_Kale 

David Hoffman
https://x.com/TrustlessState 

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Creators and Guests

Host

David Hoffman

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

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,

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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.

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Speaker1: of the week's biggest AI headlines.

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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.