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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 2:In breaking news yesterday, Jared Isaacman has been renominated, I guess, is the term. He's back in the contention for, to be NASA administrator.
Speaker 1:Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running?
Speaker 2:According to the White House. So according to the White House, the the the the the reason is that, he had donated previously to Democrats. But then Ars Technica and a couple other outlets reported that it was because of the Elon Musk, Trump dust up that happened.
Speaker 1:So can't believe that was a real day on act?
Speaker 2:It was a crazy day. And so Isaac Min got pulled, and, secretary Duffy stepped in, Sean Duffy. But now Isaac Min's back in the picture, of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. You might have seen Elon Musk and president Donald Trump sitting down having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to, things.
Speaker 2:It seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have, healed all wounds, I suppose. Thank you, mister president, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership. The support from the space loving community has been overwhelming.
Speaker 2:These are the most exciting times, the dawn of since the dawn of the space age, and I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason he's an entrepreneur, and I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally. But He can fly fighter jets.
Speaker 2:He has shown fighter jets flying
Speaker 1:You're leading people that are going
Speaker 2:They're gonna fly a big by
Speaker 1:flying in big fast machines.
Speaker 2:Totally. I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. He started Shift4 Payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16.
Speaker 2:And it's like a serious business. Billions in revenue, real earnings. The PE ratio is 25 x. It's a $6,000,000,000 company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not a hyperscaler, but it's like very serious. Real business.
Speaker 1:4,000 employees.
Speaker 2:4,000 employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume, and it also does the the payments for Starlink. I don't know if this is more important. This is probably less important, but he's been to space. Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. He's kind of, like, really earned his bona fides as someone who's, like love space and
Speaker 1:He can probably say no one likes space more than me.
Speaker 2:The debate was moon versus Mars. Moon versus Mars, where should you prioritize things? It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different pro different companies, different organizations, different constituents. And so on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule. And so on the other side, you have Elon, who has always been prioritizing Mars, Mars, Mars.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Mars. Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it taking us so long, and why is it costing us so much to go to the moon? And I think it's a good question. We're not new to trying to go to the moon. We've sent humans there six times.
Speaker 2:The fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon missions are too cheap to meter has become a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year, and we would be getting up and back.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't be a lost art.
Speaker 2:And and it is a lost art to the point where people ask, is it real? How do we do this? SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this, and Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. And so the debate around Isaacman centers on this tie on his ties to Elon Musk. He's tied to Elon Musk through shift four, that he processes payments for Starlink.
Speaker 2:And, also, he obviously literally went on top of a SpaceX rocket and went to space. NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale because it has funding, and it has the ability to help and the ability to approve different things.
Speaker 1:NASA's funding, they also know how to spend money.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You
Speaker 1:look at how much money they've spent on on Orion.
Speaker 2:And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon. And and there's a and there's an open debate. And I don't think this is like a left right issue. Wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars? And then
Speaker 1:Yes. President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. He was
Speaker 2:a Mars guy.
Speaker 1:January 2004, he announced vision for space exploration at NASA headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon by around 2020. And then they proceeded to spend 20,000,000,000 to make a broken Orion capsule.
Speaker 2:I mean, the real miss is it should have taken all the all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions and just been like, we're going to war against the moon. There's oil on the moon. Is he going to make the correct decision about what what celestial body to, prioritize versus, you know, oh, did he donate to this, or is he left wing or right wing, or did he say the right thing? Like It's also All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA, which is moon or Mars.
Speaker 1:You don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind, or is that is that
Speaker 2:is that I think that is all upstream of Moon versus Mars. Based on what we're seeing from China on the Moon progress, maybe we do need to prioritize in the Moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that. Elon, for years, was not framing things in in geopolitical ways. He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and Earth, like, you you can truly start over on on Mars. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation. But now we have Jensen Huang, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying, we're going to do data centers in space.
Speaker 2:So collectively, you have what? 10,000,000,000,000 in market cap that's like, hey, we're gonna we're gonna be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question.
Speaker 1:Elon's post from a couple days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon. Croc?
Speaker 2:Yep. Is this real? Croc? Devin, Cognition. They're the makers of Devin.
Speaker 2:Devin's the AI software engineer. Cross cross your backlog with
Speaker 1:your personal AI engineering team. David in the chat was, saying, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon pilled. He did post, I went back and found it two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Arthur Mac Macwater said we should annex it, which Solana has been
Speaker 2:Yes. Pushing on.
Speaker 1:Saying for quite a while now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Moon should be a state. It's a classic. I am inevitable, says Ken Kirtland, He's showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story.
Speaker 1:I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me wanna blow my brains out. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Sundar yesterday said, our TPUs are headed to space inspired by our by our history of moonshots from quantum computing to autonomous driving. Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space harnessing more of the sun's power, which emits more power than a than a 100,000,000,000,000 times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges.
Speaker 1:Early research shows our trillion generation TPUs or our tensor processing units purpose built for AI survive without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low Earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on orbit system reliability. It is pretty funny to think about, you know, before before we had satellites Yeah. Like scientists just being like, you wanna put radio equipment in orbit, and then you wanna use it to communicate
Speaker 2:with You wanna watch TV in space.
Speaker 1:You wanna watch space TV.
Speaker 2:You want you want space TV.
Speaker 1:That makes me wanna blow my brains out.
Speaker 2:What are you gonna call it? Dish networks?
Speaker 1:Or you wanna put a camera on one of those too? You wanna take pictures?
Speaker 2:Wanna take pictures?
Speaker 1:And send it down
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To us here?
Speaker 2:A camera in space. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 2:The science fiction future we dreamed of might actually be coming true. And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's, sun catcher project and says, great idea, l o l. But it is so funny that, like, Elon can't just be like, no. I'm I'm I'm I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself. Like, he he doesn't have I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that, really.
Speaker 2:I think it's I think it's illegal because if you're like a railroad, you can't say like, you need like net neutrality effectively.
Speaker 1:One way to infer the bubble isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence, indeed, they have been desperate to be wrong. They suck on their wrongness like a pacifier. Believe the bubble is a bad bomb.
Speaker 2:When I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that have been like, AI will never pass the Turing test, but there's also, like, the Eliezer Yukowski, which was, AI is gonna kill us, like, next year. And, like, I would put them both in those camps. And is is Eliezer saying that the bubble's gonna pop? I don't Is he
Speaker 1:Bob talk? I don't think Let's go to the bubbler.
Speaker 2:Bob Let's go to the bubbler.
Speaker 3:I don't think he's been saying that
Speaker 2:for sure. No. Okay. So so who is who is Dean Ball subtweeting here? That's the question.
Speaker 1:It's hard to argue that it's Entirely. KI is gonna be this runaway death machine and also that it's Bubbler
Speaker 2:pop. Do you know ball?
Speaker 3:Alright. How many times are we gonna make this joke? No. I I think he's mostly talking about there's a bunch of, like, journalists that like, mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh, AI is like it
Speaker 2:just Oh, yes. Yes. 100%.
Speaker 3:100%. Interesting. A pop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the the there's a I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never, like, created anything in his life. He's nontechnical. Like, he's not he's not responsible for any, like, success. But then simultaneously was arguing that, like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch ChatGPT against the board's, like, desires. And it's like, literally both of those can't be true simultaneously.
Speaker 1:For me, the Gell Mann amnesia Yeah. Effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That don't historically cover AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're starting to talk about AI. Mhmm. And they're just in a single short essay that they're writing, there's, there's easily like 10 to 15 things that are either wrong or just I completely disagree with the take. Okay. Maybe I need to be a lot more critical of, of some of their other writing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was someone who was like super critical of crypto during the crypto bubble and then came out like super doom pilled, we're going to all get paperclip next year. And I was like, like maybe I should be buying NFTs. Like he's like, he's so wrong about the paper clipping thing that I need to go back and revisit. Maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question because, like but, of course, like, truth is that he was correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI in, you know, a matter of days.
Speaker 2:A socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time. Yeah. People are not happy. They're moving to Florida, I guess.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of the people that said they were gonna move are waking up this morning and seems un you know, we'll we'll see. The the the big issue for New York state from a tax revenue standpoint is is there's they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets.
Speaker 2:I think people people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. I I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's gonna be a 45% wealth tax next week. We'll see. We'll see what actually gets put in place. But good luck to all the folks over in New York City.
Speaker 1:There are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our polish policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why.
Speaker 1:And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
Speaker 2:And there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation when and it's so, so important. It feels like if your life's work is like you want to be a doctor, you just have to go to college. But if you do want to be something that's a little bit more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college. But it depends on a whole bunch of other factors. If you're rich and you're going to graduate without any debt, there's pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out in vibe code apps and do whatever.
Speaker 2:It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. I feel like so many people boil it down to college good or college bad as opposed to college a good bargain or college a bad bargain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out how you wanna spend your time. But if you don't know how you wanna spend your time and how you wanna spend your career, how you wanna start your career, then school, I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time, so they're not just sitting. Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria?
Speaker 3:Let me think about that for a second. Abuja.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:See, that's that's clearly in action.
Speaker 2:The Substack x relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?
Speaker 1:Even correcting for fake views, traffic to Substack links from x is up substantially. Full post read sign ups, etcetera, also track. We're so back. I thought it was very unfortunate that X and Substack got In such a fight. In such a fight.
Speaker 1:It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best but the best posters on X, like, businesses were impacted by it. I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive. Obviously Substack does want to be more of a, of a, of a social platform. I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Substack is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is like the X had review, I believe was the, was the email newsletter product. They never really invested in it. They, they ultimately shut it down. I, and it's interesting that no other, something about, like, the email and and and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a, a true social media company.
Speaker 2:Like, if you're a social media company, it'd be so easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in. Right? And yet they don't because they want control, and they see it as counter positioned. And so, for some reason, the folks at Twitter bought review and were doing email newsletters and then fully pulled back from it because, it was just it just did not make sense for them to to keep going. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:We'll see. Here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in app link viewer on iOS four, and it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, instagram.com, fb.me, tiktokv.com, and open.substack.com. And so what does that mean? It's like it's like if you click on those, you won't go to the new in app link viewer on iOS, And so you need a different website for those or something like that.
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:Absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty house in the Berkeley Hills yet. Perfect techno monastery, or at least a rationalist AI dev polycule house would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. Do you know about this house, Tyler? Have you been here?
Speaker 1:No. I've heard of a Temple of Wings.
Speaker 2:Is this where your polycule meets up? What? If you put the technological republic, which is Alex Carrf's book, and abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, side by side, says young macro, you'll note the defining bipartisan tendency of the late twenty twenties is, quote, we need to become a lot more like China. And with this, we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's prescience as that of a supply side reform pundit in opposition to the Normie right who read him as a conservative, the Continental canon who read him as a bad word that I'm not gonna say, and as the Anglophone liberal left, left liberal offshoots of the of the continental canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that, is that both the abundance who you can think about Ezra Klein, this is the left.
Speaker 2:This is the New York Times. And Alex Karp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side, the left and the right, are actually unified. We need to build more. We need to create abundance through capitalism.
Speaker 1:Young Macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters He of our made sure this post was fact checked by real Landian neo deep status. Yeah. We have some some breaking The CFO of OpenAI says people are are not exuberant enough about AI. Mhmm. Bloomberg has an article.
Speaker 1:OpenAI chief financial officer, Sarah Fryer, suggested the market is overly focused on anxiety about a possible bubble in the artificial intelligence sector and should muster more exuberance about the technology's potential.
Speaker 2:I got some I got some exuberance for you right here. AI. It's coming. Artificial intelligence, it's coming.
Speaker 1:Joe Wiesenthal says, not surprised that Bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a Bitcoin bubble for over ten years. Bitcoin has now performed worse than US treasuries in 2025.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin just kind of like round tripped, right?
Speaker 1:Meta, S H I T T Y frontier model, no cloud share culture is F.
Speaker 2:On Meta, what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even?
Speaker 1:Greater than 50% chance.
Speaker 2:So they have a ton of they have a ton of GPUs.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's like very high. Right? Because it seems like they're not gonna do open source. So
Speaker 2:it's like,
Speaker 3:why are they making the model?
Speaker 2:How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done b to b. It's like a completely different motion for the company.
Speaker 1:Pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining.
Speaker 2:But do you think Apple is gonna look look smart for sitting this one out? Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the 2026 in suspended Capital's opinion. Good luck to them.
Speaker 1:Pinterest is down 22.
Speaker 2:22% is where it landed.
Speaker 1:Tough right now. You can beat you can beat, and your stock will go down, and you miss, and your stock goes down.
Speaker 2:So Reddit's twice the size market cap wise. Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company, and Pinterest is, like, kind of just getting slopped up.
Speaker 1:Or Reddit is is headed for the same future.
Speaker 2:Would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post AI future. The AI slot was infiltrating, like, pretty quickly, and it was very frustrating because
Speaker 1:What percentage of new Reddit, like, written content is AI?
Speaker 2:The same question as, like, X. Like, on X, it should be the easiest thing to AI. Right? 140 characters, 280 characters. What percentage of the posts that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI?
Speaker 2:Like, 1%. Right?
Speaker 1:This feels like every third post that is I I written
Speaker 2:don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because I feel like it's more like my following tab, but I feel like I'm seeing like a Joe Weisenthal post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post. I know he's not using AI.
Speaker 2:Then I see Brad Gerstner post. He's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watch Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his post.
Speaker 2:I see a You post. Like, when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. It's not it's like it's just not that's not the that's not the point, and that's not, like, the whole structure. And so he I don't know. I I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been, like, taken over by AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There would be value to that, but I don't know. China has overtaken The US in cumulative open source AI model downloads, says a 16 Z. Oh, we also have some we also have some updates on the, on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. Turns out. Was built by
Speaker 1:the Chinese. They built a Trina Solar.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Built this facility. Yeah. And then due to, some regulatory pressure, they were a forced seller.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then it was taken over by what is now T one energy. Sure. And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this? And everyone got really excited, including, Yes. Of course, it turns out that, it was actually built by the Chinese.
Speaker 2:It's built in America. That's that's the important thing.
Speaker 1:So let's study
Speaker 2:I regard TSMC, Arizona as, like, a win for American dynamism. Yeah. We'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here. And I'll just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country because if there's some geopolitical crisis, like, at least it's within our borders, that's better than it being halfway across the world. Right?
Speaker 2:A 16 z said China has overtaken The US in cumulative open source AI model downloads. I'm going to make a series of bets on the little guy to start. We are going to be granting out compute up to a 100 k per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up.
Speaker 1:I DMed with Lewis Lewis. A little bit yesterday about this project. He's working on pulling together the the compute resources, but very excited about this one, and it'd be fun to follow.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye, View.