True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 423: Down in the Gundo Aired: 2024-12-09 Duration: 01:07:04 === He Could Be Our Little Brace (05:55) === [00:00:00] Hi, Liz. [00:00:05] I feel like we have to like hit the gong or something in his absence. [00:00:10] Like maybe we could dress up the gong in a little brace costume like on Castaway. [00:00:16] Remember the name? [00:00:19] Wilson was the voice of the what's the gong? [00:00:20] Was there something written on it? [00:00:22] No, it's just a smiley face. [00:00:23] Isn't it like Gongs Unlimited? [00:00:25] Well, that's the store. [00:00:26] Well, the Wilson is the brand of volleyball. [00:00:28] I know, but Wilson makes such a better, like... [00:00:31] Yeah, it's a better name than Kong's Unlimited. [00:00:33] Yeah, I don't want to call him Unlimited, but we could. [00:00:36] But he could be our little brace. [00:00:38] Uh-huh. [00:00:39] Like when Clint Eastwood talked to the empty chair. [00:00:41] There he is, and we just talked to the gong. [00:00:44] I think that would make for a good podcast. [00:00:45] What would you like to say to Brace if he were here then when he can't answer you back? [00:00:50] I would say, hey, Brace, how's it going? [00:00:55] Is that all? [00:00:57] Well, I think we just take it from there. [00:00:58] Hello, everyone. [00:01:24] Hello. [00:01:24] Hello. [00:01:25] I'm Liz. [00:01:26] I'm Young Chomsky. [00:01:27] And this is, well, we are produced by Young Chomsky, too. [00:01:32] And this is Trunan. [00:01:33] Hello. [00:01:33] I'm getting confused because all of our beats are missing because there's no Brace. [00:01:37] Yeah, I'll add some beats. [00:01:39] We're Sans Brace. [00:01:40] Sans Brace. [00:01:41] Brace is not here. [00:01:42] It's just, it's just little old me. [00:01:46] Well, and Young Chomsky. [00:01:48] And a super secret guest that you probably read the name of in the description. [00:01:53] But if you haven't, you'll find out later. [00:01:57] But we're here. [00:01:58] Brace is not, but he'll be back soon. [00:02:01] He unfortunately is in jail. [00:02:05] He's in jail. [00:02:06] He got, he was stealing stuff during a door buster on Black Friday, and they've detained him indefinitely. [00:02:13] But we're going to break him out. [00:02:14] He's making a lot of new friends. [00:02:16] Yeah, he's making friends. [00:02:17] He's actually organized the prison. [00:02:19] Yeah. [00:02:20] There's about to be a big rebellion that I'm sure we'll read about on the news. [00:02:23] He's joined the Aryan Brotherhood. [00:02:25] Yeah, he's actually, he's escaped the prison on a bike, on a city bike, which we are tracking online. [00:02:33] We got to probably talk about that, the crazy murder that happened in New York City. [00:02:39] But we'll do that on another episode. [00:02:40] First I'm hearing about it. [00:02:41] Is it? [00:02:41] No. [00:02:44] No, we have, I'm not going to do an extended intro because. [00:02:47] Don't extend it. [00:02:48] I'm not going to extend it. [00:02:49] We have Max Reed of Read Max on the show today. [00:02:54] We are talking some of my favorite, favorite topics. [00:02:58] We're talking tech. [00:02:59] We're talking AI. [00:03:01] We're talking weird right-wingers. [00:03:03] We're talking the Trump admin. [00:03:05] We're talking the gundo, which I think is the first time we've talked about the gundo on the show. [00:03:12] And I think it's a really interesting conversation, if I do say so myself. [00:03:15] It sure was. [00:03:16] So let's get to it. [00:03:31] Okay, I'm not even going to do, I'm not even going to try and do any kind of like Belden-esque intro. [00:03:38] It's not going to happen. [00:03:40] We're just going to start the show, everyone. [00:03:42] Hello, I'm Liz. [00:03:44] We have with us today Max Reed. [00:03:47] Hello. [00:03:47] From the Read Max Substack. [00:03:50] That's correct, yes. [00:03:51] I just want to make sure, because I could have said Max Reed Substack. [00:03:54] This is Read Max. [00:03:54] I guess you get that all the time. [00:03:56] Thank you so much for doing this. [00:03:58] I am so excited to be here. [00:04:00] I want to say, first of all, congratulations on Bitcoin for hitting 100K. [00:04:05] Finally, we did it, everyone. [00:04:07] Three cheers for Bitcoin. [00:04:08] Hopefully, everyone heeded my advice when I called that that was going to happen before the end of the year and made some money. [00:04:13] And if not, that's fine because this podcast does not do financial advice. [00:04:20] I also want to say before we start that David Sachs, I want to give him a shout out. [00:04:26] David Sachs, our colleague in content creation, has heated the call to serve. [00:04:36] That's right. [00:04:37] And will be Donald Trump's crypto czar, which is a great idea. [00:04:40] Crypto and AI is awesome. [00:04:42] Oh, okay. [00:04:43] There we go. [00:04:43] An immigrant. [00:04:45] Look at that. [00:04:46] It's a great. [00:04:46] Immigrants are welcome. [00:04:47] Exactly. [00:04:49] Congratulations to him. [00:04:50] It's great to see someone from the streets like us, from the pavement of the interwebs. [00:04:58] Yeah. [00:04:59] I mean, we should say Brace is not here because he's advising the South Korean president, Yoon-suk-yeo, currently. [00:05:06] So there's all sorts of opportunities for podcasters to enter government service in all kinds of ways. [00:05:11] Yeah. [00:05:11] Actually, Brace is in Syria right now. [00:05:13] Oh, yeah. [00:05:14] He's got a little project he's working on over there. [00:05:16] I don't know how things are going. [00:05:18] He had mentioned that something was not working out in Damascus, but I do think things are going a little bit better for him, but he should be back soon. [00:05:24] That's good to know. [00:05:24] Once he gets that taken care of. [00:05:26] So we have you here. [00:05:28] We. [00:05:28] There's no we, it's me. [00:05:30] I don't even know how to do that. [00:05:33] No, because Young Chomsky is here with me. [00:05:34] Hello. [00:05:35] We have you here today because I'm going to take the opportunity to talk my favorite subject, which is tech, AI, right-wing freaks, and all of it kind of coming together as we are looking towards the incoming Trump admin. === The Rise of Internet Culture (10:51) === [00:05:56] It's funny, you know, I think like we were joking about this, but I'm going to say it again, that you are very well positioned for being a kind of expert or called upon expert by the various bloggeratis out there for explaining some of the cultural shifts that occurred to potentially explain some of what happened with the reelection of Trump. [00:06:23] And what I'm talking about is this internet, which you coined that term. [00:06:27] Yes. [00:06:28] And also this kind of like much, much talked about, much debated right-wing turn in certain sectors of Silicon Valley. [00:06:38] And we've had you on the show to talk about both of those things. [00:06:43] But I do think that with the re-election of Trump, we're kind of like seeing, you know, we saw both of those phenomenons kind of like cohere together. [00:06:53] Yeah. [00:06:54] And I think it's worth revisiting a little bit of that as we look towards what it might tell us about what's going to happen over the next couple years. [00:07:02] Yeah, nothing good, but yeah, it'll tell us something. [00:07:04] Yeah. [00:07:05] So for people who are just, who have no idea, have never listened before, and are just like, hey, what's that show? [00:07:10] What is this internet? [00:07:12] This internet is a name that I use to describe a kind of growing in importance internet subculture of mostly young men, mostly kind of intuitively conservative, if not necessarily partisan, who love Zin nicotine patches, domestic light beer, college football, and having fun online, I guess. [00:07:40] We're talking about the Nelk Boys. [00:07:42] We're talking about Pat McAfee. [00:07:45] We're talking about Antonio Brown. [00:07:50] It's like a pretty inescapable subculture on Twitter these days. [00:07:55] Through YouTube and TikTok. [00:07:57] Absolutely. [00:07:57] And Instagram, too, honestly. [00:07:59] And you end up in there a lot if you are even like adjacent to certain to sports, especially to like football. [00:08:04] You will end up suddenly seeing a lot of posts about Zin and a lot of posts about like memes about, there's like a whole cocaine meme subculture too. [00:08:12] It's like a real fascinating place, the internet these days. [00:08:15] So anyway, these guys, I wrote about these guys this summer because of Hawk Tua. [00:08:19] Sure. [00:08:20] Back in the news this week because of her coin. [00:08:23] Congratulations to her, obviously. [00:08:24] Oh, and me. [00:08:25] I lost my life savings. [00:08:28] Well, that happened. [00:08:29] I don't, yeah, I have a, my thing with this stuff is like, yeah, okay, it's illegal. [00:08:34] Okay. [00:08:34] I mean, add it to the list. [00:08:36] But also, for people that participate in the like hawk to a meme coin thing, like, isn't the understanding that you're sort of like getting in on a big game of musical chairs and you have to get out really quick? [00:08:50] Like, do people think getting into it that it's going to be this stable asset that they're investing in? [00:08:58] Like, isn't everyone kind of hip to the game at this point? [00:09:01] I mean, I assume it's like everything with a, you know, what's the thing they always say, like con men always say in movies, like, you can only con people who think they're in on the con. [00:09:08] And it's like every, you know, I think that's the thing. [00:09:09] Oh my god, that's so true. [00:09:10] Everybody assumes that they're not going to be the bag holders. [00:09:13] Yeah. [00:09:14] Everybody besides Taylor. [00:09:17] Yeah. [00:09:17] And I assume she'll have a cabinet position pretty soon, too. [00:09:20] She's going to have, they're going to have to give her the Matt Gates treatment. [00:09:24] So nominate her, and then she'll have to decline it. [00:09:28] And somehow that'll make it so that she's never prosecuted. [00:09:32] So she was, her fame felt like a coalescing moment for this internet, like a sort of crowning moment when they were able to sort of make her the biggest sort of viral celebrity this year. [00:09:44] And since Trump's election, a lot of people have been talking about young men online and where's the liberal Joe Rogan and all, you know, all this kind of thing. [00:09:52] And put a gun in my mouth. [00:09:55] If there's like, you know, I don't want to get too like taxonomical and like draw lines too tightly, but I do think there's like this internet is a useful way of talking about the big group of guys online who are not like necessarily Andrew Tate style, like super misogynist, [00:10:11] like, you know, pickup artist types, but who are like fratty and like, you know, probably lean Republican overall, who are sort of, you know, like intuitively conservative, contemptuous of liberals, hate protesters or activists or whatever, but aren't necessarily like, you know, I don't know what else, 4chan, you know, they're not reading Curtis Yarvin or whatever. [00:10:32] Right, right. [00:10:32] I mean, I do think that that, that kind of like millennial and Gen X manosphere is a bit dated. [00:10:40] Like, I mean, that still exists. [00:10:42] And obviously, those are, there's like a lot of pathways to those places out of things that I think would be considered the Zinternet, whatever. [00:10:52] But this internet does seem like way more of a mainstream, pardon the expression, like mid-tier, middle-of-the-road, like arena, cultural arena, rather than a kind of like scary place where men are radicalized to care about like family court or whatever. [00:11:11] Right. [00:11:12] I mean, it is like, what's funny about it is like we're kind of are just talking about like frat guys. [00:11:15] Like we're not necessarily even talking about some crazy people. [00:11:18] Yeah, exactly. [00:11:18] But it's, you don't usually, for 20 years, you haven't usually encountered those guys online. [00:11:22] And now all of a sudden they make up like a huge portion of people driving culture and ideas online. [00:11:28] Yes. [00:11:28] And I do think your point about it being not expressly or specifically political or like at least politically malleable in a lot of ways. [00:11:37] I mean there's you'll see like Like, kind of the barstool guys are an interesting example of this because they'll be like very pro-choice for, I think, like Playboy reasons or whatever, but will then, you know, care about, you know, random sort of like, oh, we spend too much money on this or that or what have you, right? [00:12:03] So sort of like blockhead centrist politics. [00:12:06] Yeah, I mean, I think the main principle is sort of like personal hedonism is like the right to invest in stupid meme coins and the right to bet a lot of money and the right to have unprotected sex as often as you want and like all these other things that sort of have to do with partying and having fun. [00:12:22] And, you know, like you don't want to overstate their impartiality or their sort of nonpartisanness. [00:12:28] Like Tucker Carlson is like a major driver behind Zen is a meme. [00:12:32] And like they're obviously like probably the bulk of them are Trump supporters. [00:12:36] But it is funny. [00:12:36] Like I just remember when Haktua came out, like when Haktua came out, when the meme was spreading, Ian Miles Chong and a bunch of these other sort of like explicitly right-wing, explicitly partisan chuds were trying to like find a way in on this. [00:12:50] And it's like, this is a pretty silly blowjob meme. [00:12:53] And it's not really not going to go with like, you know, that sort of, you're not going to be able to like make this a trad thing or whatever. [00:12:59] And there's a sort of like trying to like rope it in to be a thing, like Ian Miles Chong being like, it's actually anti-woke because it's Pride Week and everybody's talking about this instead of Pride Week or whatever. [00:13:09] It's a little bit, you know, it's harder to control. [00:13:12] I mean, these guys used to be called like South Park conservatives. [00:13:14] Right. [00:13:16] Totally. [00:13:17] Everything old is new again. [00:13:18] Yeah. [00:13:19] So it's not just, so that's one thing, this internet. [00:13:22] And then kind of like, you know, as another sort of cultural, but also economic and technological force, obviously that helped propel some of the, I'm not even going to say vibe shift, but you know what I'm talking about. [00:13:35] Shift towards Trump over the past couple years has been this turn towards the right in certain sectors of Silicon Valley. [00:13:44] Now, we talked about that before. [00:13:46] I mean, I think that it's odd. [00:13:49] I saw like this week or last week, whatever it was that there seems to be, this seems to be kind of like debated as to whether, like why and how this happened. [00:13:58] I think it was our favorite Matt Iglesias that was trying to sort of pin this on the failure. [00:14:05] I mean, this is what he does with everything, the failure of like progressive liberals not embracing or working with the good tech partners in Silicon Valley, which is a very weird thing to say considering like how friendly Obama-era progressives. [00:14:21] Yeah. [00:14:22] I mean, that's like basically undergirded all of Silicon Valley for the 2010s. [00:14:26] Yeah. [00:14:27] You know, like it's just very odd. [00:14:29] But also I think the mist, the like analytic mistake that's being made there is that it's really only certain parts of Silicon Valley. [00:14:37] Yeah. [00:14:37] And really more like insurgent, non-managerial, non-executive kind of styles of like Silicon Valley Capital, I would say. [00:14:49] Yeah, I mean, investment capital, you know, the executives you do see are founders usually, so they have a particular kind of attitude and sensibility about the companies they run. [00:14:59] Yeah. [00:15:00] You know, and I would say too, like, it's not necessarily even like a distinct change. [00:15:08] So like Mark Andreessen was a Romney bundler. [00:15:10] Like some of the guys have been Republicans for as long as they've been around, but they were much quieter about it. [00:15:17] And certainly during the first Trump administration, they were kind of very quiet because, you know, it was sort of social and political suicide to come out as a Trumpist. [00:15:29] And they feel extremely emboldened by, I mean, for obvious reasons, because he won. [00:15:34] They have been feeling emboldened for the last few years. [00:15:37] And I think they, I think it also sort of can't be underestimated the extent to which setting aside the questions of electoral politics, the sort of even the low-level coalescing of like a tech workers movement over the last, [00:15:55] say, six years, which includes not just like unionization at some firms or like attempts at unionization, but like Google walkouts over DOD contracts, these kinds of things, but also like, you know, for lack of a better word, like wokeness, like increasing demands from workers for diversity hiring initiatives and other things like that have like really freaked out and kind of sent people, sent people like Andreessen or I'm trying to think of the other sort of big names. [00:16:21] I mean, David Sachs, obviously, the all-in, the all-in podcast crew, that guy Sean Maguire at Sequoia, who seems to be a total Zionist psycho, like that there's a sort of sense that there's a like a managerial counter revolution, so to speak, to like, to like beat back whatever power labor in Silicon Valley was sort of trying to amass for itself. [00:16:45] Middle management revolution. === Consumer Demand for Shitty AI (13:11) === [00:16:47] Yeah, something like that. [00:16:48] Yeah. [00:16:49] Yeah. [00:16:49] I mean, I think it's interesting, you know, again, I want to use these as sort of like the kind of backdrop for what we're talking about today, because with the re-election of Trump, these sort of debates about whether or not this stuff was relevant or if it would have an impact or where it was going are kind of like out the window. [00:17:09] Like it is and it's here. [00:17:11] And it's going to, the fact that these people like these, you know, the, the, you know, the David Sachs and the Andreessens and all these guys are going to have a lot of sway in the upcoming Trump administration means a lot, right? [00:17:29] Like we were, I mean, I think one of the big questions is, you know, with someone like David Sachs getting this like, whatever this nebulous AI is, I mean, it's probably like a puff piece, puff like PR kind of appointment that isn't really, doesn't have a lot of, you know, power or whatever. [00:17:50] But I do think that these kind of, you know, these big questions about, you know, what is the future for Silicon Valley, right? [00:18:05] And what is the future for these sort of like dead end, dead end kind of like cultural moments that have come out of Palo Alto, dead end sort of like technology, like technological realities that have come out of Palo Alto. [00:18:21] Like basically like there is, we've hit a limit. [00:18:24] I mean, people have talked about this for where a lot of tech companies can go that had big upward swings in the like Obama era, in that like era of Silicon Valley growth, right? [00:18:39] Facebook, Google, Apple. [00:18:42] Yeah. [00:18:44] You know, the big companies have kind of, you know, hit a saturation point and a limit for where they can go. [00:18:51] And AI has been touted as the kind of off-ramp or the path out of that stagnation. [00:19:00] And, you know, I think the question has always been like, is that fake? [00:19:04] Is that real? [00:19:05] There's so much kind of mystery. [00:19:09] And I mean, you know, purposefully, right? [00:19:13] Or like, you know, guarded secrets about the future and potential of AI. [00:19:20] Is this actually going to be some world historical force that changes life as we know it? [00:19:27] But the fact remains that those questions can only be answered if massive, massive investments can be made into these products and into the kind of infrastructure that will enable those products to potentially flourish. [00:19:44] And sorry, I'm talking, I swear I'm getting to my point. [00:19:51] Up until this point, there's been a hard kind of political and economic limit to where, if that expansion can happen. [00:19:59] And the Trump admin basically is promising to let all of that go to see where it's going to, you know, see what can happen. [00:20:08] Yeah, I mean, one of the first things Trump has done is promise to rescind the Biden, whatever it's called, the Memorandum on AI, the executive action on AI, which, I mean, that's not even an infrastructural document. [00:20:20] It's just sort of like, you know, AI companies will have to do certain kinds of testing and certain kinds of like safety monitoring and all these things. [00:20:26] So like the signal from the very start has been, you know, the reins are off. [00:20:32] Like go wherever you want to go. [00:20:34] You know, you and I have talked about Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has been going around for the last year or so kind of hat in hand trying to get huge amounts of power for data centers. [00:20:48] I mean, the reporting. [00:20:50] You mean like electrical power? [00:20:51] Yes, electrical power. [00:20:51] Sorry, right. [00:20:52] So like he's asking for, I'm going to get all these numbers wrong, I think, but he wants like five or five to seven, five gigawatt nuclear power plants or something like that, which is like just an absolutely insane amount of power. [00:21:03] That's like a, I mean, it's, it's a, the reporting is always that every time he talks to people who build these plants or have the money that people laugh at him. [00:21:11] I mean, he's asking for a trillion dollars. [00:21:13] It's very like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers kind of stuff. [00:21:19] And he's scaled back his asks a little bit. [00:21:21] I mean, and who knows how much that was the real ask and how much that was like he learned from Elon that you just make the biggest ask possible and that's what works. [00:21:28] Or even you let the biggest ask get put out in the press. [00:21:31] Yeah, exactly. [00:21:32] Right. [00:21:33] Even if it's not what you're really asking for. [00:21:35] But I don't think he's like, I don't think it's so much bigger than what is reasonable for what he like, if you, if you understand his goal as to is to both like secure enough power for OpenAI's data centers such that it can meet what it expects consumer demand will be, and also to be like to keep building on top of the models that they've already created, because part of like OpenAI's success has been that they were among the first groups of researchers to realize that if you just threw compute, which is to say like computer power, [00:22:05] at these models, you could significantly expand their abilities and look like it's possible they've hit a wall, like it seems even likely that they've now hit a wall at the sort of scale like in this scaling. [00:22:17] But you know, you don't know until you've tried and there's there's always a reason to just why not just build more nuclear power plants while you can? [00:22:24] Yeah um, and he's not the only one. [00:22:26] Facebook we were just saying Facebook has uh just put out this week of an rfp for partners to build something like five new nuclear plants in the? [00:22:35] U.s. [00:22:35] Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island for these things. [00:22:38] I mean there's all kinds of uh, I mean power yeah, like electrical power, political power um, is suddenly in play and uh, all the big tech companies uh, all the big AI companies are kind of trying to figure out how they can get a piece of it. [00:22:52] It's funny with Open AI, I mean I wonder you know you when you say they've hit a limit? [00:22:57] I wonder if it's, have they had a technological limit or have they hit a consumer limit? [00:23:01] Yeah, I mean I the the, the sort of the word is. [00:23:04] So one thing that's really frustrating about reporting or writing or even thinking about the AI stuff is that like one of the things that makes LLMs really amazing and sort of fascinating is that it's it's quite hard to like really gauge their abilities in any kind of like Empirical way. [00:23:20] You know, you can run tests or whatever, and sometimes they'll pass, and sometimes they'll fail. [00:23:25] And so you'll get people constantly saying, like, oh, this new open AI model is actually worse than the model that came before it. [00:23:30] And it's like, well, is it worse? [00:23:31] Or have you, you know, has your have your expectations changed? [00:23:34] Are you just using the wrong prompts or whatever? [00:23:36] And then furthermore, like, we don't, you know, we don't, we don't have a ton of insight or access into like how they're doing what they're doing. [00:23:46] Like what they're modeling. [00:23:47] These aren't open source models. [00:23:48] We don't know what they're doing. [00:23:49] But the sort of the reporting suggests that OpenAI and the other big generative AI, you know, new AI companies have found that they are not getting the same improvement on their models out of scaling up their compute as they had been up to this point. [00:24:07] So the curve is bending. [00:24:11] OpenAI has denied this. [00:24:13] Sam has said this isn't true, but of course he's going to say that. [00:24:16] And I also think that at some point, if like just from a psychological level, I mean, in a way that I can understand, if you already beat everybody's expectations once just by 10xing the amount of compute you were throwing at a problem, why wouldn't you just keep trying that until like you're never going to, there's kind of never going to be a reason for you not to do it. [00:24:36] So, you know, like people like Gary Marcus, who's like a really intense AI critic and who is in the same way that Sam is always going to say, no, no limit has been hit, is always going to say a limit has been hit. [00:24:46] It keeps going around saying they've hit the wall, they've hit the wall. [00:24:49] I suppose we'll see. [00:24:50] But I mean, in terms of power, it also doesn't matter because they still believe there's a huge amount of consumer demand that's still out there, or they have to hope there's a huge amount of consumer demand that's still out there that they can tap into and that they need money, they need the electrical power for it. [00:25:03] Yeah, I mean, I think it's a question about consumer, like as we're thinking about this, consumer demand as in you and I having a little AI that we, I mean, I think that's what, like, generally what people think when they think of like what consumer demand for this stuff looks like. [00:25:19] And that fuels a lot of the like, well, that's not going to be a thing that we use because it feels and probably is a little bit of an absurd, like the idea of everyone having a clippy and that being a thing that we all want and need in our life. [00:25:33] I think a lot of people can see fault with that argument. [00:25:36] But the flip side of that is that like maybe we aren't the consumer and actually what we should be talking about is commercial use. [00:25:42] Yeah. [00:25:42] Right. [00:25:42] And like, you know, my assumption with this stuff has always been that Facebook or Meta, whatever, Meta is the one who is actually the firm that's like primed to take the most advantage of this tech just because the real opportunity seems to be in advertising, [00:26:00] which is that, you know, AI and, you know, in the development of this stuff, I mean, like, like artificial intelligence would be able to create and produce, like, produce ads at such a clip that is like definitionally not humanly capable of us like conceiving. [00:26:21] Yeah. [00:26:21] And would be able to find exploits for advertising and differentiation among mass population groups in order to target like further target and in specific moments from all this data, like in a way that I think we can't really conceive of, which is great for advertising, terrible for us, our souls, yeah. [00:26:41] But also probably very good, at least in the short run, for Facebook's bottom line. [00:26:47] Yeah. [00:26:48] And so you can see, so I can see that really shoring up a lot of these questions that people have about the future of these companies, these platforms, or if they have hit a sort of like point of stagnation or terminal stagnation. [00:27:03] Yeah, I mean, like one thing about Facebook is, you know, they're still years away from like really like this becoming a real problem, but they need to figure out like how big is the actual advertising market for face on Facebook or whatever. [00:27:17] And there's a kind of like Americans are extremely expensive, like that, that's their cash cow. [00:27:23] And Americans are sort of less interested than they used to be in Facebook and less interested in even in Instagram than they used to be. [00:27:29] And sort of international advertising isn't doing the kind of money, like doing the kind of numbers that they would like it to do. [00:27:35] And I can see the ways in which you could create a story for yourself where AI, like not even, not even talking about the sort of interesting metrics things you can do and different like category differentiations, but just being able to create more and more interesting content at scale for people to just kind of more slot for them to consume, so to speak. [00:27:54] Like you can sort of shore up, as you're saying, your advertising market. [00:28:01] And, you know, I like, you know, this is something we were texting about, but I think that people also, people like us, people in our position tend to overestimate the extent to which this stuff sucks. [00:28:12] That there is, in fact, like an audience for this, for like shitty AI slots. [00:28:17] Just this morning, somebody sent me a Christmas, like a Christmas song playlist on YouTube that was probably like half, like it was a two-hour YouTube video of old-fashioned Christmas carols. [00:28:30] It was like half real, like Nat King Cole Christmas carols and half just total, like quite well made, but if you know the song, like completely wrong, like AI slash. [00:28:41] Yeah, exactly. [00:28:41] Yeah, it was squacky sound. [00:28:42] Deck the halls with bowels of chorus. [00:28:45] Ha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. [00:28:47] Swipe the heart and join the chorus. [00:28:54] Ha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. [00:28:57] Um. [00:28:58] And it was so, it was sort of like, I mean, the comments, half of which I'm sure were totally fake, were all like, this is great. [00:29:04] This takes me back to my childhood or whatever. [00:29:05] And it's like, this says it's by Neil Diamond and a woman is singing. [00:29:08] Like, what are you talking about? [00:29:10] Like, that kind of thing. [00:29:12] I mean, look, we'll see exactly how that works out. [00:29:14] But I do think that there is, like, if I'm Facebook, I'm looking at stuff like that and I'm rubbing my hands together. [00:29:19] Like, oh, my God, they don't give, they don't care what we put on there. [00:29:22] And we can just endlessly make this happen for them. [00:29:24] Well, they're not passive actors, too. [00:29:26] I mean, they're the ones shaping our tastes just as much as, you know, they're teaching us to want this stuff, whether or not we realize it or not. [00:29:36] Like, I think Spotify is such a great model for that, right? [00:29:40] Where it's like, oh, you start with, you know, share, you know, uploading music, listening to music, creating playlists. [00:29:47] Now here's new specific playlists for you. [00:29:49] Now it's here specific music for you, you know, and so on and so on. [00:29:52] And I think you see, I mean, you see that in OnX, the everything app, which is just a fucking graveyard. === Roads to Relevance (10:35) === [00:29:59] I can't even, I don't know what anyone is even talking about on that thing anymore. [00:30:03] It's kind of freaky to go on it. [00:30:07] But I think that, you know, to get back to OpenAI, contra like meta, right? [00:30:12] That if I, like, because I can make the case that meta, that these companies, you know, Google as well, obviously, that, you know, shoring up some of the structural limits, potential structural limits of their ad revenue models, that AI might be able to provide at least short-term boosts for that. [00:30:31] I can see that. [00:30:33] OpenAI, you know, the chatbot stuff, I don't know. [00:30:37] Okay. [00:30:37] I can see it in changing and we already have, you know, in big companies like insurance companies or in finance and all that stuff, which is already kind of undergoing massive transformations thanks to the kind of automation that these things are providing. [00:30:58] Yeah, for sure. [00:31:00] The thing that is, I want to kind of focus on with OpenAI, though, is that something you brought up, which is the infrastructure question, and that seems to be maybe one of the potential roads for them out of this consumer conundrum, which is, okay, well, and I think you brought this up. [00:31:21] We were talking about it. [00:31:22] You know, if there is a limit, a consumer limit that we don't understand and that we can't actually sell this stuff to the public in a way that we thought we could, or it's not, you know, it's not shaping up. [00:31:33] It's not going to be as, you know, as amazing tech as we thought it would, whatever, whatever. [00:31:38] You know, at least we can maybe try to own the compute centers that are going to be required by everyone else. [00:31:46] And so it's a classic kind of real estate play that gets made, which, you know, I think at that point, the money he's going around and asking for, like you're saying, makes a lot of sense. [00:31:58] Yeah. [00:31:58] Yeah. [00:31:58] I mean, I think, you know, I mean, I find Sam Altman a kind of endlessly fascinating figure because he's such a familiar kind of millennial ambition psycho. [00:32:07] Like he really is this. [00:32:08] Yeah. [00:32:09] He reminds me of so many people I've met and known in my life. [00:32:12] In the same way that Zuckerberg was a really like understandable archetype. [00:32:16] Yeah, totally. [00:32:17] And he has, and I think that like part of what is at stake for him here is his own ability to continue to like. [00:32:24] Fail upward, and that he sort of has moved past his shitty startup that failed and he's moved past whatever shitty thing got him kicked off of YC and now he's at OPEN AI and he I assume he sees some kind of limit to like we're saying the sort of chatbot I mean, from what I understand, like when you look at user figures during the summer versus during the school year, they drop off immensely that effectively what they created is like a homework machine. [00:32:47] And you like the question of how much they're gonna actually money they're actually gonna be able to make from that. [00:32:51] As useful as it is to college students everywhere is is a good one, and so if he can be out there, if he can be the guy talking to you know, the emirs they're like going to the Uae if he can be the guy who's talking to Japanese nuclear engineers, if he's the guy building plants, building data centers, like it's not just the real estate play, I think, there's also like a certain amount of personal networking power that he is able to generate for himself yeah 100, and you know uh, we haven't even talked about the Oi, [00:33:21] the Open AI Infrastructure Plan, which they released infrastructure week. [00:33:25] It's back Infrastructure administration. [00:33:28] We're in infrastructure term now. [00:33:30] Uh, mid november, after the, after the election. [00:33:33] Uh, must have been prepared before, but it's like very, it's like almost too on the nose for, I mean, for everybody these days, but it's we're gonna reindustrialize the? [00:33:43] U.s through AI, we're gonna create special economic ai zones. [00:33:48] Uh, it's like every, every weird little vulture inside the Trump administration can find something in there, in in that document, that they can latch onto and get interested in. [00:33:58] Um, and I think that's like uh, it's. [00:34:00] It's about, among other things, about maintaining relevancy and maintaining sort of some sense of attention and power and and like sense that Open AI is at the forefront of this particular movement. [00:34:10] Right, you know, the infrastructure play. [00:34:12] I think that's a really important point. [00:34:15] It's something that we've been hearing about for a really long time and was a big push from the Biden Admin too right, I mean, so I know, you know, there are a lot of new opportunities with from, you know, for people within the Trump admin, 100. [00:34:32] But this has been a kind of general orientation by the state and the people and the, you know, the kind of bureaucrats and the thinkfluencers of the state for quite some time. [00:34:44] And I think that, you know, I think liberals and progressives or whatever have, you know, they touted the Biden, whether it was the CHIPS Act or, you know, the Build Back Better Package, whatever it was, CHIPS Act, and then there's the IR, you know, there's the three bills or whatever. [00:35:01] I always forget which ones are which. [00:35:03] But that these were the kind of, you know, look, we're making these big infrastructure infrastructure investments and we are, you know, working with, you know, tech partners and green tech and AI and we understand the future and, you know, and that this was a kind of, I mean, it's pretty basically bipartisan at this point, consensus that like these things need to get made. [00:35:29] But the reality of the Biden push was that because of the, because we keep talking about limits, political limits, the realities of politics in America, that the sheer amount of what could get passed, like there, it got chipped away at, no pun intended, so much that what you're talking about in the investing is like nothing compared to the like immense, [00:35:56] immense amount of capital that this kind of infrastructure requires, right? [00:36:01] Right, yeah. [00:36:02] I mean, and so it's like, you know, I think that what we saw with the Biden admin, like they couldn't get done the stuff that they imagine through these traditional political roads. [00:36:15] Yeah. [00:36:16] Yeah. [00:36:17] I mean, like, I mean, this is all the roads, all roads lead to the DOD, ultimately. [00:36:22] I mean, that's what we're saying is like that this is the next sort of the place to go and then the place where there's money and the next place to look is the Department of Defense. [00:36:31] Right. [00:36:31] Because that's where money is and that's where political will is and that's where, you know, like you can actually build a bunch of nuclear plants or build a bunch of whatever else you need to do. [00:36:42] Yeah, I mean, you can actually get shit done because you don't have to deal with cobbling together this geriatric coalition of a bunch of people that have to like pay off whatever their local hog farmer or whatever is so they can get reelected through the local, the like, you know, Podunk Town Chamber of Commerce doesn't get mad. [00:37:02] You know, there's all these political realities that come into play when you're trying to direct state investment that go out the window, weirdly, when you just channel things through DOD. [00:37:16] Yeah, it's nice. [00:37:17] We should all get some DOD money. [00:37:19] I think that like, I mean, it's what's funny because I think that what we might see happen through the Trump admin maybe would have only have been made possible through the kind of like political limits that became very obvious thanks to the Biden admin, right? [00:37:37] But I mean, it does seem that now the consensus with not just Silicon Valley, but what we're going to talk about next, the new Silicon Valley, the gundo, is that, you know, we just go direct through DOD, cut out the bullshit, don't deal with the politics, and, you know, tear down all of the red tape so we can actually build baby build. [00:38:01] Yeah. [00:38:01] And I mean, look, the other side of this coming from Silicon Valley is there hasn't been a unicorn exit in too long. [00:38:10] I mean, they're just, everybody's waiting for another Facebook or whatever, or had been until a few years ago, and it's just not going to happen. [00:38:17] No. [00:38:17] And they're looking for ways to make investments worthwhile. [00:38:21] And, you know, the last Elon, again, a reason that Elon Musk is an incredibly important figure here, and Peter Thiel to a similar extent is like Palantir and SpaceX were proof of concept that new startup hardware, military, and technological hardware companies could get government contracts. [00:38:41] And that's a big, fat, you know, that's a lot of money right there. [00:38:45] And so Build Baby Build, like what's in the back of that is like, you know, using Uncle Sam's money. [00:38:51] Yeah, absolutely. [00:38:53] I think, you know, I was reading this RAND report, which basically like calls out, not in name, but calls out SpaceX and Palantir as the kind of, you know, examples to use as they're looking to fix the issues with DOD, I guess. [00:39:13] Yeah. [00:39:14] And it's interesting, you know, they say in this, I was kind of joking with you, but this entire, it was their, what is it called? [00:39:22] It's their Commission on National Defense Strategy. [00:39:24] You know, it's like a huge RAND report. [00:39:26] I love reading massive RAND PDFs. [00:39:29] This is a little vacation page. [00:39:31] I think it's so interesting. [00:39:33] But it's funny. [00:39:34] You know, it's all about, you know, China, obviously. [00:39:36] China, And diagnosing the bloated security and defense apparatus and bureaucracy of the United States and how it is not well situated for actual war in multiple theaters, as it says, which is stuff that people have been saying for a long time. [00:39:58] And that it doesn't have the technological capabilities, that we don't have the manufacturing capabilities. [00:40:03] All of this stuff we know is true. [00:40:07] But they're basically calling for a kind of like war communism and saying that, I mean, this is a quote from it. [00:40:15] DOD's business practices, Byzantine research and development, and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance. [00:40:28] Such methods are not suited to today's strategic environment. === Space Mining and Futuristic Nostalgia (10:06) === [00:40:34] You know, it goes on. [00:40:36] A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity to produce, maintain, and replenish. [00:40:42] Addressing the shortfall will require increased investment, additional manufacturing and development capacity. [00:40:47] It requires partnership with an industrial base that includes not just large traditional defense manufacturers, but also new entrants and a wide array of companies involved in sub-tier production, cybersecurity, and enabling services. [00:41:03] I like that. [00:41:04] So I'm going to say that's a call out to basically SpaceX and Palantir and the like. [00:41:09] But it's also a call out to my new obsession, which is the gundo. [00:41:14] The gundo. [00:41:15] AKA El Segundo. [00:41:18] But the gundo is kind of, and now we get to go back to this internet, and people will understand why we were talking about it at the top of the episode. [00:41:25] The gundo is like, I really, it's like all I can think of is Obama, Obama era, Palo Alto, which I understand sort of before Obama, but it's really associated with the Obama era, right? [00:41:40] Move Fast, Break Things, Zuckerberg, you know, cannonballing with Sean Parker and Palo Alto, Bilging, Facebook, Millions Not Cool, a Billion School, et cetera. [00:41:50] Everyone knows the culture. [00:41:53] The gundo feels like that, but for whatever this next iteration of, I don't know what we want to call it. [00:42:02] It's quasi-Silicon Valley, not really, high-tech development in the United States is going to be and how it's going to shape not just the Trump years, but whatever comes after the Trump years. [00:42:15] So we should talk about what this is. [00:42:17] It's kind of like a little, let me step back. [00:42:22] El Segundo, aka the gundo, is, if you are not a coastal elite like myself and Max, is a little bedroom community, we'll say, just south of LAX in Los Angeles. [00:42:37] LAX, the worst airport in the world. [00:42:38] Fucking hate LAX. [00:42:40] It's really, really small. [00:42:41] It's like five miles. [00:42:42] There's like 20K residents or something. [00:42:45] It's just like, it's halfway between LAX and Manhattan Beach, basically. [00:42:49] But it is right on the beach. [00:42:50] Yeah. [00:42:51] Very different landscape than Palo Alto. [00:42:54] Very different, yeah. [00:42:55] And the Bay Area. [00:42:57] And it is not, I would say the culture there is not like WeWork neons, neon sign slogans in the office with, you know, vending machine, not even vending machines. [00:43:10] I don't know. [00:43:11] What did WeWork have? [00:43:12] Like big arm tables. [00:43:14] Yeah. [00:43:15] They probably have ping pong tables, but they're a little bit different because they'll be like American flag painted. [00:43:21] Yeah. [00:43:23] But it is not, I guess, what you would, what they would call soft tech. [00:43:27] Yeah. [00:43:27] So we're not building platforms. [00:43:29] We're not building ad, I don't know, ad markets. [00:43:34] We're not building search. [00:43:36] We're not building delivery apps, their favorite but there. [00:43:40] We are building real deal hard tech for the United States government. [00:43:46] For one of them was saying, I wish I could remember the name of the guy who was like, we're not doing software as a service. [00:43:52] We're like building the kingdom of heaven on earth in America. [00:43:56] God bless. [00:43:56] God bless in El Segundo. [00:43:57] The kingdom of heaven on earth in El Segundo. [00:44:00] I think that's Augustus Dorico. [00:44:02] Yeah. [00:44:03] Who's definitely the guy who is like trying the hardest to make the gundo happen? [00:44:07] A thing. [00:44:08] Yeah. [00:44:08] And I think he might have incredible, incredible name. [00:44:12] Oh, God, it's so good. [00:44:13] I'm glad you said it. [00:44:14] I was like, is it Dorico? [00:44:16] But it has to rhyme with Dorico. [00:44:17] Dorito. [00:44:18] I think it's Dorico. [00:44:18] I think it's Dorito. [00:44:19] Augustus Dorico. [00:44:20] Let's just say it is. [00:44:21] Augustus Dorito. [00:44:22] I love it. [00:44:23] He, yeah, he's the head of a company that is investing or working on and developing cloud seeding technology. [00:44:30] I think what's really interesting about this stuff is that it does, it's very Zinternet coded, the culture there. [00:44:38] It is heavily Christian. [00:44:41] They love God, country, guns, but it is Muscle Beach. [00:44:46] It is sports betting bonanza. [00:44:50] It is crypto, meme coin, you know, welcoming. [00:44:56] But it's also very aware of things like the climate emergency. [00:45:03] And it's not, it's not in that like traditional, what you would think conservative coded, I still think it's like millennial mindset of like, climate change isn't real, drill, w drill. [00:45:14] Like all of these guys are investing in massive technology for what they say is to like save America from a dying, the dying planet. [00:45:23] Yeah. [00:45:24] Which is fascinating. [00:45:25] Yeah. [00:45:26] And they're doing like, they're very good at the self-mythology and they have a very good, like, I mean, it's very obviously, these are the guys who are inspired by Elon and Peter Thiel more than anybody else. [00:45:39] And they model their sort of sensibilities culturally and sort of the way they run their companies on this guy. [00:45:45] But they also share with the sort of Zuckerberg era founders the same things you would expect from anybody getting VC capital, which is like working 24-7 and going crazy and like, you know, just working with your other 23-year-old bros all the time. [00:45:58] Just build, just build a factory. [00:45:59] Build a factory. [00:46:00] You can just build a factory. [00:46:01] But what the other ones are. [00:46:03] Some of the big ones are like, there's a Valar, they're all named after Lord of the Rings shit because they're all that stuff is because Valar is Lord of the Rings. [00:46:11] The reference point for anything. [00:46:13] There's one that does microgravity pharmaceuticals, which is like such a fucking William Gibson thing. [00:46:18] Also, is that Radiant? [00:46:19] No, Radiant Nuclear is they're building micro nuclear reactors. [00:46:24] Incredible. [00:46:25] Micro consumer, like Vibe is kind of funnily sort of retro futuristic. [00:46:31] Like the sort of the nuclear stuff, rain seeding, like all the like space drug labs. [00:46:37] It all feels a bit 50s, 60s. [00:46:40] I think the space mining one is called Astrofuge. [00:46:45] No, that's the one they're trying to. [00:46:46] They're developing negative carbon fuel for rockets by mining in space. [00:46:52] Varda space. [00:46:53] VARDA. [00:46:54] Yeah. [00:46:54] Yeah, VARDA space industry. [00:46:55] They're doing orbital manufacturing. [00:46:57] I was actually looking into that, and apparently it's already kind of happening a little bit that there's a lot of upsides to manufacturing pharmaceuticals in microgravity, which is a fucking insane sentence. [00:47:15] But it's like specifically with protein-based drug manufacturing. [00:47:19] There's something about how you crystallize the proteins that microgravity makes it incredibly efficient. [00:47:27] And I think I want to say the same thing goes for semiconductor fabrication. [00:47:32] And that there's a lot of potential for cheap and efficient production in space, which sounds crazy. [00:47:42] Yeah, it's real. [00:47:43] This is like William Gibson, like, you know, space elevator stuff. [00:47:46] Like, there's real. [00:47:48] Yeah. [00:47:48] And it's, you know, it's important as we're saying that to mention that like because of SpaceX and Blue Origin, honestly. [00:47:57] SpaceX, which is in Hawthorne, which is just down the road from some El Segundo. [00:48:01] Yeah, and actually SpaceX first, their first office was in El Scundo. [00:48:04] Yeah, maybe. [00:48:06] But because of the advances that they've made, that the cock, this also sounds insane, cost to orbit is extremely low compared to what you would imagine. [00:48:19] And so the idea of sending shit up to be manufactured in space and then literally sending it back down is not as expensive as you think it would be. [00:48:29] Yeah. [00:48:30] Which again makes me feel a bit queasy. [00:48:33] But SpaceX, I mean, yeah, SpaceX and again, Palantir, but SpaceX specifically, I want to talk about because a lot of these guys are ex-SpaceX. [00:48:43] I think Augustus is like really, he's like 22 or 23 or something. [00:48:46] He's really young. [00:48:47] And I mean, he's got like a crazy mullet. [00:48:50] Like he's very, there's something so interesting about the aesthetics and references of these guys that like only reminds me of something that AI could generate. [00:49:00] Yeah. [00:49:01] Because it's such a mishmash of references where it's this like 60s futurism or 40s like, you know, Oppenheimer push or, you know, the heyday of the space program mixed with like a top gun or like Hulkamania, like Uber masculinity from the 80s. [00:49:23] Like the Oakley's Predators, Oakley's Predator glasses. [00:49:26] Yeah, mixed with like party hard millennial mentality. [00:49:30] Like it's a very weird mishmash that I can't kind of put my finger on. [00:49:34] Plus like white picket fence conservatism. [00:49:37] Yeah, it's, I mean, it's of a piece, I think, with the like the sort of affection that online fascist guys have for like AI generated, like slop images of Christmas morning in 1996 or whatever. [00:49:50] Totally. [00:49:51] Return, return to return to home alone. [00:49:53] Yeah, exactly. [00:49:54] Like return to the SNES or whatever. [00:49:57] It has that same kind of like effect, like patriotic nostalgia, but for like only the most surface level reference that they can recombine in whatever way they sort of feel like they want to do it. [00:50:12] Yeah, totally. [00:50:13] But yeah, I mean, the other thing that I find really interesting about it is how Christian it seems to be because like you never thought of, you know, like the sort of earlier wave of Silicon Valley companies, but software companies were like not only not Christian, but that was like where internet atheism, Reddit atheism as a joke like emerged. [00:50:33] And like this new generation of hardware guys, I mean, like, it's not surprising if you think of them as defense contractors to learn that a lot of them are super Christian. === SpaceX's Legacy in El Segundo (05:16) === [00:50:41] But to like have the sort of Christianity of it be reinserted into the tech industry via this crew is fascinating, I think. [00:50:52] Yeah, I think that some of that too is the, you know, this the Southern California backdrop is like really important to that. [00:51:02] El Segundo, you know, we mentioned that, you know, SpaceX's first location was there, I think, from, if I can remember, I think it was like 2002, 2003. [00:51:13] I can't remember when SpaceX kind of started up. [00:51:15] I have to go back in my Tesla episode notes. [00:51:19] But it's also, I mean, El Segundo has a history as a kind of like space manufacturing, space and defense contracted company manufacturing zone. [00:51:32] It was where even, I think Standard Oil had like its second refinery now. [00:51:37] Hence El Segundo, yeah. [00:51:39] Yes, thank you. [00:51:41] There. [00:51:42] And it was able to, you know, with the development of the highway system, you were able to get fuel out really efficiently. [00:51:49] There's also the second or most or busiest port. [00:51:53] I don't know if it's the second or the first busiest port on the West Coast. [00:51:56] It's like right there in Long Beach. [00:51:59] And so it was, you know, there was a huge boom from basically like the 1940s or early, late 30s, early 40s through to the like mid to late 60s there as we invested in new like defense companies and then the advent of the space program. [00:52:18] And then it all kind of fell off in the 70s when NASA canceled a bunch of shit and we entered like terminal stagnation and develop of, you know, and non-development. [00:52:29] And so there hasn't really been that much there until SpaceX kind of came to town. [00:52:35] And the thing about SpaceX, like that's really, it's like, I hate talking about Elon. [00:52:42] I love talking about Elon, but I also hate talking about Elon. [00:52:44] But SpaceX and Valentir, you know, they prove that you can not only be really small and compete with companies like Raytheon and Boeing, which is important, but also that like the only pathway for you to do that or like to be viable in an industry like that is to win DOD contracts. [00:53:05] And so figuring out how to be flexible, efficient, cost-effective enough in order to win those contracts is like extremely important. [00:53:15] But also like kind of being the like non-bureaucratic, non-red tape, not giving a like don't ask for permission, you know, kind of mentality that Elon has brought to every single aspect of his life in this world, unfortunately, is like a lesson that I think these guys, a lot of whom are ex-SpaceX, have internalized as they've like kind of started these companies. [00:53:43] Yeah, totally. [00:53:44] I mean, I think that's the sort of like, that's the real like legacy of SpaceX is the sort of recognition that actually we're at a place where it's an advantage to be non-like conservative. [00:53:58] I mean, in the small C, sort of like institutionally conservative to move fast and break things, I suppose. [00:54:04] I mean, something I'm interested in, this is like just a sort of observation I've made. [00:54:09] Like I've met a lot of SpaceX engineers who are specifically who are like rocket scientists, literally, but who don't want to work for defense contractors. [00:54:18] And for a long time, SpaceX was kind of the only game in town if you wanted to do that, no matter how much you liked or disliked Elon. [00:54:25] And I'm interested to see, you know, like you're saying, like SpaceX now has, has been around for long enough that it has this whole, you know, sort of graduate, so to speak, like coterie of engineers and people and technicians who've worked on it for a long time. [00:54:41] And, you know, a bunch of them obviously are moving right back into rocketry at their own companies in El Segundo. [00:54:46] And I wonder where, you know, like how, you know, in the same way that PayPal spawned Elon and Teal and all these other guys, like what the sort of the actual personnel legacy of the company will be. [00:55:01] Because I wonder, you know, obviously a lot of it is going to be these kind of DOD contracting, like awful little guys with their Zen and their mullets and whatever. [00:55:08] But I also wonder about the guys who were there because they couldn't bring themselves to work at Boeing or Northrop or whatever and where they end up too. [00:55:14] I mean, the other factor is like similar to Palo Alto, which had Stanford in the background, is that Caltech is like a huge kind of, I don't know, like foil to the industry, whereas like so much of kind of engineering, typical engineering prowess coming out of Caltech, which I think would be like maybe more conservative or maybe more traditional is probably a better way to put that. [00:55:42] And kind of has the sort of like traditional feeders to these big companies. [00:55:49] I think that the gundo positions itself against kind of Caltech in the same way that Zuckerberg positioned himself against Stanford. === DOD Contracting Boom? (09:51) === [00:55:57] Yeah. [00:55:58] You know, and then what we saw is that Stanford sort of changed and kind of reabsorbed a lot of that energy somewhat, thanks to Peter Thiel, obviously. [00:56:09] Yeah. [00:56:10] But, you know, I think that given the Trump admins insistence that they are tearing down as much of the regulatory apparatus as they can, basically in order to make sure that this stuff can get the funding that they think it requires in order to shore up or push America into this like next wave of capitalist development or whatever they imagine. [00:56:39] That like the this being a kind of like cultural blitz doesn't that doesn't seem correct. [00:56:47] No, I mean something that like it keeps occurring to me is even if you think of I mean we've now talked about AI, we've talked about the gundo, we didn't even touch on crypto, which is obviously being beyond talking about the hawk to a meme coin, which you're legally obligated to discuss on the podcast as often as possible. [00:57:04] But like there's all these things that you could you could look at as bubbles in one way or another and insist that they're going to go away, that this is an investment bubble. [00:57:12] But like the way the thing we keep saying, the thing you just said is that like the decisions about where money is going and where the investment is going are being made right now. [00:57:21] Even if it is a bubble, they're being made during the bubble. [00:57:24] And the data centers that get built, the power plants that get built, the kinds of education that people pursue, the kinds of companies that get funded, those are happening in an environment where there's a huge return on investment expected out of almost all of these businesses that we're talking about. [00:57:41] And so It's not enough to just sort of put your fingers in your ears and be like, oh, like AI, it's going to crash out. [00:57:50] It's fake. [00:57:50] It's like, it's not going to, it's hit a wall or whatever. [00:57:54] It's like, okay, but like, we're not going to understand, like, it's going to be five or ten years before the dust settles and we see all the things that, I mean, even longer than that, maybe. [00:58:02] And we see all the ways that money's been directed, the paths that have been closed off to us because of how money's been spent in this moment. [00:58:10] And like, that's, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's also all happening now under a Trump administration, which is just like rapidly deregulatory, capital-friendly, like, you know, whatever other things you want to say about it. [00:58:22] Yeah, definitely. [00:58:23] I mean, I think I was thinking about that when, just because I know we've got to wrap up soon, like, I was thinking about that when I was reading this morning, like this, some like, I don't know, Newswire piece about BlackRock's global outlook, which they had like an incredible quote that is either going to be like the thing that gets like splattered all over the news when there's like the next crisis, or is going to be extremely prescient. [00:58:49] But was like, oh, we now the government has exited the like boom and bust cycle, and now, you know, we just, you know, safely manage the assets of the world or whatever, which I believe is probably what, you know, the late 19th and early 20th century monopoly capitalists also believed. [00:59:10] But they did say, I mean, it's interesting, you know, BlackRock, which is essentially an appendage of the United States, like the state, right? [00:59:18] Like in so many ways, and at least of the central bank, you know, they manage $11.5, $12 trillion of the world's assets. [00:59:28] They are one of the largest, if not the largest, directors of global investment. [00:59:37] And so it's really important to pay attention to what they're saying about where these things are kind of going and what they're seeing. [00:59:45] And so I was looking and they said, you know, mega forces are reshaping economies and their long-term trajectories. [00:59:53] It's no longer about short-term fluctuations in activity. [00:59:55] I mean, that's, of course, what an asset manager would say. [00:59:59] 2024 has reinforced our view that we are not in a business cycle. [01:00:02] AI has been a major, major market driver. [01:00:05] Inflation fell without growth slowdown, and typical recession signals failed. [01:00:12] We believe the world economy is currently in the process of being entirely reshaped by the emergence of five new mega forces, including the shift to net zero carbon emissions, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic trends, and digitization of finance and AI. [01:00:27] And so you can see the ways in which, if that's how they see, I mean, what they're saying is like, this is where capital investment is going, right? [01:00:36] Into net zero carbon. [01:00:38] We already know that. [01:00:39] Into electrifying the world, at least the West, into managing the fallout from whatever potential new trade blocks will emerge in this kind of geopolitical re-engineering that's happening. [01:01:01] And we don't need to talk about the demographic trends, but that's obviously a big factor when you're looking at aging populations and a shrinking labor force. [01:01:07] Yeah, totally. [01:01:08] Coupled with big leaps in potential productivity that AI might bring, at least in the short term. [01:01:18] I'm not convinced about its viability in the long term. [01:01:21] And so if they're directing investment, and I mean massive capital investment, basically directing the larges of the largest state in the world, you know, it's important to take this stuff seriously. [01:01:34] And I think, Sarah, I mean, I talk to you about this a lot, which is just that it really bothers me when people just want to kind of like turn away from this and say it's going to be, you know, just another NFT bubble or whatever, which, by the way, are back and to what people make money on still all the time. [01:01:54] That stuff didn't go away. [01:01:56] It's just been reabsorbed. [01:01:58] And, you know, you know, I mean, it's going to be a wild four years for crypto. [01:02:04] And like the bubble burst and it didn't matter because, I mean, among other things, because these are like political problems we're talking about, they're not technical problems that has nothing, it doesn't, in some sense, has less to do with the technology. [01:02:15] The technology may be functionless and useless, but if it can be a store of value for people who feel like maybe someday they can get the government to bail them out of their seven squillion and crypto or whatever, they can make use of it. [01:02:29] Yeah, it's like it's there's a real like the change is happening. [01:02:35] You know, and you don't like, you don't even have to look at the Valor Atomics guys and the Gundo bros. [01:02:41] Like the extent to which you should, because they're really funny. [01:02:44] They are good. [01:02:45] But you have to, like, Jeff Bezos, you know, like putting, like, changing the Washington Post endorsement of Kamala because he sees the writing on the wall. [01:02:55] Like, the sense is even the biggest, the sort of most stable, the big, the FANG companies are also cognizant of a shift in how the U.S. government and the world is understanding their role and treating them. [01:03:11] And I think they're sort of feeling themselves right now. [01:03:14] I think there's like a, you know, they see themselves as ultimately ascendant and they're looking very much looking forward to the next four years. [01:03:22] Well, I don't know if we are. [01:03:23] No. [01:03:24] Which is your favorite mega trend of those four? [01:03:28] Oh, what if I said demographic changes? [01:03:30] That was because I was wondering what we're doing. [01:03:31] That's what we're going to do. [01:03:31] Yeah, yeah, definitely. [01:03:33] I love demographic changes. [01:03:34] That's so great. [01:03:35] Population flows, that's one of my favorite flows. [01:03:37] I know. [01:03:39] My favorite is, I mean, I think the most exciting, because it's the weirdest, is all the geopolitical kind of like, I find green tech to be very boring, so it's not that. [01:03:51] Come on. [01:03:53] But I do think that like an underreported story about green tech, by the way, is the like complete like embrace of all of like the the need and the ability and the direction of like moving to zero net emissions by like the biggest companies in the world. [01:04:17] And that this is not, you know, this is no longer, it's not the Sunrise crew like in Nancy Pelosi's office anymore. [01:04:25] Like this is like just, and it's not even ESG bullshit. [01:04:28] It's like, no, no, this is just what's happening and this is what's going on. [01:04:32] It's so good to know that somebody turned out to be in charge finally. [01:04:35] I guess. [01:04:35] I mean, I don't know exactly what that means politically other than they understand the reality of the situation. [01:04:43] But yeah, I mean, I don't, yeah, I think it's got to be the geopolitical ones. [01:04:47] Yeah, that's a good mega trend. [01:04:49] That's a mega trend to watch out for. [01:04:51] Yeah. [01:04:51] You heard it here first. [01:04:53] Do you know what else is in El Segundo, by the way? [01:04:55] What? [01:04:56] The Lakers practice facility. [01:04:57] That's right. [01:04:58] Well, they're clearly not spending enough time there. [01:05:00] No. [01:05:01] They are on strike, it seems, from practicing and from their coach. [01:05:04] Just a lot of losers in El Segundo as well. [01:05:06] Turns out you can say a lot of shit on Twitter and on podcasts, but then you try to go out in the real world and do the job. [01:05:12] The men in the arena. [01:05:13] Maybe you can't do it. [01:05:14] Maybe you can't do it. [01:05:16] Maybe you won't command the respect of the team. [01:05:37] See, I don't even do a sign-off because I feel too funny. [01:05:40] I can't do a formal, like, well, thanks so much. [01:05:42] Goodbye kind of thing. [01:05:43] Yeah, well, goodbyes are difficult in life. [01:05:47] And overrated. === Goodbye On TV (01:15) === [01:05:49] You think? [01:05:49] Yeah. [01:05:50] I just finished re-watching Mad Men. [01:05:52] I guess it's like a TV thing, but they never say goodbye on the phone in the show. [01:05:55] They're always talking to somebody and they just hang up. [01:05:58] And it feels like it'd be very rude in real life, but it would be very boring, I guess, on TV to have that. [01:06:03] Do you want to hear my impression of Mad Men? [01:06:05] Do it. [01:06:06] Shut the door. [01:06:07] Yeah. [01:06:08] Shut the door. [01:06:09] Come in. [01:06:09] Have a seat. [01:06:10] Shut the door. [01:06:11] Yeah. [01:06:11] That's it. [01:06:12] Don Draper's always like, what? [01:06:15] I don't say goodbye. [01:06:17] I say aloha. [01:06:18] And that way you don't know if I'm saying hello or goodbye. [01:06:20] I say shalom. [01:06:22] They call that the Jewish aloha. [01:06:26] I'm just going to wrap up because we don't know where that's going to go. [01:06:28] Wrap it up. [01:06:29] I'm Liz. [01:06:31] I'm Young Chomsky. [01:06:32] Is that how we close the show? [01:06:34] And I'm Freeze. [01:06:36] That's true, our old friend Unlimited over here. [01:06:39] Um, and this has been Tronon. [01:06:41] We'll see you next time. [01:06:43] Bye-bye. [01:06:58] Jesus got shooting. [01:07:02] Come out. [01:07:03] Come out.