LIMITLESS: This Is Far Bigger Than The Internet Boom | Shaun Maguire

Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia and former physicist turned investor, joins the Limitless Podcast to explore why we’re on the verge of a technological renaissance. From AI and silicon photonics to humanoid robots and space infrastructure, Shaun makes the case that the next 20 years will make the internet boom look tame. We dive deep into why America needs 10 SpaceX-level companies, the return of hardware innovation, the energy constraints of the future, and how frontier technologies like Neuralink and Mars colonization might reshape civilization. ------ 💫 LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW https://pod.link/1813210890 https://www.youtube.com/@Limitless-FT https://x.com/LimitlessFT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:36 Who’s Shaun Maguire? 9:24 Investing in the AI Age 13:06 Hardware Manufacturing 21:58 Hardware Precedes Software Revolutions 42:20 Energy 49:53 Space Solar Reflectors 55:45 Space Economy 1:04:15 Elon Musk 1:14:24 Robotics 1:17:39 Neuralink 1:25:22 Doom Scenarios 1:32:02 Closing Thoughts ------ RESOURCES Shaun Maguire https://x.com/shaunmmaguire Sequoia Capital https://www.sequoiacap.com/ Josh Kale https://x.com/Josh_Kale David Hoffman https://x.com/TrustlessState ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If America can stay at the cutting edge of space, get to the cutting edge of silicon photonics, if Tesla and then others can basically get to the cutting edge of humanoid robotics, which is something that I strongly believe is

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  why fundamentally cheap space travel will unlock so many things that will actually turn into quality of life improvements for the average person who's left on planet Earth.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  You know, people have this mental model that space is very

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Picture a guy who treats the frontier like his backyard. That's Sean McGuire, and he was gracious enough to join us on the show today to discuss energy breakthroughs, factory floors humming with humanoid robots, brain machine computers, and space exploration. In fact, Sean's even invested in a company who shoots satellites into outer space to beam light rays back at Earth and turn night into day. This is, it's crazy stuff. And he walks us through exactly which of these sci fi visions are already sneakily here today, which will upend entire industries in months, and which have the opportunity to reshape entire civilizations over the next couple of years. Some of the timelines even left me speechless.

• 0:59David Hoffman?

  And that is what the Limitless podcast is all about. So Bankless Nation, welcome to Limitless, where we explore the frontier technologies that are poised to reshape our world. I'm David Hoffman, joined by my co-host Josh Kael, and our very first guest is Sequoia Capital Frontier Tech investor Sean McGuire. Now, if you are hearing this on the Bankless feed, don't worry, Bankless isn't going anywhere. And if you found us on the Limitless feed, congrats, you're ahead of the curve. Limitless is a brand new podcast out of Bankless, focusing on frontier technologies and getting ahead of a rapidly accelerating future. Bankless will return to focusing on crypto and Marcus with Ryan and me at the helm. And Limitless is where Josh, Jaws and I, and also sometimes Ryan, will chase the future.

• 1:43David Hoffman?

  How AI and other frontier technologies are going to impact our lives and what we need to know and do about it. If you're familiar with the Bankless cadence, you'll find yourself right at home with Limitless. On Monday, we're going to do deep dive interviews with founders and investors that are building the future. And then on Thursdays, we have the weekly AI roll up, our fast-moving recap of the week's biggest AI headlines. Now, I'm pretty biased here, but I think the AI roll up is truly the most accessible, informative, and engaging AI news show out there. So if all of this sounds like your jam, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app or YouTube. There's a link in the show notes to go find Limitless. And if you don't mind, we would definitely appreciate a quick five star review and also sharing it with your friends to help more curious minds stay ahead of the curve. Your support, of course, powers everything we do.

• 2:27David Hoffman?

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• 3:12David Hoffman?

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• 3:57David Hoffman?

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• 4:41David Hoffman?

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• 5:23David Hoffman?

  Audited by ZK Security, the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X. Bankless Nation, today on the podcast, we have Sean McGuire. He's a partner at Sequoia Capital. Sean's got one of the more interesting backgrounds that I've ever seen. Starting out working as a physicist, working on quantum gravity, then spent time working at DARPA, where he was deployed to Afghanistan, then shifted gears into startups and investing. He co-founded a cybersecurity company called Expanse, which was later acquired by Palo Alto Networks. And then he's also been an early backer of companies like Visa, Watershed, SpaceX. At Sequoia, he's focusing on early-stage investments, especially in hard and frontier technologies, which is why we wanted to bring him on the show today. Sean, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  What's up, guys? Thrilled to be here. First of all, did not start with quantum gravity. Started probably with an F in algebra two. So I've had a lot of failures before the successes. And unfortunately, I was on early backer in Visa. I think he meant Viz.

• 6:22David Hoffman?

  Viz, excuse me.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Just all good. Visa would have been pretty legendary and hopefully Vise becomes even bigger.

• 6:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I guess Visa is just the wrong generation. It's a little bit earlier than all of us here. So maybe with that, since I need a little bit more help kind of understanding your background, just expand on your perch a little bit for listeners who just might need more context about, you know, what your deal is, who you are, and especially as we get into more modern times with all of the crazy technologies that we have today. Just explaining a little bit of your context and what interests you and how your arc has been, I think would be pretty helpful.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Thrilled to be here. I've been a big fan of the pod for a long time.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  So I'll try to keep this pretty brief, but I would say kind of my childhood was characterized by just like not listening to what I was told to do. Instead of paying attention in school or like even going to class a lot of the time, I just stayed home or would do, or even in school would focus on my own learning. And I've basically been obsessed with computers, the internet, like then physics, then math. Basically my entire life, like computers really started at age of seven. And so I kind of sacrificed not learning English very well for learning a lot about computers at a young age.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  And, you know, I took it pretty seriously. I was really into building computers, really into like honestly, understanding like how computers are made, understanding silicon at a pretty young age and understanding a lot of industries. I've just kind of been driven by curiosity my whole life. I was really obsessed with the chemical industry as a kid. I'm happy to talk about the chemical industry today to me. It's honestly one of the most fascinating industries in the world. It's five trillion a year in sales. No one knows anything about it. It's bigger than oil and gas. It's where everything comes from. But it's just like I'm giving that as an example that I have 100 anecdotes like that. It's just kind of being really interested in different things and spending time going pretty deep at a young age and.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  You know, now as an investor, I get to kind of invest in those things. Invest in things. Basically, I get to invest in things that were childhood passions. And so I can make chemicals instance. I'm an investor in a chemicals marketplace called Node, K N O W D E. And almost every investment I've made at Sequoia can be traced to some deep childhood obsession. Like with SpaceX, I was completely obsessed with space from a very young age. Like I started off at the age of nine being obsessed with the solar system, but then like starting to learn about rockets. And, you know, like taking that all the way to having a failed space launch company in my early twenties.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  But kind of, I think that's what people need to understand about me is that the investments I make now, like it's not coming from two years of thinking about something, it's coming from, you know, 20 to 30 years.

• 9:17David Hoffman?

  I think that that background is really helpful because the reason why we want to get you on today is just really just to talk about all the frontier technologies that really seem to be maturing seemingly all at once. People often joke that the world has not been the same ever since Harambe was killed in 2016. But I think I want to actually take that a little bit more seriously and fast forward to the world has not been the same ever since ChatGPT 3.5 came out in 2022. Because now, just a few years later, Elon is catching rockets flying out of the air. We have actual robots walking among us. I just saw a video today of a robot boxing league coming out of China. So that's pretty crazy. Driverless cars are actually in production, driving people around. And then now also, of course, we have people talking about actual AGI coming in in two years or less.

• 10:02David Hoffman?

  So it just feels like this current moment of time seems especially unique. And it seems like you've been thinking about a lot of these things as they have been maturing. From your vantage point as an investor in Sequoia, how does this just period of history feel for you right now?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Well articulated. I mean, this period feels insanely exciting. I feel, I truly feel like unbelievably privileged and lucky to be an investor in this time. I have been very passionate about the history of venture capital, you know, for honestly for over 20 years. And I think that if you look in VC, there were kind of like, depends how you define it, but like two to four really great periods before today. And I think we're, you know, and some examples were the early computing era. It depends how broad your interests are, but you know, early internet era, then like

• 10:59Speaker 00

  the dot com era. I would say in my, in my opinion, like the early mobile era was incredible with giant companies being created very quickly. And now we're in this kind of new era where you have both AI and a research into the hardware happening simultaneously. And so I truly feel incredibly lucky to be an investor right now. And I think the, to build on that, I think the AI stuff is more obvious to the public. Like it's talked about all the time. Like you're, you know, it's kind of incredible. And Nvidia has become like a hardware company has become such a popular hot

• 11:40Speaker 00

  company. But to take a bigger look at this, I wrote a manifesto at Sequoia about three years ago. It was like a hardware manifesto. And basically what I said in it was, if you look at Sequoia, 53 year old firm now, it was 50 years old when I wrote this. For the first 25 years of the firm, Sequoia made almost all of its money in hardware. In the last 25 years, we've made almost all of our money in software. And the question I asked was like, is hardware dead? Long live hardware? Or was there some weird kind of quirk of history or secular trend of why, you know, hardware was not as popular, not as great of a way to make money? And that

• 12:22Speaker 00

  might come back. And I'm like, it was a straw man question. I'm strongly in the latter camp. And if you want, like right now, I can kind of drill into some of the Like insights I have there, but I really think we're entering this dual kind of golden phase of both hardware returning in mass at the same time that AI, which has both a hardware element and a software element, happening simultaneously. So it's pretty wild.

• 12:51David Hoffman?

  I think that that actually is where we want to go first in this agenda, not specifically through hardware, but also discussing manufacturing. There's a bunch of subjects that we want to go one by one, starting with hardware and manufacturing. We also want to talk about energy, space exploration, everything Elon Musk is doing, hardware, human connections, even chemistry, if we can find time. But let's start there about manufacturing. As you said, the first 25 years of Sequoia's returns were all hardware investments. And I think this question of manufacturing is also especially timely, given that we are in the midst of this Trump's Liberation Day maneuvers, trying to bring back manufacturing back to the United States. Maybe just talk about the importance of hardware manufacturing, generally speaking, for software, and then also how important it is for here inside the United States.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'll start with, I mean, like, whatever one's view of politics are, like, America found itself in a position over the last 25 years, where very little of like advanced technologies are made in America anymore. And this makes it much harder. This is like one of the reasons why it's been hard to create hardware companies in America. I think it was much bigger than that. Like, the primary thing is just where we were in Moore's Law and where we were in like different big platforms. But whatever the like hardware supply chain is in a place, it's much easier to innovate on like the final end product. And if you go back

• 14:22Speaker 00

  So like, I'll give an analogy from history. I was incredibly lucky as a child, like genuinely just insanely lucky. I met this man named Arnold Beckman. I ran into him, he was being pushed in a stroller and he asked me a bunch of science questions. It's kind of a crazy story, I was like eight years old, or sorry, I was nine years old. And this guy, I think Arnold is probably the most underrated person in the history of American technology, quite literally, like I think the most underrated person. I'll spend a couple of minutes on this, I think it is like very important anecdote to understand kind of the challenges of manufacturing in America today. So basically Beckman was a professor at Caltech. He was a chemistry professor, he invented the, so he was doing advanced chemistry, but

• 15:07Speaker 00

  he invented the portable pH meter to help farmers measure the acidity of oranges and when it was ripe, when it was ripe time to pick oranges. And that ended up becoming a company called Beckman Instruments, which ended up at its height employing about 2,000 chemistry PhDs and they made many, many different interests, instruments primarily for the chemicals industry and then for early pharma industry. And so anyway, so he was doing that and he was known as like one of the apex minds at Caltech and there was an undergrad named Bill Shockley. Like Shockley was a brilliant guy and he was attracted to Beckman and so he became one of Beckman's kind of proteges. And then Shockley went to MIT to do his PhD, then he went to Bell Labs, invented the

• 15:52Speaker 00

  silicon transistor when he was at Bell Labs. Shockley's a much more common name than Beckman. Shockley got the Nobel Prize for inventing the silicon transistor. He went, this is, this is the part of the story that people don't, don't know. So Shockley ended up going actually back to Caltech after Bell Labs for a couple of years to be visiting faculty, kind of figure out what to do next and kind of back to work with his mentor, Arnold Beckman. And this is where they decided to start Shockley Semiconductor. Something that people don't know has kind of been lost in history is Shockley was actually not an independent company. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Beckman Instruments, of this chemical instrumentation company. And so they started Shockley. Beckman was the chairman.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  You know, they hired brilliant people like Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and all, you know, all these people that became the traders eight. They left to start Fairchild. Then, you know, Intel spun out of that. Beckman continued to be mentor to like the Intel founders as they built the company. Okay, so like here's, here's where we get to the, the core point. For probably the first 30 years or so of building silicon, the hard thing was making wafers, like was making very pure wafers and other chemical processes, like to make a silicon wafer has about 20 chemical steps.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  And then a bunch of the other hard problems really were all chemical problems. In the last 20 years, the hard problem has become lithography. It's, it's etching out these very fine, you know, features. But for 20 to 30 years, the hardest thing was chemicals. And having this guy, Arnold Beckman, that had this insane chemicals company with 2,000 genius chemistry PhDs that were always making new equipment. Having that sit literally right next to Intel meant that whenever Intel was running into a problem, kind of scaling the next generation of, of like silicon, trying to

• 17:57Speaker 00

  push, you know, Moore's law forward, they would basically just share it in real time. Like, hey, we're running into this problem. They'd share it with Beckman and his chemists. And they'd be like, oh, you know, this might be able to solve it. Or if not, they would come up with some new instrument that could solve it. And having this coupling of the people that were pushing silicon forward, sitting right next to people that were pushing chemicals forward and chemical instrumentation and sensors, et cetera, is what led to being able to scale the whole system at lightning speed. And the thing that we've lost in America in the last 25 years is, is we've lost this supply chain. We've lost this coupling, you know? And so you have a couple very unique instances.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  You have Elon, basically, that has gone and into these kind of totally new areas, areas, and built his own supply chains, kind of himself for his own companies. And so he's able to have this tight coupling because he's basically doing everything in, like within his own companies. But for almost every other company, like if you are a drone company and your limiting factor is making motors, like the motors are being made in China, at least the best ones are being made in China. And, you know, it's much harder to talk to the engineers. I mean, and now with what's happening in the world, like we can't even buy motors from them for a defense-grade drone.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  But you don't get to go talk to the people building the components and learn what's coming one year from now. What are the hard... And you don't get to tell them what are your problems and have them go start putting them in their roadmap right now. And kind of getting that back, getting the whole supply chain back, the whole, like, all these different components, it is not something you can do in five years. Like, it's, it's not even something you can really do in a decade. Maybe in individual verticals, like if we decide, you know, making drones is a core national priority, then we can probably bring the supply chain just for drones into America in less than 10 years.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  But like, if you wanted to do leading-edge chip fabrication, like I, I think America would really struggle, even with like 100% max effort to, you know, catch up to where the cutting-edge will be in 10 years, over the next 10 years. Because the, the supply chain is a few orders of magnitude more complex than for drones. And so, this is kind of, it was one of the biggest mistakes, I think, in business history or in national history for America to let its entire supply chain kind of go, starting in the late 90s, to China. And I personally think it's very important that we bring it back. And I have a bunch of, like, theories and philosophies about how we should do this.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  I, I think my view is like kind of different than how most people are thinking about it today. But you know, if if your view of the world is that there will never be conflict again, like we're at the end of history, then sure, globalization is great, like outsource your supply chains, buy from everyone. But if you believe that like we're not at the end of history, then I think it's pretty important to like make at least critical components in America. And you know, but I think we can't be naive about how hard this will be. And like you have to do it kind of systematically.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I was super interested in talking to you about is where those constraints actually lie. When it comes to manufacturing here, what does the optimistic bull case look like for bringing that back on shore? And you said that you made this point a little while ago that I really liked, which was that every every software evolution is is preceded by a hardware revolution. And I guess I was really interested on like where we are on that spectrum of progress and where we are on the spectrum of progress and how we're able to get to the place where we have this optimistic case for manufacturing. It's like the example was like because the iPhone, we got the App Store because of the GPU, we have AI mining. Are we software constrained or are we hardware constrained? And where are those limitations? And how do we break through them to bring the manufacturing back to the United States?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Man, thank you for asking this. What a layup. Like, this is my favorite question. I would say there were two parts to it. On the point that hardware revolutions precede software revolutions, I really strongly believe this. I think it's almost a definitional point. You know, if you want to have the App Store, which enables creating a bunch of, you know, creating Uber and a bunch of these big companies, you have to have the iPhone. To have the iPhone, you have to have Qualcomm, you have to have Broadcom, you have to have 20 years of building out networks and building out, you know, comms, technology, almost all of that was on the hardware level. If you want to have deep learning, you need

• 22:51Speaker 00

  to have the GPU, that's 20 years of progress. If you want to have cloud computing, you have to have very cheap commodity, kind of the whole point of what is a cloud? It's basically the idea that you can put a bunch of cheap commodity hardware in one place and then put distributed systems, you basically use like algorithms on top of this commodity hardware to kind of

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Handle failure, handle, you know, things breaking in the hardware in a fault tolerant way, which gives you a giant cost advantage over, you know, hosting your own hardware. And basically, we had to have 20 plus years of, of like, memory and CPUs, et cetera, getting cheaper to, to do that. You know, part of why VR is not better right now, I mean, this is what people talk about. The hardware is not that great, and it's gone a lot better, and the Vision Pro is a lot better, but we're still not there. I, with AI, I personally, and I think this is much more obvious now, but I've been saying this for many years, like, I still think we're wildly hardware limited right now.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  It's like, even if we have AGI in two years, like, the number of units of AGI we would have would probably be very small, you know, like, in a hypothetical world, let's say it takes a gigawatt data center to have like, one AGI, you know, we won't have that many gigawatt data centers at that point. And for any gigawatt data center, you can probably do the same thing with, call it, 10 megawatts, like, 100x more efficient, not even on the algorithm side, purely on the hardware level. Like, if you start using more silicon photonics, like, optimized chips, just way better interconnects,

• 24:45Speaker 00

  these types of things, you know, you can probably get like, 100x improvements, simply just by better hardware. Anyways, I think, I think that AI is going to be limited by hardware for the next five to 10 years. And don't get me wrong, I think we're going to make unbelievable progress on the software side as well, in parallel. This is one of these beautiful periods where like, the software and hardware are co-evolving with each other, and, but the software basically always evolves faster than hardware. So anyways, I, I, it's like, on a much bigger level, I think we basically hit the end of a bunch of, a bunch of like, software revolutions, more or less at the same time.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And so it didn't really leave many places to go. Like, we hit the end of the mobile revolution roughly at the same time than I think we hit the end of the traditional cloud revolution. I'm not talking AI. AI is like the one area of software that I think is kind of at the beginning of a giant, giant revolution. You know, powered by hardware, though, and I will just say, even in AI hardware, like, what we're seeing right now wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Nvidia buying Mellanox, you know, or Mellanox existing independently if Nvidia was still able to use it. Basically, Mellanox is an internet connect company. It's actually Israeli company.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Sequoia was a seed investor, acquired by, for $8 billion by Nvidia five or six years ago. I can't remember when. And basically, like, Mellanox is what lets Nvidia have good, full systems, not just, you know, single GPUs, but full systems and, you know, ultra-high bandwidths in these systems. And it's probably the real reason why Nvidia has a moat over AMD and Intel today was Mellanox. But there was a lot of progress on the hardware side that's enabling the AI revolution we're seeing right now. Kind of on the first question, which was, how do we bring back manufacturing to the West? What would that look like? I think the, I think we should all learn from the best examples we've seen.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  To me, the two companies in America doing manufacturing the best right now are SpaceX and Tesla. I'm wearing a SpaceX hat right now.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Amazing company, my favorite company in the world. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to pick favorites, but come on.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Likewise badass.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  It's just an incredible company. But basically, look, I think SpaceX is one of the only, I think it's maybe, it's the only company I can think of, along with actually Mellanox, that is outperforming China across the board. Even Tesla is facing like very real competition from Chinese auto companies. And there's certain areas where Tesla's ahead, there's certain areas where the Chinese EV companies are ahead. But SpaceX is very far ahead of every Chinese rocket company. We, like, SpaceX should not take this for granted. They will never take it for granted. They work at maximum speed, but...

• 27:52Speaker 00

  I think it's, we should learn from the fact that these two companies were able to build supply chains, build giant manufacturing companies in America that are the best in the world in their categories. And I think basically the lesson that I would take away is, you know, they started off with initial vehicles that were like, that had a market, but were like a low enough level of complexity that a company could do it. So like the Roadster for Tesla or the Falcon 1 for SpaceX, which was, you know, Falcon 1 was not a great rocket, but proved that they can do it. And then it became the Falcon 9, which was a, like an okay rocket. Before the Falcon 9 could be reused, like it was still not at the state

• 28:37Speaker 00

  of the art, you know, in the history of rocketry, like there were probably some better rockets than the Falcon 9, expendable. But by starting with these things and vertically integrating along the way, it put these companies in a position to where then when they got to like the Falcon 9 usable, or call it the Model S, they had actually intersected and become like best in the world in their classes. And they controlled their own supply chain. And so then as the companies scaled, they could keep investing in the supply chain. You know, SpaceX announced recently that like with Starlink used terminals, they're now even making their own PCB, you know, doing their own PCB assembly, which is a

• 29:22Speaker 00

  much easier problem than say like making a leading edge chip. But we haven't been doing much of this in North America recently. And so like the fact that you start off as a rocket company and it leads all the way to be doing like PCB assembly is just very bullish for manufacturing in America. And then once you have a big factory doing PCB assembly, you know, the people that work at SpaceX doing that, like someday some of them will leave and like they'll, they'll actually know how to do this and they'll probably start doing, maybe they'll start a company that just does PCB assembly for other American companies and just, these things catalyze entire supply chains and then ecosystems beyond that.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  And so anyways, for me, I think a giant mistake would be America trying to intersect Chinese manufacturing in areas that are already mature or already on exponential trends. I think we have to go try to find what are the next areas, like what are the things that are relatively new, where we can go kind of invest in them now and get ahead and then build vertically integrated supply chains there. And we have like roughly two today in, you know, electric vehicle manufacturing with Tesla and SpaceX with space launch. But I, I think we need like 10 of these. And honestly, I think that if America had, I think it's as simple as if you have roughly

• 30:48Speaker 00

  10 SpaceXs and Teslas that are vertically integrated, primarily manufacturing in the West, that alone will basically make all of manufacturing, that's like enough to revitalize all of manufacturing in the West. And so to get, to take this like one step further, I am unbelievably bullish on a 20 year timeframe on silicon photonics. So almost everything that we use today, you know, with silicon are silicon electronics. So, you know, a GPU is, it's electronics, like the computation is happening via electrons, not photons.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  You know, almost every sensor we use is an electronic sensor. So like a lot of the sensors in the iPhone, et cetera, like electronic sensors, almost every, anyways, like CPUs are electronic, almost everything is electronic. Silicon electronics is so far along in its manufacturing curve that getting to the leading edge is very hard. I mean, like hundreds of billions of dollars minimum, plus 10 years at a minimum to even have a chance of getting to the leading edge. I think you, even there probably wouldn't catch up.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Silicon photonics, in my opinion, is just now, like just now, getting to the point where like the first real commercial applications have started to happen. And once you have first real commercial applications of something, that's when you can start to, you get this feedback loop where you start to get revenue, which causes investment, and that drives the cost down because they're building fab facilities that are optimized for photonics, not for electronics. And, you know, then as the cost goes down, you can make other products, and then the supply chain gets better, and we get better at making reliable, you know, lasers that go on chip, which are a prerequisite for silicon photonics. And I mean, I could talk for a long time about silicon photonics, but I am, I think

• 32:51Speaker 00

  it's, I think silicon photonics will be as important in the 21st century as silicon electronics was in the 20th. And I think that no one is ahead right now. Like, this is something where America can easily win in silicon photonics manufacturing, if we're to kind of do it the right way and be smart about it right now. That said, like, both China and Taiwan have, they, they feel the same way, and I think they've identified in the last, really just in the last like 18 months, silicon photonics as critical technologies for the next, you know, two decades. And so they're now just starting to very heavily invest in it. And I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna take this a little further.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  These things, these things are of national strategic importance. And so with TSMC, until about 18 months ago, TSMC was willing to, so when you make a chip, there's many steps to it. You know, one step is fabricating the, you know, the device. Another step is packaging it, which is kind of when you take the chip or whatever and you kind of more or less like put the hood on it and put all the wires that come in and out of the chip, and you test and make sure that everything is kind of working properly, and a few other steps in there.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Until about 18 months ago, TSMC was willing to package. So packaging is incredibly hard. Packaging is probably harder than than fabricating the chips. And most people don't understand this, but packaging is probably harder than fabricating the chips. And TSMC was willing to package Silicon Photonics chips made by other fabs. Like if you had a chip made by Global Foundries, TSMC was still willing to package it because TSMC is the best in the world at packaging chips. But in the last in the last 18 months, they basically stopped packaging Silicon Photonics chips made by other companies. So you have to now do everything with TSMC, which

• 34:57Speaker 00

  basically makes it, it makes a strong incentive for the leading companies to only work with TSMC, which makes it hard for any other company to kind of get inroads in Silicon Photonics. And so I think this is like highly symbolic of how strategic Taiwan and TSMC view, which are deeply intertwined, view Silicon Photonics. But I think that's smart of them. Like I don't, I don't blame them. I think that's brilliant. Like great leadership by Taiwan. They're playing the game the right way. But it's just, it's, it's, I think, real confirmation of my point of how important Silicon Photonics is. And this is one area, like if, if America can stay at the cutting edge of space,

• 35:40Speaker 00

  stay like, you know, get to the cutting edge of Silicon Photonics, you know, get, stay at the cutting edge of of EVs. If Tesla and then others can basically get to the cutting edge of humanoid robotics, which is something that like I strongly believe is coming. And I think Tesla, Tesla is very well suited to manufacture these things at scale. And like, I hope the space, I hope there are many winners in America. I hope it's like a highly competitive space with many winners, but manufacturing things at scale is really, really hard. I think Tesla is very well suited for making humanoid robots.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Just as a like, I'll, I'll kind of end this monologue in one second, but something that I think is Oftentimes missed when people look at hardware companies. Well, basically, I think hardware companies. So with software companies, software companies usually get harder to build. The bigger you get, like it gets harder to acquire customers. Once you, because there's not, it's not that hard to replicate the code of a software company. Once you prove that a market's good, competitors will come in. And then it becomes harder to acquire customers and all these things. With hardware companies, it's really hard to get them to work. But once they work, they actually generally get easier with scale.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  There's many reasons for this, like it's insanely hard to get the supply chain working. It's very hard to make the thing. It's very hard to work out all the kinks in the system. It's, you know, there's usually like a baseline number of things you have to build to get the system to work. But once you have a working, if you look at basically every hardware company in history, almost every hardware company has produced many of their own products organically. You know, Apple has so many products. Tesla has many products. Nvidia has many products. Broadcom has many products. Qualcomm has many products. Like any hardware company has lots of products. And so if you use Apple as an analogy, you know, Apple isn't fabricating their own devices,

• 37:52Speaker 00

  but they are designing them. The Vision Pro reuses a huge number of components from the iPhone. So like the, you know, Face ID is reused. A bunch, you know, the accelerometers are reused. The magnetometers are reused. Like I, I think, I may be wrong on this, but I think the Vision Pro has about a thousand sensors in it. And some of those are like, you know, 10 of the same sensor. But I, I think my estimate is something like 950 of the thousand were reused, like ported over from other Apple products. And there's called 50 that were like net new designed for the Vision Pro. This is such an advantage of hardware companies of like, once you get going of getting

• 38:37Speaker 00

  to reuse other products. And this is something where for Tesla with Optimus, like I think quite, there's, there's a lot of things that get to be reused from, and even if not of specific like components, the processes or supply chain to make them is basically the same supply chain as making cars. And so it's like, by starting off, by getting really good at making cars in America, it can lead to making many other products, even reusing a lot of the components in there. And so this is kind of like, my core thesis is we have to have about 10 SpaceX Teslas. And that's how you really bring manufacturing back to America.

• 39:14David Hoffman?

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• 39:58David Hoffman?

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• 40:42David Hoffman?

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• 41:11Speaker 02

  Man, and there it is. I personally, I love the monologue. That was great. I think you're really good at explaining things on first principles. So I kind of want to apply that to the next category, which is how do we power all of these things that you just spoke about? It's how do we power the robotics, the electric cars, the actual manufacturing and factories that are required to build all of these things? Do we have the energy capability now to even do that? Or are there key unlocks that need to happen on the way before we could start making things at the scale that you're describing?

• 41:40Speaker 00

  I mean, amazing. Another great question. I'm very happy that America has woken up to like just how fundamental energy is. And this was kind of lost from the conversation for a decade or so as like climate change took priority over kind of growth. And I understand that philosophy, but if you like GDP is just extremely correlated with power production, electricity generation. And we really stopped investing in power generation in America.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  And like, I don't mean fully stop. We've had a lot of, a lot of growth, but we have not been investing in it anywhere near the same, to the same level as China. I, I think probably like if America were to fail in like manufacturing resurgence, I think it would be because of just power constraints. So just not having low enough power costs and not having enough just power generation. So I, I think this is the most important question. And how do we get there? Look, the, so obviously we need to start.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  We need to invest in things that will be good long-term power generation sources. But I think the only thing that lets you like really have lots of power generation in short term is using fossil fuels. And it's kind of, this is maybe an unpopular view, but I basically view the world as like there's peacetime and there's wartime and kind of different, you should have different optimization during peacetime versus wartime. You know, obviously, there's hot wars, things like World War I, World War II, where a lot of American industry got devoted towards making, you know, equipment for the wars.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  But then you have the Cold War, which is something slightly different, where, you know, this is again, an unpopular view, but you should have a different set of rules during war. And personally, I'm glad that America fought the Cold War. I think there were many blunders during the Cold War. You know, like many aspects of the Vietnam War were giant mistakes and stupid. But I think it would have been a much worse outcome for the world if America would have just ceded the world to the Soviet Union and basically let communism spread. So I'm generally very happy that we did this.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  I personally think we're going through a very similar thing right now with China. It's Cold War 2.0. And like China is not playing by their, like, you know, they have a wartime attitude. And I think it would be foolish for the West to not simultaneously have a wartime attitude. And kind of a end byproduct of this is I think that we need to be investing like crazy in fossil fuels right now. Because I think the stakes are too big. Like, I think liberal democracy is at stake. That's my personal view. I'm happy, like, I'm happy.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  A lot of people disagree with me on that. And I don't think it's as clear. I think that China has been very strategic with not making this as obvious as it was during the Cold War. I think they learned from Cold War 1.0 and some of the mistakes made by the Soviets. But I think, basically, in the short run, we have to really deregulate fossil fuels. Granted, with, like, we should do it as clean as possible. And this is something where there's a pretty big narrative violation. Like, you know, if you look at the CO2 emissions of a, like, a clean coal power plant versus a dirty coal power plant. You know, you can have wildly more efficient coal power plants.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  And, you know, I, hopefully, we don't use too much coal. But things like natural gas, like, we should be using huge amounts of gas right now. But at the same time, we have to be investing in much better, longer-term technology. And to me, that's like, solar is unbelievably important. Solar is basically at a point right now where the, like, price per watt, like, nothing will ever catch up to the cost of solar. Or, sorry, nothing in the next, nothing that is even close to working today. Like, fusion could get there, but with uncertain timeline.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Nuclear, I don't think, can catch up to solar, is my kind of personal opinion on this full systems level, given where solar is now. If we were to go back in time, if we had a time machine, we went back 30 years and we deregulated nuclear 30 years ago and let nuclear go down an exponential cost curve starting 30 years ago, I think it would probably be way ahead of solar today. And I, I don't think solar would have even gotten to where it is now, because nuclear, we wouldn't have needed it. Nuclear would have been so good. But I still, I think America should be investing very heavily in nuclear, even though... It won't be as low of a cost as solar.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  One, I think China has basically a lock on large scale solar manufacturing for at least the next decade or so. And they have, they basically control the supply chain of a lot of the components that are required to make solar panels. And so I, just from like a strategic perspective, I don't think we can only rely on, on solar. And so I would be investing in nuclear. To have nuclear be even reasonable cost, you basically have to build like at least a hundred, you have to build a bunch of nuclear power plants using the same design, basically the same construction crew, et cetera, where people, you get economies of scale and people

• 47:58Speaker 00

  kind of learn what they're doing on the first one and do it more efficiently by the fifth and then 10th one. I would love to see America, you know, start building another hundred nuclear power plants if nothing else for the strategic significance. But I, in the immediate term, I think we need to really invest more in natural gas and other fossil fuels.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Awesome. Yeah, I was super curious in the dynamic between fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, which one will be more important on what time scale? It sounds like solar is the best medium term prior to getting nuclear, which leads me to a fun question that I'm just super interested in because it's, it seems too good to be true. You're invested in this company called Reflect Orbital, which is literally planning to take rockets and send satellites up in space and reflect them down onto solar farms at night. Is this possible? What are the dynamics of this? Like, is this where solar is headed to?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  So it's a, it's a complex thing to answer. So I, one of my lessons of being an investor now for basically a decade and being in startups for 20 years is, so I'll use an analogy from Varda. So. Did you guys know Delian's company, Varda?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  So I love Delian, he's a character, smart guy. I passed on the Varda seed. And I have no idea if they'll make it as a company. Like, it's always impossible to predict these things. But I didn't like their initial idea. Their initial idea was trying to make, you know. So I love the general idea of build a space company. Because I just thought the timing for it was very good. That launch costs over the next decade are going to drop dramatically. And mass to orbit is going to increase dramatically. And that like, a really smart team will figure out some way to, like, by assembling a really smart team, they'll figure out some way to profit from that. But their initial idea was making this thing called ZBLAN.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  ZBLAN is ultra pure, like, fiber optic cables. It's especially good for really long range, like, data transmission. Like, I just personally don't think ZBLAN is that important. I think it'll be a shrinking market, especially with Starlink. Like, Starlink is just the best way to send data over long distances. And so I passed on Varda because I basically felt like they had the right macro idea around, like, building a space company now assembling the talent. But I felt like they had the wrong micro idea of ZBLAN as a starting point. And a lesson for me from that was like, if you think that the macro on something is unbelievably good, and the team is insanely good,

• 50:41Speaker 00

  even if the, and it's a seed investment, even if the micro idea is, you know, you're not fully certain about it, then you should still make the investment. And that an unbelievable team will, like, take advantage of the macro tailwind. And so for Reflect, it's a very similar thesis for me. The, again, I, I think...

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Almost everyone is underestimating what the space economy is gonna look like in a decade. Like in 10 years, people's minds are gonna be blown. You know, like, we are certainly going to have some infrastructure on Mars. You know, like Elon's talking about, you know, there's a Mars launch window every 26 months. The next one is end of next year. SpaceX is trying to send some, like, uncrewed by human, but crewed by optimists, starships to Mars. Then, I hope they make it, and I think they have a real shot, but I don't think it's guaranteed. But I think in 2028, in the next window after 26,

• 51:47Speaker 00

  I think it's basically guaranteed that SpaceX sends some starships to Mars. And I think in the window after that, which I think would be like early 2031, I think it's basically guaranteed that SpaceX starts to send some, like, forward cargo and stuff to Mars, like useful cargo, whether it's solar panels, you know, sending stuff that will be infrastructure for humans to go eventually. And by the time you get to 2035, like, I think we're going to have, I just think people are gonna be shocked at the amount of mass going to orbit, the amount of money made in space.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  You know, Starlink is, it's one of the fastest growing products in history in terms of revenue. If you fast forward 10 years, like, I am very confident Starlink will have over 100 billion of revenue. I think there will be other space businesses that have lots of revenue. And there's only, like, there's only like five credible teams, in my opinion. Like, there's a bunch of teams, but there's like five that I think are heads and shoulders above the rest that are really kind of building towards this feature right now. And Whatever, I can't tell you exactly what they'll do that will be valuable.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  But I think just like learning how to actually do things in space and assembling teams that are absolutely cracked, that know how to do things in space right now. You know, I, I think it's, it's like buying land next to the railroad stops. Like when you knew, like you already knew that they're being constructed. You knew the railroad lines are being constructed and you knew where the stops were. And you go and buy the land at the stops. And you maybe don't know exactly how you're going to develop it, but you sure as hell know it's going to be really valuable. And so that's kind of how I view, honestly, that's how I view reflect. Like I bought goal, like A plus real estate.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  It's like I bought the real estate right next to San Francisco station at the end of the Trans-Pacific Railroad.

• 54:03David Hoffman?

  I think listeners broadly, the base case for maybe not just listeners, because the bankless audience tends to be pretty like optimistic and curious about their future. But the average person in the United States, when they hear about how much investment or how hard we are going to invest in getting into space, their first reaction might be, how does that benefit my life? And we have, we have space, we have, God, I'm forgetting the name of the satellite, the wifi, Elon's wifi satellite.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Starlink.

• 54:30David Hoffman?

  Starlink, okay. And we have Starlink, which is a very awesome, very strong example. Like I've, I've run into businesses in like, you know, United States national parks where there's no wifi and they have a Starlink. So they can actually hold, maintain their business. It's great, but that's just like one example. I think understanding that Elon is trying to like reduce the costs of getting things into state. He's trying to bring it down to zero, trying to get it as close to zero as possible. Like all technology, people are still having a hard time imagining how that benefits them, like how, how that impacts their life. And I know maybe Sean, like the takeaway from what you just said is like, oh, I don't really know. I just know that some teams are going to figure it out, therefore I'm buying the real estate. But are there any like, any things you could leave the listener with to go explain to the rest of the world?

• 55:14David Hoffman?

  Like why, like fundamentally, cheap space travel will unlock so many things that will actually turn into quality of life improvements for the average person who's left on planet earth?

• 55:27Speaker 00

  I'll say a few things. First of all, this is not directly into your question. It's an analogy to the past. But like, what's... You know, people have this mental model that space is very hard and expensive. And space is very hard and will always be hard. But space didn't make much progress for about 30 to 40 years. And when a field is stalled for like 40 years, it gives people bad intuition. When the field starts to go through exponential progress, because like you're overweighting the stalled period. If you look at the cost per kilogram to orbit, it was basically stalled for like 30 years, around a hundred thousand dollars a kilogram.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  SpaceX is going to push that with Starship, when it's fully usable, down to like $20 a kilogram. This is like a 50,000x reduction in cost. The... Whenever in history, something like that has happened, the... And for a sort of... It's not just the cost, it's also the amount of stuff you can put in space. It's been very limited in the past. But we're going to be able to put up, call it, a million time in 10 years, like a million times more stuff per year than we were able to put up, you know, 20 years ago.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  And when those two things happen, like cost goes down by 50,000x and amount of stuff you can set up goes up by a million. The only... Literally, the only analogies I can think of that are like semi-appropriate are early railroad, like, era where we basically... You went from needing to take a horse-drawn carriage across America, where you had a very high chance of like dying or getting a vicious disease along the track, you know, to you could just very easily and comfortably send extremely large amounts of stuff very cheaply across America and all the businesses that unlocked.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  And what it did to the value of real estate in like in the West. And the other analogy is like early shipping and like the invention of the ship and then discovery of new places and what that did to like the global economy. I really can't stress how like this is basically this is basically the same thing. We you know, we are going to have railroad space. We're going from horse drawn carriages to space to railroad space. Like that is happening right now and over this next decade. And in terms of what the businesses will be, I think that again, I would look at when NASA was at its peak and was still able to take risks before the Challenger shuttle disaster.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  They invented like when you have this clear goal of like, we need to win the space race. We want to put humans on the moon. We want to spend a lot of money to do it. There were so many spin out technologies that came as a result that deeply benefited just regular people, whether it's breakthroughs in radio technology or you know, like the microwave oven or all sorts of materials that were used in many different products, you know, on and on and on. As SpaceX builds a city on Mars, whatever you think of like the value of that city,

• 58:59Speaker 00

  the technologies that are going to go into building that city will be unbelievably valuable on Earth. And by there's something very ironic that when you try to solve the even harder problem where you're more constrained, it's actually in some ways easier to solve some hard problems. And if you want, I can get into why I think that is. But here's some of the things that are going to come from building a city on Mars. We're going to have better farming tech than we've ever had before. It's basically going to force us to figure out how to actually do vertical farming, which no one has like, you haven't had SpaceX level engineers go and try to solve that problem. We're going to probably like, I think that there'll there's going to be huge breakthroughs in power production.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I don't know exactly what will make sense on Mars. Whether it'll be like nuclear or solar, but there will be huge breakthroughs in that. There will be, like, I actually think there'll be huge breakthroughs in electronics fabrication. So we'll basically have to build autonomous fabs or very, very low human labor fabs. I'm not saying that will happen in 10 years, but I think 30 years from now, you know, the goal is to have Mars City be fully self-sustaining, which would mean that it has to have a fab and that will have to be like a basically autonomous fab. And that fab will probably be even better than the fabs we have on Earth.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  And anyways, when, when you try to build a fully autonomous city on Mars, like it forces you to rethink from first principles almost every technology that we consume today, every input down to like, how do you have? I'm, I'm going to say something really crazy that is the truth. We don't even have clean food in America today. Like, like our food, dear America, I love you. This is tragic. Our food supply is literally poison. It is filled, our food is filled with arsenic, lead and forever chemicals. And it's in the soil all over the country.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  And you, you like, we can't get rid of it or, or we haven't built technology yet to figure out how to get rid of it. I really only started to understand this over the last six months or so. A founder that I work with, who's a very smart guy, like started measuring, like doing detailed chemical analysis of soil all over America. And it's, it's literally all contaminated. And if on Mars, we start figuring it out how to make food kind of with, in a fully closed system, we can use that same technology to make. Safe food in America. Like, we're gonna basically get to the point where we don't even need soil to make food. And so even though the soil is contaminated, it's okay. We'll be able to, you know, make food without soil, you know, and, and measure what's in it and get back to basics.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  And I know that sounds crazy, but like, the path towards having clean food in America might actually be Mars. And I hope we figure it out sooner than that. But, but that's the sad reality of, of where some of our industries are today.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love that as the accessible bull case for Mars. I definitely share your optimism, sometimes over a little bit too much in terms of timeline and like what we're actually capable of. And find us in the minority because it is so challenging to wrap your head around the fact that we actually can place things on another planet within the next decade, which is super exciting. But there is one part of this that is slightly disturbing in the sense that a lot of this has to do with one single person, one single company. And this is SpaceX, this is Elon. And this is true in a lot of other categories where they are the leader in autonomous robots. They are the leader in robotaxis. They are the leader in a lot of these categories that we're talking about that are the future. And you are someone who's uniquely positioned to talk about this because of your exposure to, what is it? I think it's SpaceX, a boring company, XAI, X. You are mega Elon supporter, mega Elon bull.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Like, bull case for Elon and also why there's no clear first or second best in these industries? And where can we find more people like this to build these important projects?

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  In my opinion, Elon is by far the best entrepreneur in the world today and almost certainly of all time. I think it comes from many places. One is his like radical first principles thinking. Another is his like psycho level work ethic. You just can't, you, I don't think anyone should, people can't comprehend how hard the guy works unless you've seen him do it. Like, most, most humans would drop dead trying to work as hard as he does. And I think he ramped up to that capability over many decades.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  But I actually, so I, I think Elon is the most important entrepreneur in the world. But I actually think most of his companies would be fine today if, you know, in the worst case scenario, God forbid, something happened to him such as if he got sick. You know, I think that it would severely impair the long-term potential of the companies. But it's kind of like how tragically when Steve Jobs passed away, you know, from Apple. Like, they had already designed the iPhone. They already had a roadmap for the next 10 to 20 years. And other people were able to execute on that roadmap.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Well, I think that Apple hasn't innovated anywhere close to as much as it would have with Steve still there. But I want to be clear, I actually, I actually think that, God forbid, in the worst case, if something happened to Elon, I think that Optimus would still happen. I think that autonomous vehicles are mature enough, like that would happen. I think that, like, Mars would still happen. Starship would definitely still happen. Starlink would get to absolutely insane scale. The direct-to-sell program would really still happen. So I just, I actually, I'm kind of of these two minds. Like, I, he, I think humanity would not move nearly as fast as it will with him.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  And like, overall, innovation would be way lower. But I actually, I wouldn't underestimate just how far along and mature these different product lines are today. And so, sorry, the first question was like, or so what was the second part of the question? What did I miss?

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  How do we find more Elons? Yeah, where are the other, where are the second-best companies? Where are the companies that are also going to take us to Mars? Is it just one? And will it just be one? Or are there other people capable? And what does it take to build a company like that? So that there is more people working on these hard problems?

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  I don't think you can create an Elon overnight. Like, I think Elon is the, like, Elon as an individual is the product of 50 years of pain, like, suffering, work, compounding all of this.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Like, I really believe that. I also think that something that is underappreciated about how effective he is today is that over the course of the last, you know, 20, 30 years, he's been able to assemble like a group, a collective of, call it 20 people around him that are some of the most talented humans on the planet, that he's like, you only come across one of these people every, like, or call a couple of these people every year and, you know, and it takes a decade of like testing someone and testing what they can do to really learn their true potential and learn that they're reliable.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  And so like, if you go look at SpaceX, there are people like Mark Jankosa or Boring Company, where there's Steve Davis, you know, or basically every one of his companies is, has five or so people that are just out of this world talented. And you can't, and all these people have a mind meld with each other. They know how to work well. They know how, like, they don't even need to speak to know what needs to get done. And you can't rush that. It literally takes like 20 years to kind of build an organism almost that is self-sustaining

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  and like maximally evolved to be effective. So like, I think to have second Elons, like if you wanted to have one emerge over the next decade, it would have to be someone that's already like 10 plus years into doing really incredible things to where their own personal rate of learning is kind of, has been on this maximum trajectory for 10 years. And they're kind of like, the leverage they have in the world is on a maximum trajectory. Leverage, meaning, you know, like building these insane teams, building trust with these

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  people, acquiring kind of credibility, acquiring capital, you know, building manufacturing capability, et cetera.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  And so some candidates, I mean, there are people like John and Patrick Carlson, who are unbelievably talented humans and they're still quite young. And like, I think they, they love Stripe so much. And I think they see that, I think for them, like Stripe will be the vehicle through which they do most of their other projects over the course of lives, rather than how Elon has started a bunch of different companies. But I like, I could see John and Patrick 10 years from now, really surprising the world with like what they're, the scale of what they're able to do. And like leveraging the learnings they've had over the last 10 years and the position they're in now

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  to like push an order of magnitude or two beyond where they are now. But I, I think you basically have to look at other really, really great founders or companies that are already quite far along right now to even, to find the people that are even eligible to kind of be the next Elons in 10 years. And what happens a lot of times is people, it's, it's really hard to sustain, like, like, look at Warren Buffett's net worth, and this is a weird analogy, look at Warren Buffett's net worth. And it's like only, only the last 20 years or whatever that he's actually become so insanely rich. If you go back to the nineties, like he was a billionaire or whatever, but it was like single digit billionaire.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  Like you, you, we can't underestimate compounding. And Elon is one of the only entrepreneurs that hasn't stopped his rate of compounding because he's still willing to work at this maximum intensity. And it's very hard to do that. Like it's very, very, very hard to keep going and work 100 hour weeks every single week and embarrass yourself. Like by definition, to be at maximum rate of compounding, the way you really learn is by making mistakes. And like to still be willing to embarrass yourself, take enough risks that you make mistakes, test Starship in public where inevitably a lot of them are going to blow up and the media is going to write bad articles.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  Like it's, it's just, it's just exhausting and most people get burned out from doing that. And so I, like to have another Elon or more of them, we need. It would require some of these people that have compounded at incredible rates early on to keep going and push through. And I think that's where Elon's personality of like, you know, growing up in South Africa and dealing with like a lot of challenges at an early age and like the infinite grit and also just probably some singular aspect of how he was born, how he was raised, you know, like who his mother is. Like, I think all these things play and it's like you need, you need someone to do enough early on to

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  where they're compounded the maximum rate. And there's only maybe like one person a year that breaks through, you know, to like level two of that or whatever. And to go to level three, you also need kind of these very unique personality and kind of crazy, challenging life and upbringing. And so anyways, I hope we get more, but we should all appreciate like how lucky we are. And I'm sorry to like get into this because I obviously Elon is a very controversial figure right now. But and so a lot, you have people like attacking Tesla dealerships and all that. And here I am, like, I honestly think we should all, whatever you think of the man's politics, like, like, we should celebrate his work ethic

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  and like celebrate what he's done to push technology forward in, in the world. It's like, it's really, really important.

• 1:11:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I think most listeners are going to be familiar with basically every company and project that Elon has, except for maybe his most recent foray into robotics. That's, I think, the most opaque one. That's just the newest one on the scene that I'd like to dive into a little bit more. As we're talking about space and colonizing Mars, I would imagine the order of operations is to not put humans on Mars, but first put robots on Mars. And we can even see the robots that he's debuting here on Earth. And it's all very iRobot-y. Like, turns out they actually are just looking like actual humans. Maybe you could just kind of ground us and the listeners, I'm pretty unfamiliar, Josh is far more familiar than me, about just like the state of robotics as an industry, why

• 1:12:39David Hoffman?

  they actually ended up looking exactly like humans. Is that the way things are going to be? And just overall, where, where are we in the robotics arc of technology development?

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  So on the question of like, why are robots looking like humans? I think there's two primary answers for that. One is that the world has been designed for humans. And that may sound simple. That's actually incredibly important. You know, like, humans can go upstairs, no problem. If you're a wheeled robot, going upstairs is hard. If we were to like, go start building new cities for robots, like, you probably wouldn't put stairs in there, and then you can have wheeled robots everywhere. And wheeled robots are like, easier than robots that have actuating legs. But we've already built cities for humans that go upstairs,

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  since there's stairs everywhere. You know, like warehouses are built for humans. And so like, the height of where things are and like, the, you know, the layouts, they work for humans. So basically, if you deviate too much from the human form factor, it actually starts to become, like, all sorts of things become really hard to do, just simply because of how the physical world was designed, almost like an architecture perspective and from a, you know, from a form factor. And then the second thing is, I think, less important, but it's the psychological thing, which is, you know,

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  I think humans just react better when robots look like humans. You know, if you take a robot and you make it some very different form factor, and I mean, even like, the face, whatever. Like, if you don't have the eyes, whatever, if you make it like, just a fully black face, like...

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  It's fine, they can start to, like, if you, if you put in like three I's or whatever instead of two, I think that's kind of scary, honestly, for some people. And, and, and it's just like, it's unnecessary. Like, why, if it's, if you don't need to do that, why? To, to just kind of conform to, to what people are already comfortable with. But, but I think the first reason is way more important.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  There is one thing that is absent from the portfolio that I saw. That is one of Elon's ventures that I'm super excited about, and also a bit dystopian, which is Neuralink. And it is the, the connection between this new form of intelligence that we have and our analog biological meat space selves. And I'm curious of your takes on just brain machine interfaces in general, the, the practicality or even realistic version of what those look like? Will we actually get there? Are they critical? Who are they critical to? And kind of what is the order of operations that we get to this point that Elon is guiding to, which is basically a merging with artificial intelligence? Is, is we are pretty slow, we are building this thing that's very fast. Is there a peaceful coexistence of those two things through companies like Neuralink?

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  You're asking great questions. So Sequoia, we're not investors in Neuralink, but I, I have personally known a lot of the, like, I mean, I, I followed the company from the very beginning. I have some very close friends that were there basically from the beginning. Like, I, I knew most of the founding team as social friends and some of whom were actually Burning Man campmates back when I used to go to Burning Man a long time ago. I haven't been in a long time, but believe, believe it or not, like, a lot of the early team was from my Burning Man camp. We were called the Phage. It was a, a bunch of scientists, especially a lot of biologists. It was like Matthew McDougal, who's the, the chief scientist

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  of the company, was in my camp for a long time. I think that Elon's philosophy with starting companies has, people will not believe me when I say this, but I really think he's basically said, what are the biggest existential risks for humanity? And then, once he finds one, he goes and starts a company to actually try to address that risk. And in the case of SpaceX, it's like, God forbid, if some...

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Astronomical event happens that destroys life on Earth such as an asteroid hitting our planet. We need to have humans somewhere else and have a fully self sustaining city in that place. So another one is Tesla, where he saw the challenges of climate change early on. And, you know, I like, I think there are many other challenges too, but saw it as a challenge. And I think he also had very strong intuition for what was happening with both solar production and with the ability of batteries to create a Tesla.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  With OpenAI, which, you know, he basically started. I think he was, I mean, in his words, he was afraid of, he was afraid of other people building AGI or superintelligence that he, you know, that were not massively truth seeking and were not taking safety as seriously as he wanted. And so he decided to create an AI company or AI nonprofit to go try to be the first to superintelligence. I'm sorry, it's an AGI and superintelligence. They're different, slightly different things, but let's say superintelligence, not AGI.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  But so try to be the first to superintelligence and to do it in a maximum truth seeking and safe way. In the case of Neuralink, I think it's like, once he started working on AI, felt like the timescale for superintelligence is closer than most humans would have thought a decade ago. And that we should have a company that, or sorry, and on like on superintelligence, even in the case of trying to do it in the safest way. I think, I think the numbers he's said in podcasts and things like that, or like even doing, even in the best case, he thinks it's something like 80% chance that, that.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  Superintelligence is safe for humans and that everything happens very smoothly. And, you know, hopefully he's wrong. Hopefully it's 100%, 99.9999% or whatever. But I think he said about 80%. And I think Neuralink is a hedge against that. And granted, when you started the company, I don't think anyone knew the exact time scale of when we'd get to superintelligence. Now, I think we're, most people in the field would say we're probably going to get to superintelligence meaningfully before we have high bandwidth, readily manufacturable brain-machine interfaces.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  But if you go back like seven years, and if you would have thought it was like 20 years for superintelligence, we maybe could have intersected that, you know, kind of, or even got there ahead of time with brain-machine interfaces. And there's actually a hedge against, call it slightly dangerous, superintelligence because, and it's like a radical idea that a lot of people would disagree with, but you can basically merge with that superintelligence. And I'm not, I don't want to put words in his mouth, that may not be how he was thinking about it. But I think that no matter like the level you want to take this, I think that's like the furthest extreme.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  And I don't mean merging like the Borg, I mean like, you know, like having a symbiotic relationship that, you know, where humans get leverage from this and are better able to understand like the superintelligence and what its goals are. Anyways, I think that basically everything, you know, the last one of the Borging Company, maybe that was not an existential, I think this is probably the only one that's not an existential threat to humanity, but.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Traffic is really damn annoying and and we can have much, much higher quality of life by solving traffic. And and then with X, I think that was existential to humanity. Maybe not like X, X, maybe not to human life, but definitely to democracy. And like, I'm strongly in the camp that freedom of speech was on the way, like the way out the window. And so I personally think it was necessary that something had to be done with X, which I think has had a cascading effect across other platforms. So I think this is the lens through which he started these companies. And definitely narrative violation

• 1:21:56Speaker 00

  from from from like, the perception that Elon is just like a greedy guy or whatever he is. Like, I really believe he started these companies because he felt like these are the most pressing problems facing humanity. And he wanted to play a role in trying to make these things happen well.

• 1:22:18David Hoffman?

  I think identifying all of these industries that are critical for humanity is definitely the main motivations for the topics that we discussed in this podcast today. We talked about a lot of just frontier technologies. We covered a lot of ground. But I want to ask this one final question as as we wrap things up here. A lot of the things that we discussed today are like, kind of scary. Superintelligence, like space travel. There's just like a lot of kind of scary things out there, like human robots walking around the world. I think if you go and pick a movie out there that has human robots walking around the world, it's actually not a good movie. It's not a happy movie. And so I think maybe rightfully so, the average listener, average person out there is looking at all

• 1:22:59David Hoffman?

  of the topics that we are talking about today. And they like have experienced fear as like an initial gut reaction. Maybe you could assuade that reaction or maybe give your take about why you're excited, why this is good, why people ought to be excited, and why people ought to invest their time understanding each of these verticals that we've talked about today, because whether we are scared or not, they are coming.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Well, space exploration, we should not be afraid. I mean,

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Sure, like the astronauts that go on early missions, like they're very brave and things may happen to those individuals. But for humanity, I think that this is only a giant net positive and is a prerequisite to really understanding the universe we live in and like making progress towards answering questions like where do we come from? On the boring company, I, traffic sucks, like no existential risk. On the humanoid robots, I, I personally, I personally only see that as like upside.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  On superintelligence, I do think that's, that superintelligence is one that I, I'm scared of, to be honest. And I am, I'm scared of it like not being developed properly. So, I mean, like, I'll give you an example. I'm Jewish, the like Jews are a very small minority in the world, less than 20 million Jews. We're always outnumbered, so things like Wikipedia, Jews are always going to be outnumbered. And when AI models use Wikipedia as a, like a source of training data, it like that honestly scares me. There's a lot of, there's a lot of things on Wikipedia that have been, that are just not

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  accurate. And especially when you have some controversial topic and one group is a minority, it's very easy to have bias on those topics. And like here, I, I don't think there's anything that can stop AI progress. I think it's like human incentive. Like if America were to, if the West were to stop all AI research, China's not going to stop. You know, like the West stopped a lot of, like a lot of cloning research 20 years ago and China did not stop. You know, like COVID was almost certainly a lab leak. You know, like China was.

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  Like pushing the limits on on like virus evolution. And I would much like we're going to have superintelligence someday. And I think it will be much safer if there's multiple kind of competing superintelligences, some of which hopefully are like good and developed, hopefully all, but like having some developed by people that I like. And when you have a diversity of these things, I think it helps a lot and they can keep each other in check. And, you know, if they're all developing and they have roughly the same level of performance.

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

  It may like humans, we may get to the point that humans can't even find the mistakes in the superintelligence. But one superintelligence will be able to find the mistake in another. And, you know, that's actually very useful for keeping these things honest and pushing the development in a safe way. And I just like cat is out of the bag. It's going to happen. And but I think I think like the we do not want only one person to have this capability. I think I'm, you asked me to be positive and I'm not being positive, but like nuclear weapon like when nuclear weapon research, when you, when you get to the point in science where the jump from the science to a working product is not that far.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Call it like a trillion dollars in today's dollars. If it's, if it's valuable enough, like a government will make that jump. And, you know, like nuclear weapons are an example. And I'm really glad that the, you know, that America got nuclear weapons before the Nazis. And I think, you know, then when multiple people have them. Like, I think it's very important that we kept it to only nation states having these tools. Because nation states have like a strong incentive to not use them. Terrorists don't have that strong of an incentive. Like if you don't control a large landmass, if you don't have a city that you're responsible for, etc.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  Like, like the mutually destruction theory breaks down with like superintelligence is going to happen.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  I think it's, I think there's like a 95% chance, in my opinion, that it is very positive and everything goes great, but the 5% chance that it's, that it's not that great, I think it'd be very bad to only have one group have superintelligence. And so, and I, it is for sure going to happen. And so, the biggest mistake we can make is like, try to like, stop progress in the West. And I don't know, with all of that, humans are resilient, we're gonna figure it all out, it's all gonna be fine. And, you know, I don't know what else to say.

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a nice place to leave it. I think that you have just laid out a very nice, pragmatic, optimistic outlook of the future. I think there are certainly some controversial things, and if people find them disagreeable, I think that's good. I would encourage everyone to go check out your X feed, because I think at one point, you had a chain of like 12 posts in a row that I favorited. I think one of the things I admire is your ability to just break down things to very clear first principles, but doing so for ideas that are often controversial and not broadly accepted. So I think it's, it's great to open up the conversation. I would encourage everyone to go check it out. And just thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  Last thing I'll say, I mean, thank you, other than thank you for having me. Look, I'm gonna be wrong all the time. I'm gonna say things people disagree with. I, I like, I think it's, I think we lost the ability in the West to have reasonable disagreements in the last decade or so. And I'm sure I'm wrong on a lot of stuff. I welcome the conversation, and I hope others do the same.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  John, thanks for coming on today.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys.