Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #5: Bootstrapping, Deep Tech, and Building the Abundant Future: with Joshua Baer

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#5: Bootstrapping, Deep Tech, and Building the Abundant Future: with Joshua Baer · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  Now with AI90 to 95% of AI application companies are going
• 0:04
  to go out of business. You would bootstrap to product
• 0:06
  market fit. That's when you want to go raise
• 0:08
  money. The Nirvana state raising money
• 0:10
  is when you already have product market fit and you're already
• 0:14
  growing revenue fast. The world that we live in is
• 0:17
  designed for people, so if we want robots to be able to be
• 0:19
  around our world and not have to redesign the world for them,
• 0:22
  they need to look like us and be able to sit in a chair.
• 0:25
  And I am 95% certain that humanity is going to create an
• 0:30
  of abundance for all robots coming in, like an NGO coming in
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  with an army of robots building the clean water supply they
• 0:37
  need, the electrical configuration and you know,
• 0:40
  pipelining to create energy in the country in the 1st place.
• 0:43
  The the projects to create food that they need to grow the
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  healthcare they need. This age could create an Oasis
• 0:49
  in chat. Hey everyone, welcome back to
• 0:55
  the Love Conker's Fear podcast. This is the podcast where we
• 1:00
  talk about how humanity is going to make it over the next 10 to
• 1:04
  15 years to the age of abundance for all.
• 1:07
  I'm having amazing entrepreneurs, amazing
• 1:10
  technologies, scientists, spiritual teachers, as well as
• 1:14
  philosophers on this podcast. And today you may notice I'm
• 1:18
  wearing AT shirt and this is a T-shirt that was given out at
• 1:24
  the recent Aspen Action Forum. I'm a proud Henry Crown fellow.
• 1:29
  Thanks to our guest today, Josh Baer.
• 1:32
  Josh is a fellow Henry Crown fellow.
• 1:35
  He's the founder and CEO of Capital Factory.
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  And I'm really, really proud to welcome Josh Baer to this
• 1:44
  podcast. We we've done many podcasts
• 1:47
  together and this is the first one we're doing for Love
• 1:51
  Conquers Fear and we've got a lot to talk about, so welcome
• 1:54
  Josh. Good.
• 1:55
  Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
• 1:56
  This is also the first ever Love Conquers Fear podcast with doggy
• 2:01
  in tow. Storm is here.
• 2:03
  I don't know how much she's going to contribute, but she
• 2:05
  might have some some, yeah, some deep thoughts to share with us
• 2:09
  towards the end. Yeah, we're talking about
• 2:10
  earlier that River and Cosmo and Esther are going to be very
• 2:14
  jealous when this podcast goes viral on The Doggy World.
• 2:17
  And they're going to be like, you didn't even include us and
• 2:20
  we're in the house. But you know, here we are.
• 2:23
  So why don't we start with with how we first met?
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  So Deborah and I moved back from San Francisco on July 4th, 2003.
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  I'll never forget when we're driving back into my hometown,
• 2:37
  the town I was born in in 1972. The fireworks were going off as
• 2:41
  as I was driving the big U-Haul. And shortly after that I joined
• 2:47
  Bootstrap Austin, which is from our mutual friend Bajori
• 2:51
  Goswami, which. Is monthly meet up and it was
• 2:54
  really one of the 1st monthly meet ups.
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  I remember now there's like two or three every day.
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  Yeah, every night happening at Capital Factory.
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  But back then there was only there weren't many groups to
• 3:03
  join. Yeah, and Austin had been kind
• 3:06
  of decimated. You know, I saw the the height
• 3:09
  of the boom in Silicon Valley because we moved there at the
• 3:12
  beginning of of 2000. isawthe.com bust, the depths of
• 3:18
  despair and then the slow green shoots.
• 3:22
  But just take us back to that time when we first met.
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  Yeah. Well, you know, I just moved
• 3:27
  here as well. I moved here in 1999.
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  I just graduated from college. So a little bit behind you and
• 3:33
  CMU, right, Carnegie Mellon. Yeah.
• 3:34
  And I came here to work at Trilogy, which is it's it's all
• 3:38
  on podcast and story, but was it, you know, most importantly,
• 3:42
  just a really great group of people that I was surrounded by
• 3:44
  and that, you know, that brought me you're awesome.
• 3:46
  I got to be immersed in and, and Austin, like the rest of, you
• 3:52
  know, a lot of places in the US and certainly intact was, was
• 3:55
  was peaking, was not just booming was peaking, right.
• 3:59
  And, and so, yeah, it was just the the peakofthe.com boom.
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  Things were crazy and things were really different in the
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  Austin startup market, venture market.
• 4:12
  The types of companies that were being successful were different.
• 4:16
  The types of entrepreneurs that could get funded were different.
• 4:19
  There was really only one VC firm, Austin Ventures, and very
• 4:24
  few other investors would invest in a company based in Austin.
• 4:28
  Both because they wanted to be close to it and because there
• 4:31
  was this generally common assumption that if Austin
• 4:34
  Ventures didn't invest in it, it must not be a good one because
• 4:37
  the year and they were like seeing all the good ones.
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  I remember that, yeah. And so Austin Ventures was big,
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  really big. And people like John Thornton
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  and Joey Gonna and others were kind of icons in the for the
• 4:49
  venture space. Bill Wood And then you, I mean,
• 4:52
  one of the things that's been consistent that whole time, it's
• 4:54
  now been, you know, more than 25 years is, is Brett, you were one
• 4:59
  of the top entrepreneurs in town.
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  Like, you know, at that time you were coming back from Silicon
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  Valley, which was like, Oh my God, you know, like you'd gone
• 5:05
  off Silicon Valley and built a company there.
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  Now you're coming back to do 1 here.
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  And that gave you a lot of credibility and a lot of
• 5:11
  legitimacy and was really rare back then, right?
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  Like there weren't very many people that had spent time in
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  Silicon Valley and that back to now where that's actually much
• 5:20
  more common. Like that by itself wouldn't
• 5:22
  stand you out. But now you built so many
• 5:24
  companies that I I just look at you of somebody that like in
• 5:27
  particular when you want to go on something new, you can just
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  immediately assemble this world class team of like all the
• 5:33
  people that you've worked with and all the different companies
• 5:35
  along the way. And and that you know that
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  fortune a great spot that you can pick along stuff.
• 5:40
  I appreciate it. Yeah.
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  I mean, I remember, you know, coming back and one of the
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  things that I thought was so odd and I thought I needed to be a
• 5:50
  voice of reason and is there was such a strong bent towards
• 5:55
  bootstrapping that I thought. In fact, that's what brought us
• 5:58
  together. I know and, you know, and, and
• 6:02
  the reason I joined Bootstrap Boston was not because I thought
• 6:06
  bootstrapping was the only way, but because I had a club in
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  Silicon Valley with Aaron Hoffman that we had Co founded
• 6:16
  called Mind Exchange. And it was where we got together
• 6:19
  and Oren's another great mutual friend who we, yeah, he's, he's,
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  he's terrific. And and you know, R and I had
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  this club where we got other successful entrepreneurs and
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  we're all like early in our careers, but we got together to
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  discuss like trends, what was happening.
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  And usually there was an entrepreneur presenting when it
• 6:39
  helped with their business plan. And we kind of beat that up
• 6:41
  together with lots of love, but, you know, lots of really good
• 6:45
  feedback. And so I was looking for to
• 6:47
  start something like that here and I, I forgot how I found out
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  about Bootstrap Austin, but I was like, oh, it already exists.
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  Like this is a great insertion point.
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  And it was it was it was incredible.
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  And what Bejoy did with that created a lot of value, you
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  know, bringing a lot of good people together.
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  But one of the things I thought that was so weird is there is
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  just such a anti VC Bennett. I mean, well, Bejoy was
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  particularly on mission, right? Right.
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  But it's funny because I was, you know, I was certainly
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  singing that song, right? You had.
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  Largely bootstrapped your. Company I had never raised
• 7:24
  funding for anything I'd barely ever invested anything.
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  I made a few Angel investments and really like, you know, I was
• 7:31
  like all about like, yeah, bootstrapping is great and I
• 7:33
  didn't I no great successful venture backed entrepreneurs and
• 7:38
  I didn't even know what that you know, what does that movie look
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  like? What's that look like when it's
• 7:42
  successful? Right.
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  So I feel very naive in hindsight, you know, kind of
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  looking back, I still love bootstrapping.
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  When I go start something, my instinct is to bootstrap it.
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  Like I don't think like I'm going to start something I need
• 7:57
  to go raise money. Like I think I'm going to start
• 7:59
  something like how do I get it moving, right?
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  You know, like really quickly. And then OK, well, yeah, they'll
• 8:06
  be points where we need money. And unfortunately I'm in the
• 8:08
  spot where I can like either put some money in or I also can, you
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  know, probably, you know, I can raise money if I need to.
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  But like, yeah, it's just like my instinct is like, well, I
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  just want to build it. I don't want to actually take
• 8:18
  money if I don't have to. That's more hassle.
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  You know, like now I realize that to do really big important
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  things, it usually takes a lot of money, Right, right.
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  But in in my kind of like now post, you know, hindsight,
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  looking back, I feel like bootstrapping is it's just this
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  great influence, like it's a great place to start.
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  Like and you don't nothing goes exactly according to the
• 8:40
  playbook, nothing that you know, like you can't just plan it out
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  and like that's OK. It happened just the way I
• 8:44
  thought it would. But if you could, you know, like
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  you would bootstrap to product, product market fit all right,
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  You know, like you kind of like husher it together until you had
• 8:53
  it really like dial in and you're like, no, no, no, no, I
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  got it. Like here's the model.
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  I know the deal. I know who my customer is
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  customer is, I know how to acquire them.
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  I know what it costs. Stick some money in this end and
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  there's a lot more money coming out the other end, right?
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  You know, like that's when you want to go raise money.
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  Yeah. The Nirvana state of raising
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  money is when you already have product market fit and you're
• 9:15
  already growing revenue fast because A, it's going to be very
• 9:20
  little dilution at that point because you've de risk the
• 9:24
  business and B, you have some handle over how you're actually
• 9:30
  going to scale it. I mean, that's the Nirvana
• 9:33
  state. Yeah, there's, there's very few
• 9:34
  companies that actually have that characters.
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  You know, like. Yeah, I mean, but but like you
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  know, take a company like Apptronic now, which you guys
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  are big investors in, you cannot build a bootstrap a a robot.
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  No, no you can't. And.
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  They're not and like, like, and just as that example, like
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  they've made it so far. They've got huge proof points,
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  great partnerships with Google, with Daimler, with other big
• 9:57
  companies. And yet like, it's not like they
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  could check all those boxes. I just said, you know, like,
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  like, like we have a vision of product market fit.
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  They have billions of dollars in pre-orders.
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  Like, I mean, like lots of people want it, right.
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  But it's like, it's not even like actually like really out in
• 10:15
  the market yet, you know, like it's just in tests, like I
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  wouldn't call that product market fit.
• 10:19
  Yeah, to get to the, you know, to get to the point where you've
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  got actual affordable, safe humanoid robots and guess what?
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  It takes 20 years and. Yeah, it all depends on what it
• 10:28
  is. And and you know, I explored
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  this in my book, my first book, The Entrepreneurs Essentials, I
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  explored this really deeply on bootstrap or VC and the ideal
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  state is if you can do a mix of the two.
• 10:39
  And I know we're going to get into AI today, but there's
• 10:42
  probably never been a better time to try to bootstrap now
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  with AI, you know, you can do so much with so little Hurley.
• 10:50
  So it's it's really. It's like in the flip side of
• 10:53
  that is as an investor, you're really cautious.
• 10:55
  What do I invest in? What's his differentiator
• 10:57
  because it's so easy to go do these?
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  That's right. That's right.
• 10:59
  Because someone without money can go do so much.
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  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a thesis on that.
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  I know we're a bit on a tangent, but I'll, I'll give you my
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  thesis on this. Yeah, because when, whenever
• 11:10
  Deborah and I are. Let's not worry about any more
• 11:12
  tangents. Yeah.
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  But whenever we're we're investing in a company now, I am
• 11:17
  thinking to myself, is this durable in an exponential
• 11:22
  acceleration with AI, quantum computing, robotics, like is
• 11:26
  this something that even can stand the test of two years or
• 11:31
  is it going to have the Jasper AI problem?
• 11:34
  I was an investor in Jasper, but as you remember, Jasper was
• 11:38
  using GPT back when it was an API form from open AI and they
• 11:44
  created the Snipes wrapper to create marketing content,
• 11:46
  etcetera. And then ChatGPT launched and
• 11:49
  that was a near terminal event for Jasper and Mitchell Green,
• 11:55
  one of my friends who I introduced you to recently,
• 11:58
  who's actually my a long time ago.
• 12:00
  Yeah, I mean, actually he's, he is.
• 12:02
  He is my most successful self-made friend.
• 12:04
  Like he, I remember that Austin Ventures crowd, the GPS were
• 12:09
  kind of frankly making fun of him, even though he was like
• 12:13
  super helpful at bizarre voice. And he now manages over 5
• 12:18
  billion capital, which is more than AV ever managed in
• 12:22
  cumulatively in their whole lifetime.
• 12:24
  And it's because he has a model that works.
• 12:27
  And, you know, we're investors in his funds.
• 12:28
  We're an investor in your funds. You know, we really believe in
• 12:31
  you both, but he was saying recently on CNBC as well as many
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  other outlets that he thinks 90 to 95% of AI application
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  companies are going to go out of business.
• 12:43
  I very much agree with them on that.
• 12:45
  Do you have a take on that? I I buy it like yeah.
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  Short term solutions, yeah, I just think.
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  I just think. So I mean, a lot of it's just
• 12:51
  going to just fold into core chat TPT functionality.
• 12:55
  It's just going to be able to do those things like.
• 12:57
  Yeah. So my current thesis at least is
• 12:59
  that if it's a company, if you're thinking about starting a
• 13:02
  company and it's a company that could go from zero to a billion
• 13:07
  in AR. But that's really hard to do and
• 13:11
  requires a lot of verticalization and services
• 13:14
  that that may be durable. Because if you're an Open AI or
• 13:18
  Anthropic or any of these models, which are growing just
• 13:21
  by leaps and bounds. I mean, Anthropic went from 900
• 13:24
  million to 5 billion of AR in the last 10 months.
• 13:27
  Open AI now is at 12 billion of AR.
• 13:29
  And we're less than 1000 days since the launch of Chachi PT.
• 13:33
  I mean, it's never happened before.
• 13:35
  It took Salesforce 18 years to get 10 billion of air, took
• 13:40
  ServiceNow 21 years to get 10 billion of air.
• 13:42
  And so we're just blowing past those milestones is that that
• 13:47
  that type of market, you know, where you could get to a billion
• 13:50
  of AR is probably too small for them to care about.
• 13:53
  And if it's verticalized and there's enough services wrapped
• 13:56
  around it, you probably will not get run over.
• 13:58
  I mean, I think that's right. Just like tailoring really
• 14:01
  tightly to a customer. Yeah, it's still going to always
• 14:03
  going to matter. Yeah.
• 14:04
  Well, come coming back to you know how we know each other.
• 14:08
  We really developed a tight relationship as as as very close
• 14:12
  friends with the beginning of Bizarre Voice and because.
• 14:18
  Really, I was better friends with Deborah.
• 14:20
  That's true. Actually, you should tell the
• 14:21
  story about that. But not that she's in the market
• 14:24
  anymore for for what she used to do.
• 14:26
  Right. Well, just, yeah, we had met
• 14:28
  early on and you've been, we were just talking and I was a
• 14:31
  bachelor and moving into a really nice new house and nice
• 14:35
  new part of town and it was empty.
• 14:37
  And you were like, my wife's an interior decorator.
• 14:40
  Like you should talk. And I really, you know, like,
• 14:44
  honestly, I didn't know anybody and like, and, and, and actually
• 14:48
  I get a lot. I got along great with Deborah.
• 14:49
  Like we were really here off like, you know, she was super
• 14:51
  fun to be around and I liked all the stuff she picked out.
• 14:53
  And so she totally decorated my house.
• 14:55
  And in the process, like I spent a lot of time with her, like
• 14:58
  Uncle really lost her time. I'm like way more time than I'd
• 15:01
  spend with you for a long time after the beginning.
• 15:04
  And so, yeah, for the, I'd say, you know, for the probably the
• 15:06
  first couple years of our relationship, I felt like I kind
• 15:08
  of knew her better than you. Yeah, yeah, well, she is an
• 15:11
  amazing interior designer and I'm a great person and a great
• 15:14
  person and my soul mate, you know, 2029 years and counting a
• 15:17
  marriage. So but you know, through bizarre
• 15:20
  voice I had a real need and you had a interesting business model
• 15:25
  because you had bootstrapped and you didn't have investors to
• 15:28
  answer to. You were able to kind of do
• 15:31
  different things with with your with your business with other
• 15:35
  inbox where you have like a little side business where you
• 15:39
  would rent out. I don't know if you did this for
• 15:41
  a lot of people, but you didn't for me it.
• 15:43
  Was actually before other. Inbox OK, this is before other
• 15:46
  and so the way. This came about is I had my oh,
• 15:48
  Skyless. I had Skyless, which was my
• 15:50
  first business, which was an e-mail service provider or
• 15:52
  something like a MailChimp or constant contact.
• 15:54
  And I'd bootstrap that. And I know when I was, I had a
• 15:58
  computer science degree and we were, we probably shouldn't
• 16:01
  have, but we built our own software and platform for most
• 16:03
  of our, you know, most of our time we were in, in business.
• 16:07
  And so I had a pretty large development team that was
• 16:08
  building all that. And then around 2001, they
• 16:12
  passed a new law called Can Spam, which was really designed
• 16:16
  to put some basic rules around e-mail marketing, simple things
• 16:20
  like requiring that if somebody unsubscribes, you have to stop
• 16:23
  emailing them. But but, but it's just, it's not
• 16:26
  as much as they sound so obvious and simple now.
• 16:28
  They weren't, they weren't actually the way it worked in
• 16:30
  post to mail, all right. And so we had to like adapt the
• 16:34
  laws for post to mail. And that's really a big part of
• 16:36
  what it did. And so as that came out, it did,
• 16:38
  you know, it changed the industry.
• 16:40
  The industry worked a certain way.
• 16:41
  And I was in the middle of it and I could see that they and
• 16:43
  suddenly everybody was not following the rules because they
• 16:45
  passed a new rule. And there was this opportunity
• 16:48
  to create a SAS solution to help people comply with this law.
• 16:52
  And so very quickly, in about 30 days, I had our team developed
• 16:57
  and launch this solution on Sub Central.
• 17:01
  And at the time I was, you know, honestly, like, I mean, it was
• 17:05
  the right thing to do, but I was just, you know, experimenting
• 17:07
  with an entrepreneur and having my own business.
• 17:09
  And I looked at it and I was like, well, I'm kind of
• 17:10
  launching this other business and I think it has the potential
• 17:13
  to be its own business that's separate and actually marketing
• 17:16
  strategically. I wanted to position it because
• 17:18
  I wanted all my competitors of Skylist to collaborate and work
• 17:22
  with in order to be unsub Central.
• 17:24
  All right, It had to like work with all of us.
• 17:27
  And so I really wanted to be separate.
• 17:28
  And so I said, so I said, well, actually, so that means I kind
• 17:31
  of need a third company that's really just a development
• 17:34
  company. All right.
• 17:35
  And I'm just going to like hire them out to build stuff for both
• 17:38
  of my companies and but internally for me.
• 17:42
  And that was the beginning of the first company, which was so
• 17:45
  the first one was Skyless. The next company is Capital
• 17:47
  Thought. Yeah, Cap, full thought.
• 17:48
  And I named that and that was really kind of like my think
• 17:51
  tank, that or my like group of developers that could go build
• 17:54
  things, could take ideas and turn them into capital reality,
• 17:57
  you know, and things that mattered.
• 17:59
  And we did it for unsub central. And then the next thing we did
• 18:02
  is we built that project for you.
• 18:04
  And I remember it's kind of like you as I as I think of it and
• 18:07
  told me that, you know, you may have heard it differently, but
• 18:08
  it was quite a while ago. But as I remember, it was like,
• 18:11
  you know, you had started to pull your team together.
• 18:13
  You had the idea, you had some initial customers lined up and
• 18:16
  you hadn't closed your being in like serious lead investors.
• 18:19
  You brought Angel around Angel investors.
• 18:21
  That's right. And you also even hadn't built
• 18:22
  out the whole team. So you didn't have your CTO yet.
• 18:24
  And so you came to me and you say, hey, Josh, you know, like
• 18:27
  you just built that other thing really fast.
• 18:29
  Like do you think like I could hire a couple of your guys and
• 18:32
  you knew some of my guys and they were good guys.
• 18:33
  And you're like, can I, can I get some of them to like work on
• 18:36
  this for me while I build my team?
• 18:38
  And it was, I think positioned the whole time from the
• 18:42
  beginning as a temporary solution.
• 18:44
  It was like, hey, I'm going to go raise money and I'm going to
• 18:46
  like build a team. And so we're, this is not a
• 18:48
  permanent solution, but like until then, can you start
• 18:51
  building the demo I'm liking in the beta and get it out there.
• 18:54
  And so I think we worked your for about 9 months in total.
• 18:57
  And I like probably had about two or three people working, 2
• 19:00
  1/2 people on my team working on it.
• 19:02
  As I recall you, I think you paid us about $12,000 a month.
• 19:04
  And I think my cost sounds about right.
• 19:06
  I think my cost was a little bit more than that.
• 19:09
  And but I was like, I really excited about working with you
• 19:11
  and I was like. I always thought that I was
• 19:13
  allowing you to at least break even on.
• 19:15
  That it was close yes, like it was like a little bit more and I
• 19:17
  was like, it was like, but you know like this is going to.
• 19:19
  I thought it would work out. I thought it'd be interesting
• 19:21
  and and and then. That gave you a lot of equity.
• 19:24
  Though, well, you gave me a stock option grant and you, but
• 19:27
  at the time, honestly, like how many stock option grants had I
• 19:29
  ever received? Like, I don't know if any, you
• 19:33
  know, like maybe just trilogy, I guess trilogy, right, right.
• 19:35
  And so so you gave me a stock option grant, but I didn't like
• 19:38
  negotiate anything with you. You just so I didn't know what
• 19:42
  it was. You know, apparently it was a
• 19:44
  very good generous time. I was and.
• 19:46
  What we know it was. Right.
• 19:47
  But like I didn't know what it was.
• 19:48
  And so I just got the stock option grant and I was, that was
• 19:50
  my first experience kind of going through that.
• 19:52
  And one of the things that was so great about that experience
• 19:54
  is you're such a great communicator and you're already
• 19:56
  an experienced CEO that you already from the beginning of
• 20:00
  that company sent out this weekly e-mail to all the
• 20:02
  investors with just here's the update, here's what's going on.
• 20:06
  And so not only did I get to like invest effectively invest
• 20:10
  through my time through my team in the company from the very
• 20:13
  beginning, get some stock which ended up being worth millions of
• 20:16
  dollars and was life changing for me and definitely like
• 20:18
  effectively funded the beginning of capital factor that's going
• 20:21
  to be having that money to be able to go invest and stuff and
• 20:24
  help start it. But in addition to all that, I
• 20:26
  got this kind of like this like backseat experience of like
• 20:30
  watching you drive bizarre voice, right and like every week
• 20:33
  seeing the updates all the way up until the last e-mail that
• 20:35
  was like we're going public next week.
• 20:37
  I'm not going to send these updates I.
• 20:40
  Remember that. Yeah, the only modification I'd
• 20:43
  say on that e-mail is like I did not give a timeline and you're a
• 20:48
  little bit off on the timeline on that.
• 20:49
  I sent it six months prior to IPO because I was told by the
• 20:53
  lawyers you. At some point you're like, I'm
• 20:55
  trying, I'm stopping. The lawyers told me you have to
• 20:57
  stop this. And I was fighting with them.
• 20:59
  No, I don't want to stop this. And they're like, you have to
• 21:01
  stop this. You were going to be a public
• 21:03
  company. But it was amazing, you know,
• 21:04
  it's like I got this whole kind of like backseat view of, you
• 21:07
  know, just as I remember it was incredible ride and bizarre race
• 21:09
  was such an incredible ride. It was showed me it was the
• 21:13
  first time. Also, I was just part of a
• 21:14
  company where there were so many oversubscribed up rounds and you
• 21:20
  get to see like what's it look like when everything works
• 21:22
  right? And like not quite up until the
• 21:24
  IPO, but like, but it was like, Oh my God, like every round up
• 21:28
  to the IPO was like oversubscribed everybody like
• 21:32
  begging you to sell some more shares, you know, like, right.
• 21:35
  And like everybody that had invested early just making money
• 21:38
  and making money and making money.
• 21:39
  It was like this money cheat. It's like kept going and going
• 21:42
  and going and going and yeah, that was a, that was an
• 21:45
  incredible, incredible ride. Yeah, it really was, well, you,
• 21:49
  you helping me out with that early on actually gave us the
• 21:54
  time to hire the team, right like it because we already had
• 21:58
  customers and it was the ideal scenario.
• 22:01
  And the most amazing thing about Bizarre Boys is that Y
• 22:05
  Combinator, which I wasn't a member of, but they said that it
• 22:09
  was one of the top three most capital efficient companies in
• 22:12
  history and for SAS. And the reason why is that we
• 22:17
  only raised $23 million prior to IPO and we had 13 million left
• 22:22
  in the bank at 100 million AR when we went public.
• 22:25
  Wow. And the reason why is that we
• 22:28
  were mostly applying what we're talking about earlier, the
• 22:31
  bootstrap and VC model in combination.
• 22:34
  We got to cash flow break even on the Series A, which Austin
• 22:38
  Ventures did lead and you know, Crispus City and Tom Ball were
• 22:44
  fantastic on the board. They both were really helpful.
• 22:47
  And then later Battery Ventures came on board and later lead
• 22:51
  Edge Capital, Mitchell Green. And you know it was because we
• 22:55
  got to cash flow break Even so early that then everything was
• 22:59
  kind of optionality and it was all like how fast do we want to
• 23:03
  grow. The only thing that really would
• 23:05
  have ran that company prior to IPO is if we started it and
• 23:09
  we're raising money in 2021, that's 2021 people probably
• 23:13
  would have been putting hundreds of millions of dollars and
• 23:15
  placing billions of dollars evaluation on it.
• 23:18
  And in the zerp period that would have been a whole
• 23:20
  different thing. But given that we're building
• 23:22
  the company in thepost.com bust where people are so conserved.
• 23:27
  Everything was super. Talent that really, really
• 23:29
  helped. So Fast forward on Capital
• 23:32
  Factory today, because it's, I know you just had the Fed
• 23:35
  Supernova conference, which your, I think your biggest event
• 23:38
  of the year for sure. And just what is Capital Factory
• 23:42
  look like today? You know, I'd mentioned we're
• 23:45
  investors in your funds, but it's it's kind of incredible
• 23:50
  what it's actually become at this point.
• 23:53
  I mean, it's incredible to me. Yeah, well, I'm, I, I'm, it's
• 23:56
  incredible to me. I'm, I have a blast everyday.
• 23:58
  Just came from there and capital factory.
• 24:01
  It's, you know, it's a community and so it's kind of like a
• 24:05
  different things to different people.
• 24:06
  I think externally to most people, how they do it, It's
• 24:09
  we're the most active early stage investor in Texas.
• 24:11
  So we don't have the biggest fund of the most money under
• 24:14
  management, but we're connected to the most companies.
• 24:16
  We're in the most deals pretty much every week we're investing
• 24:19
  in a different company that we've been working with usually
• 24:21
  for a long time, but that is now, you know, at the right time
• 24:24
  and raising money. We're one of those active space
• 24:27
  robotics, satellite hypersonics investors in the country, and
• 24:34
  all of those things are like hardware, you know, which also
• 24:37
  if you think back to when and we met each other and when Austin
• 24:41
  Ventures was investing, you know, you couldn't invest in
• 24:44
  hardware. No, it was.
• 24:45
  It was. Money for those kinds of things.
• 24:47
  It was a software world, right? It was just really hard to raise
• 24:50
  money. That's hardware.
• 24:52
  It's more so. And also it was really hard to
• 24:54
  raise money for any company that worked with the government.
• 24:56
  That was a bad, It was a poison pill.
• 24:58
  It was a bad thing. And it turns out that as much as
• 25:02
  I never expected this, because I thought software was going to
• 25:05
  eat the world, and it was software was like here to stay
• 25:09
  and software was going to be the best thing forever.
• 25:11
  It kind of did all those things. And I'm curious if you agree
• 25:16
  with this. But my experience now, and this
• 25:18
  is this is almost even a small example of abundance and some of
• 25:21
  the effects, but the abundance of SAS is that SAS isn't such a
• 25:25
  great investment anymore. Yeah.
• 25:27
  Yeah, I agree with that. I think I think if you're.
• 25:29
  A good SAS company you don't need that much money.
• 25:32
  You don't need that much money and it's.
• 25:34
  Super competitive because you have really, really well
• 25:37
  understood metrics and if you're really good, like everybody
• 25:40
  wants to invest in you and there's a lot of, it's a if
• 25:43
  there's a lot of market, you're going to get a good price, you
• 25:45
  know, like you're going to get a deal like so it just doesn't
• 25:49
  seem as exciting. It's not like I, I mean, I like
• 25:51
  SAS. There's still going to be some
• 25:52
  big deals too out there. I'm sure we'll make a lot of
• 25:54
  good investments, but it's not nearly as differentiated as or
• 25:57
  exciting anymore. Yeah, yeah.
• 25:59
  I mean, you know, one of my friends who I'm going to have on
• 26:02
  this podcast came out with this great book recently called Deep
• 26:05
  Future. His name is Pablos Holman.
• 26:07
  I'm not sure if I ever introduced you to him, but
• 26:10
  amazing guy, real futurist, used to work for Nathan Myhrvold,
• 26:13
  intellectual adventurers who was the CTO of Microsoft, you know,
• 26:17
  in the past. And and he thinks all the action
• 26:21
  is in what he's calling deep tech.
• 26:23
  You know which, which to be clear, like the original large
• 26:27
  language models are deep tech and you know, the power
• 26:30
  consumption, everything that it takes to build a frontier model
• 26:33
  today that that's really hard. And there are at the same time
• 26:36
  certain SAS businesses being formed right now that are going
• 26:41
  from zero to 100 million of they are very, very fast.
• 26:46
  But those are very much the exception and even going to that
• 26:50
  doesn't mean they're durable and it.
• 26:52
  Doesn't mean they're a good investment like you just are you
• 26:54
  going to get good terms or you going to?
• 26:56
  I'm not saying there aren't good ones out there, but it's just,
• 26:58
  it's not nearly as like it used to be.
• 26:59
  Just like there was just this Greenfield of like apply SAS,
• 27:04
  apply SAS, apply SAS, you know, like to every business, you
• 27:08
  know, we're just we're past that, right?
• 27:09
  You know, and like it's not, it's not, it's not unique
• 27:12
  anymore. It's like it's that's, that's
• 27:14
  the killer business model. And so so yeah, it's like it's
• 27:17
  not that it got worse, it's that it got so good, you know, that
• 27:20
  it's just commoditized. It's not a good investment
• 27:23
  anymore. Yeah, I don't know if if people
• 27:26
  outside of Austin realize how diversified Austin has become
• 27:31
  now. So maybe just you're the most in
• 27:34
  the know on this, right? With how many investments you
• 27:37
  guys have, maybe just rattle off some of the deep tech
• 27:39
  investments that were born here. You know, one of the things I
• 27:44
  like to like to remind people is that Tesla now is the largest
• 27:50
  private employer in Austin. It's 23,000 employees.
• 27:53
  Dell is around 11,000. So that is pretty new.
• 27:58
  I mean, you know, Tesla's been around for a while, but moving
• 28:01
  their headquarters here and all the companies around that from
• 28:04
  Neural Link to Boring Company to SpaceX nearby, etcetera.
• 28:09
  But outside of the Elon Musk kind of empire of companies,
• 28:13
  what else is going on here in Austin?
• 28:15
  I mean, just everything is going on in Austin.
• 28:17
  If it's really interesting and it's really hot, then people
• 28:20
  here are working on it, you know, because Austin is a great
• 28:23
  place to live. And so it attracts some of the
• 28:26
  just best, most portable like people in the world who have
• 28:31
  choices of where they can live and what they can go do.
• 28:34
  And post COVID more than ever, they can go anywhere.
• 28:37
  And so guess what? Like they're all coming to
• 28:40
  Austin. And not necessarily everybody,
• 28:42
  but it's self selected people that fit this culture, that want
• 28:45
  to be part of it, that want to be part of this growth, that
• 28:47
  want to build something that somehow are in what I think of
• 28:51
  as this messy middle right of like, you know, conservative and
• 28:56
  progressive and all kinds of different policies and lots of
• 28:59
  experiments happening. Yeah.
• 29:01
  And but it's attracting Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale and Jim
• 29:03
  Brier and lots of other people that are coming here to build
• 29:08
  big companies and do hard things.
• 29:10
  And some of these companies, I mean, just just to roll off some
• 29:13
  that I can think of Icon 3D homes like you guys were in
• 29:17
  early, yeah. So amazing prints or that prints
• 29:20
  concrete to print homes. Yeah, yeah, and and won a big
• 29:24
  contract with NASA. Printing the moon base, yeah.
• 29:28
  Which is crazy that we're talking about a moon base, which
• 29:31
  is so cool. We have two other companies that
• 29:32
  landed on the moon this year, Intuitive Machines of Firefly
• 29:36
  Space, both Texas companies. Another one that IPO this year
• 29:43
  are three space IP OS, the third one being Voyager Space, who
• 29:47
  just is building the next space station.
• 29:50
  Star Lab run by Henry Cronfellow, friend run by our
• 29:54
  friend Dylan. And so, yeah, like those kinds
• 29:56
  of things that I never imagined us investing in, Yeah, five
• 29:59
  years ago, never mind 10 or 15 years ago.
• 30:03
  Paradromics which is a invasive brain interface company.
• 30:07
  Just now it's creating a high bandwidth link between computers
• 30:10
  in your brain. Yeah, competitor to neural link.
• 30:12
  Yeah, I mean in the same space. So you're not doing the exact
• 30:14
  same thing, but definitely in that same space.
• 30:18
  And then so many other, you know, really interesting.
• 30:20
  What about Atronic? Yeah, in the robotic spaces and
• 30:23
  others, robotics means so many different things.
• 30:26
  Today. It means humanoid robots like
• 30:28
  Aptronic, which we just invested more than $100 million into as
• 30:32
  part of a $400 million round Google.
• 30:35
  That's the most you have ever invest in a company.
• 30:38
  That was basically more than we invested in anything combined.
• 30:41
  Wow. And and then we doubled and not
• 30:43
  just happened. Yeah.
• 30:44
  So yeah, we've, our AUM has been, is going to triple this
• 30:47
  year. But but yeah, that's like, and
• 30:49
  that's really about what we believe may be the biggest
• 30:51
  market in the world, which is all of human labor.
• 30:54
  You know, everything that people do and moving super, super
• 30:57
  quick. Definitely something that leads
• 30:58
  towards the world of abundance where you have people to help
• 31:01
  you, robots to help you with all the things that you need to go
• 31:05
  do. Avtronic is addressing what, you
• 31:06
  know, probably is one of the biggest markets in the whole
• 31:09
  world, which is all of human labor, anything that people can
• 31:12
  go do. And that's the whole concept of
• 31:14
  why is it a humanoid robot? Why isn't it doesn't have wheels
• 31:17
  or a different format or, you know, like it's because the
• 31:20
  world that we live in is designed for for people, right?
• 31:23
  So if you want robots to be able to be around our world and not
• 31:26
  have to redesign the world for them, they need to look like us
• 31:30
  and be able to sit in a chair and walk around this chair and
• 31:34
  move it and twist it and do all the things that we do.
• 31:37
  And that's what this the promise of these humanoid robots brings.
• 31:40
  And yeah, that's that's massive. And then robotics is so many
• 31:45
  other things. Robotics is drones.
• 31:48
  Not everybody thinks of a drone as a robot, but robots really
• 31:50
  about autonomy. Robots are about, you know,
• 31:53
  affecting things in the world and having them happen
• 31:56
  automatically. And drones are one of the most
• 31:58
  popular examples of that. Most drones that consumers think
• 32:02
  about a really just cameras. That's what a drone is.
• 32:05
  It's a camera that can move around and you know, and the
• 32:08
  cameras can do lots of things. Cameras can look, you know,
• 32:10
  different kinds of cameras. The cameras can have AI inside
• 32:13
  and so cameras can, you know, inspect things and other things
• 32:16
  like that. And then more and more, the
• 32:18
  germs can do things. The drones can apply, they can
• 32:22
  clean things, they can apply coatings to things.
• 32:24
  They can, you know, sometimes go fix things.
• 32:28
  And that's all the drones. Then there's things happening
• 32:31
  automatically in space. One of the biggest signs to me
• 32:34
  of Austin really being able to do anything and like having just
• 32:38
  kind of everything going on here is the fact that we have Saronic
• 32:42
  here, another great company that's raised hundreds of
• 32:44
  millions of dollars, gotten billions of dollars in contracts
• 32:47
  with the Navy and the US government, and they're building
• 32:51
  autonomous boats for the Navy in Austin.
• 32:56
  Yeah, it's incredible. Why are they, there's no ocean
• 33:00
  here, Right, Right. You know, like, why are they
• 33:02
  building boats? OK, we have a lake, but like,
• 33:04
  why are they building boats here?
• 33:06
  It's because the talent and the people are here that they need.
• 33:09
  And to me that says, like, if, if we can go build the future of
• 33:13
  shipbuilding here. And of course, they're going to
• 33:15
  end up with, you know, offices in other places and shipyards in
• 33:18
  other places. But if this is the headquarters
• 33:20
  for the shipbuilders, you don't do anything.
• 33:23
  That's a. That's a very good example.
• 33:25
  So you know, one of the things that I know you're pretty hard
• 33:29
  wired as an optimist like me because I know because I know
• 33:33
  you really well. We talked about this stuff a
• 33:35
  lot. I'm at the place where I am 95%
• 33:40
  certain that humanity is going to create an age of abundance
• 33:44
  for all. And let me just describe what
• 33:47
  for all means in my mind. So you know, one of the things I
• 33:51
  talked about in my book, the second book I'm writing, which
• 33:55
  is called Love Conquers Fear with the subtitle Humanity, AI
• 33:59
  and Age of Abundance for all. As I talk about this Uber driver
• 34:02
  that picked me up, delightful guy named Kalabu from this
• 34:06
  country, Chad in Africa. Never heard of it before.
• 34:10
  It was kind of embarrassed I didn't hear it before.
• 34:12
  You know, I just fell in love with this guy.
• 34:15
  You know, we were having such a great conversation and ask him
• 34:17
  all about his family. And I started looking it up on
• 34:21
  ChatGPT and we started having a conversation about Chad and
• 34:24
  found out pretty quickly it's #187 out of 189 on the human
• 34:28
  Development index that their GDP is 660 a person versus around
• 34:33
  our 85,000 And the US. And my mind almost immediately
• 34:39
  went to the country of Chad needs AI and robots.
• 34:45
  That is the only hope for a country like Chad is the robots
• 34:49
  coming in like an NGO coming in with an army of robots building
• 34:53
  the clean water supply they need, the electrical
• 34:56
  configuration and, you know, pipelining the energy projects,
• 35:01
  you know, to create energy in the country in the 1st place.
• 35:04
  The, the, the projects to create, you know, the food that
• 35:08
  they need to grow the, the health care they need.
• 35:12
  And it, and it really took me in this place where I was visioning
• 35:16
  on this ride. I was like, Oh my gosh, this age
• 35:20
  could create an Oasis in Chad, kind of like what you were
• 35:23
  saying. If a, if a Navy, you know, you
• 35:26
  know, ship company could start in Austin.
• 35:29
  Like imagine if Chad could be on an Asus and, and, and that could
• 35:33
  actually happen in this lifetime.
• 35:35
  I mean, where are you at on your percentage between, you know,
• 35:39
  I'm, I'm at 95%, Where are you? In what you saw, what time frame
• 35:42
  did you say? Yeah, I think, I think the next
• 35:46
  10 to 15 years just to frame it is.
• 35:50
  We're in such an. Exponential curve.
• 35:53
  I think a week of tech progress right now is like a year of tech
• 35:57
  progress 10 years ago. And I think 10 years from now,
• 36:02
  an hour or two of tech progress is going to be like a week
• 36:05
  today. That's the only way I can even
• 36:07
  grok exponential. And that's going to take us to
• 36:11
  this place where the capability for us to show ourselves is
• 36:17
  going to be very pronounced, but the capability for us to create
• 36:21
  an age of abundance for all is also going to be very
• 36:24
  pronounced. And it'll be up to humanity to
• 36:27
  make a choice. Like, what do we want?
• 36:29
  Yeah. So I'm pretty optimistic.
• 36:33
  I don't claim to be like, omniscient.
• 36:37
  Yeah, I'm not either. I'm making a prediction.
• 36:40
  I don't know what's going to happen and.
• 36:42
  I'm frequently wrong, but when I look back at the progression of
• 36:46
  technology through human history, it certainly is
• 36:50
  following the acceleration that you talked about, and we can all
• 36:53
  see that. Happening.
• 36:56
  And as far as just every year feels like it advances even
• 37:02
  faster and it's harder to keep up with and the changes that
• 37:06
  have come in 10 years now compared to the past 100 years
• 37:09
  and you know, things like that. So I believe that I think that's
• 37:13
  true. And when I look at the evolution
• 37:16
  of technology, there's been lots of cases where technology has
• 37:20
  lots of potentially bad use cases.
• 37:25
  And, well, nothing's. Perfect and there's examples of
• 37:29
  things going wrong we generally that seem to use technology for
• 37:35
  good and nuclear power be an example of that Like we've done
• 37:40
  some bad things with nuclear power or no sorry when certainly
• 37:43
  nuclear weapons, right but it's been pretty limited and and you
• 37:48
  know, people have different perspectives about what the Cold
• 37:50
  War meant and deterrence and things like that but like, you
• 37:53
  know, nuclear power seems like a really promising thing right now
• 37:56
  if you know, like as far as being having a lot of potential
• 37:58
  good yeah, I hope that the US gets.
• 38:00
  After with nuclear power, though, it's still a taboo
• 38:03
  thing. It's that seems to be changing,
• 38:05
  you know? Yeah, it seems to be changing.
• 38:06
  We have two, two small nuclear companies we recently invested
• 38:09
  in. They're really cool.
• 38:11
  One of them building small nuclear reactors that are
• 38:14
  modular to put it primarily data centers.
• 38:16
  And the idea of being modular ones are easier to produce.
• 38:19
  You build them in a factory or you're getting better at them,
• 38:22
  making a lot of them assembly aligned nuclear reactors.
• 38:25
  Exactly which the building here in Austin.
• 38:27
  ALO Atomics and then the other one digs, uses mining technology
• 38:32
  and puts the reactor a mile underground because then by.
• 38:37
  Doing so, you don't need to. Build any of the other
• 38:39
  protective infrastructure around it, like there's no containment
• 38:43
  needed, right, right. And and they literally just like
• 38:46
  put water on top of the whole up top of it and literally the
• 38:49
  water pressure of a mile all right will completely without
• 38:52
  any electricity, without any completely contain anything that
• 38:56
  could happen, you know like and so it has some really
• 38:59
  interesting benefits. It's amazing and creates the
• 39:01
  potential little we know about how.
• 39:04
  Far you could actually dig into the earth and like even what's
• 39:07
  down. What's amazing is how much we
• 39:08
  know. Like, you know, I mean, not
• 39:10
  everybody knows, but right, yeah, like we can dig really
• 39:12
  deep, yeah. And and they can do stuff and
• 39:14
  so. So, yeah, I think, you know,
• 39:16
  nuclear is an example where that's happened and you know, AI
• 39:20
  is so far another example where that's happened.
• 39:23
  And and yes, like, you know, AI could be used to do really hard,
• 39:28
  terrible things to deceive people.
• 39:30
  And, you know, you know, there's conspiracy theories about China
• 39:34
  using TikTok to like and make all of our children have mental
• 39:37
  health problems. Like I don't think that's like,
• 39:41
  I don't think that's directly intentionally happening.
• 39:44
  There may be some effects of that or influences, but like, I
• 39:47
  don't really think that's happening, but like it could
• 39:49
  happen. Like that's totally unthinkable,
• 39:50
  right. All right.
• 39:51
  And when you look at what happened with just small drones
• 39:54
  and what the Ukraine and Israeli sent on with the sneaking drones
• 39:57
  in and having, you know, secret drone attacks it like it.
• 40:01
  Looks so smart. But like the US is way more
• 40:04
  susceptible to that. Like if China wanted to do that
• 40:07
  to the US, like we're a screwed. Like they could have tons of,
• 40:11
  you know, like suddenly have tons of drones taking over doing
• 40:13
  bad things and, you know, like, and it could be really bad.
• 40:17
  And so, you know, yet generally drones are being used to do
• 40:21
  really good things, right? Right.
• 40:22
  So yeah, I just, I'm an optimist, though.
• 40:24
  Like I see that so far. Playing out too, that you know.
• 40:29
  Things being better, things continuing to get better, people
• 40:31
  working towards the right things.
• 40:35
  I try to just be it, be a positive influence.
• 40:39
  How do I make sure that I'm at least contributing to these
• 40:43
  things getting better? Because it's not like I can stop
• 40:46
  them like they're going to happen.
• 40:48
  So like how do I try to push them in a better direction is
• 40:52
  like my optimistic entrepreneurial approach and at.
• 40:57
  The same time like. Shit's going to go wrong.
• 41:01
  Like there's going. To be mistakes.
• 41:03
  The pendulum is going to swing back and forth and and I
• 41:07
  generally believe all that. And then there's one of the
• 41:13
  theories. Maybe it's.
• 41:16
  Fermi's Paradox. But of that, one of the reasons
• 41:21
  we don't see other signs of life in the universe is that at some
• 41:26
  point life just extinguishes itself like it can't handle it.
• 41:31
  It overcomes the planet, it overcomes whatever it's doing
• 41:35
  and effectively taints its own and habit habitat.
• 41:40
  And I had the joy of visiting Easter Island many years ago
• 41:46
  with my wife, Amy. Yeah, with Rapa Nui, which is
• 41:50
  one of the most remote inhabited islands.
• 41:52
  Now it's a four hour flight West of Santiago, Chile.
• 41:55
  It's not easy to get to, not easy to get.
• 41:57
  And wonderful place, reliable and mystical.
• 42:01
  And part of the thing there is that the island actually went
• 42:05
  extinct. There did have people that
• 42:07
  inhabited it that live there. And it's a small island and they
• 42:12
  cut down all the trees and like they had to.
• 42:19
  Leave right like. And it's like, like, somebody
• 42:22
  cut down the last tree and they're just like, oh, shit.
• 42:25
  Like, right, right. There's no more trees.
• 42:27
  Like, what do we do? Like, you know.
• 42:30
  And the place went empty. And this was before riding.
• 42:33
  And so there's really some lost history there.
• 42:36
  Like there's incredible moai, the statues that they built in
• 42:41
  the yeah, that that they don't really know the full story of
• 42:44
  because there is no written history.
• 42:46
  And because the people all went away and, you know, some moved
• 42:49
  off to other islands and and eventually came back.
• 42:52
  But that's, you know, that story.
• 42:55
  I think it's something we've seen play out in habitats over
• 42:58
  and over again. Yeah.
• 43:00
  And we have to be really thoughtful about.
• 43:01
  And so, yeah, you know, that's why lawns focused on getting the
• 43:04
  Mars, right, getting off this planet.
• 43:06
  Yeah. So that if this habitat gets
• 43:08
  tainted, it's not the only one. Right.
• 43:12
  Right. Yeah, I mean, I, I think that, I
• 43:16
  mean, I did a visioning exercise recently.
• 43:18
  I don't know if you read the short story I did, I did, which
• 43:21
  is called God's Final Exam. So the visioning exercise with
• 43:25
  that is a way that collectively we could make it.
• 43:30
  What would be the collective awakening for humanity that
• 43:34
  would get people to collectively wake up and say, hey, we are
• 43:38
  genetically almost identical. Like if you take a 7 foot tall
• 43:43
  black American basketball player and a four foot tall, you know,
• 43:48
  Chinese monk, the genetic similarity is almost exactly the
• 43:53
  same. And we have all this programming
• 43:57
  though, that tells us like, hey, I'm an American, you're a
• 44:02
  Chinese or I'm a man, you're a woman, or I'm a Jew, you're a
• 44:06
  Muslim or all of these, all these things that babies don't
• 44:09
  have, like babies when they're born just are the divine lower
• 44:13
  creatures just look at each other with nothing but love.
• 44:17
  And so part of what my thesis on humanity is that we need to have
• 44:22
  a collective awakening to manifest that future of
• 44:26
  abundance for all because we're building technologies that will
• 44:30
  take us there. Like it could, it literally
• 44:32
  could be the most amazing future.
• 44:35
  You know, it's the Star Trek future, right?
• 44:36
  We could I mean, Mars is just one in many planets and Mars
• 44:40
  actually isn't a great candidate for many reasons, right.
• 44:44
  We've learned from our mutual friend, Richard Garriott, who is
• 44:47
  a big fan of of Elon and and helped a lot with SpaceX.
• 44:52
  But one thing's Richard says like, hey, Mars, it just
• 44:55
  eradicate you. I mean like just the radiation
• 44:57
  alone, like you've got to build underground, etcetera.
• 45:01
  And part of how we could go actually go to other planets as
• 45:06
  if we get to a point with AI, quantum computing, robotics,
• 45:10
  brand new computer interfaces where we can accelerate our
• 45:15
  technological progress to be able to see what the actual
• 45:19
  limits of physics are Like. Do we know that we can't travel
• 45:23
  faster than the speed of light? I mean, Einstein called quantum
• 45:26
  entanglement spooky ash kind of at a different distance because
• 45:30
  it broke his paradigm for general theory of relativity
• 45:35
  like that, that these particles were moving in synchronicity.
• 45:39
  He's like, that can't be true. And so he said, I'm going to
• 45:42
  choose my religion as materialism, even though my
• 45:45
  mathematics shows that this is the case.
• 45:48
  And we only know what 4% of the universe is made of.
• 45:51
  We don't know what 96% is. We call it dark energy and dark
• 45:54
  matter. Well, maybe we should know and
• 45:55
  maybe we should figure out how to navigate that.
• 45:59
  But we really, we, we really could have this future where we
• 46:04
  could have that Star Trek future, right?
• 46:06
  We could actually go conquer other planets.
• 46:10
  And, you know, conquer is a bad sounds like a bad word.
• 46:13
  I mean, like actually birth life on other planets and have and
• 46:17
  have that future, but only if we don't destroy ourselves.
• 46:22
  Do you think a lot about that? I think a lot about this for for
• 46:25
  our kids and for humanity. I mean, I'm super, super happy
• 46:28
  with technology progress overall, but there are some
• 46:33
  pretty serious problems, like we are being manipulated via social
• 46:38
  media right now, for example. There's no doubt that the
• 46:41
  algorithms are goal seeking to sell us more ads and leveraging
• 46:46
  our base fears like they're just algorithmically programmed for
• 46:49
  that. But I agree with Tristan Harris
• 46:52
  that it's both a utopia and a dystopia at the same time with
• 46:56
  social media. I don't think human nature.
• 46:59
  Is going to fundamentally change and humans are both social and.
• 47:05
  Competitive and. So, you know, we are tribal like
• 47:10
  like it's just like that's innate to I believe.
• 47:15
  And so it's really how to me like how the social structure
• 47:20
  evolves and in your beautiful kind of vision of the future
• 47:25
  was, you know, God's last question.
• 47:27
  It describes the end point, but not really like the transfer.
• 47:30
  Like how did you get there other than he's like just it happened
• 47:34
  like people did this. And I I think that the.
• 47:38
  How is like that's like really key.
• 47:41
  Like it's some level, you know, capitalism is this incredible
• 47:46
  thing we've had is driving towards abundance that's pushing
• 47:50
  human advancement and increasing quality of life, increasing the
• 47:54
  amount of resources available. And yet there's a.
• 48:00
  Post capitalism. Future I do also believe like I
• 48:03
  don't think we're there yet or anything it doesn't mean we
• 48:05
  should do anything different right now yeah you know like but
• 48:08
  like yeah like if we're really successful when there is
• 48:11
  abundance when there's energy abundance well we don't need
• 48:17
  capitalism anymore like you can have all the things you want
• 48:20
  there's robots to build whatever you want there's plenty of
• 48:23
  planets and plenty of space and there's a lot of sci-fi books
• 48:26
  that explore that vision of like what's a world of abundance look
• 48:29
  like one of my favorite are written by Alastair Reynolds one
• 48:33
  of the particular ones called Aurora rising or or the prefect
• 48:37
  is another name that goes by but about just kind of this world
• 48:40
  where everything that can be will be because people want to
• 48:44
  live lots of different ways and they can and but also when
• 48:47
  people potentially live forever and aren't worried about dying
• 48:52
  there's also. Different extremes of what
• 48:54
  could. Happen.
• 48:55
  Does that mean we suddenly become much more conservative?
• 49:01
  Like we don't. Want to take risks?
• 49:02
  Because right now it's like, well, you know, like I'm going
• 49:05
  to go skydiving. I'm going to go climb that
• 49:07
  mountain and I'm going to go do that really fun thing because we
• 49:11
  only live once, right? You know, like, but I'm going to
• 49:14
  die anyway. Like, I might as well like, try
• 49:16
  fun things, even if not like, I'm trying to die.
• 49:18
  But like, you know, even if it, you know, there's some risk
• 49:20
  involved. But suddenly if there's like,
• 49:22
  well, but actually there's no risk.
• 49:23
  Like if I just stay home, like, I'm definitely not going to die.
• 49:28
  Well, does that change the math? Like, does everybody just stay
• 49:31
  home? Yeah, because they're afraid to
• 49:33
  go. Out, you know, like.
• 49:35
  Or is it the opposite, which the books also explores?
• 49:39
  Like is it like, well, wow, like it's now my bar for thrill
• 49:43
  seeking is so high. I need to do like the most
• 49:47
  dangerous thing in the world, like the Super extreme sports
• 49:51
  because it's the only way to like feel alive, right.
• 49:57
  And so I think those are all really interesting dynamics that
• 50:00
  could come to come into play, but I don't think, you know, to
• 50:03
  me a everybody living in harmony, but and there's no.
• 50:10
  Conflict and there's no. Competition and there's no I'm
• 50:14
  not sure that's heaven you know like it's kind of boring and
• 50:17
  like and like does you know does the struggle of life give it
• 50:22
  meaning right you know like sports is 1 sports is one thing
• 50:27
  that we've evolved what's the next for sports you know that
• 50:31
  like let me let me unpack this because.
• 50:34
  Because this actually isn't my read so just just to be clear.
• 50:38
  Like, of course, I am an entrepreneur, so I'm always
• 50:41
  going to take risk and there will be a large.
• 50:48
  Portion of. Humanity that is wired that way.
• 50:51
  Like the barrier to creativity is being shattered because of
• 50:54
  AI, which is great. Like the ability for me to write
• 50:58
  a short story. I mean it took me 3 hours to
• 51:00
  write that and I was able to call in the styles of Andy Weir,
• 51:06
  who you know you turned me on to his most recent book project
• 51:10
  Kilenary, which is fantastic and being made into a movie and call
• 51:14
  in the character development style of Borscht to really build
• 51:19
  that out and paint that vision of a possible future.
• 51:24
  So one of the push backs I get, and I understand this push back
• 51:29
  is people say, well, Brett, are you suggesting that humanity is
• 51:35
  going to be like baton where they measure themselves on gross
• 51:39
  domestic happiness instead of GDP?
• 51:42
  And that's actually not what I'm suggesting.
• 51:45
  Like there will be a portion of humanity in a world of abundance
• 51:48
  which thinks that way and measures that way.
• 51:51
  And then there'll be a portion that's hyper ambitious that
• 51:54
  wants to go find out what the laws a physics actually are.
• 51:59
  And they want to go to other planets and they want to go take
• 52:01
  the risk. Like you and I would probably
• 52:03
  sign up to be like, hey, let's go visit a quasar together.
• 52:07
  Let's go to the edge of a black hole and see what that's like.
• 52:11
  And, you know, be there for the birth of a star.
• 52:13
  And and that that would be exciting, but would come with
• 52:17
  some risk that is unquantifiable because it's never been done
• 52:22
  before. Like we would truly be pioneers
• 52:25
  or you want to start life on another planet.
• 52:28
  What I'm suggesting is that if we don't create the capability
• 52:34
  to transcend the mindset that we've had because of the way
• 52:38
  we've evolved, which made sense that the more likely scenario if
• 52:44
  we don't transcend it is we destroy ourselves because we're
• 52:48
  going to have technology that's more powerful than we can even
• 52:50
  imagine today. Like it.
• 52:52
  The the ability for a terrorist to create a bio weapon is going
• 52:59
  to be extremely pronounced with my, my thesis is open source AI
• 53:03
  is going to win. And that doesn't mean I'm
• 53:05
  operating from place out of fear.
• 53:06
  I actually, again, I'm 95% certain that humanity is going
• 53:10
  to make it. And there's three reasons that I
• 53:13
  have that hope. One is we pulled together and we
• 53:17
  did figure out how to contain nuclear weapons.
• 53:21
  Now if you're an alien visiting Earth today and you knew nothing
• 53:25
  about humanity and you were just trying to figure us out, you
• 53:29
  would pretty quickly zone in on the fact that we have more
• 53:31
  nuclear weapons today then then we need by far.
• 53:36
  We could destroy the planet many times over today with the
• 53:39
  nuclear weapons we have. And then you would ask yourself
• 53:41
  as an alien, are they still developing nuclear weapons?
• 53:44
  And the answer setup would be yes.
• 53:46
  It'd be like, wait, hold on, they're still developing nuclear
• 53:49
  weapons, but they have more and they're doing it as a
• 53:52
  deterrence. And that's, that's the driving
• 53:54
  force. But yet we haven't, we haven't
• 53:56
  destroyed ourselves that way. We didn't destroy ourselves with
• 54:00
  smallpox. We had to globally collaborate
• 54:02
  on that. And actually, you know, my, my
• 54:04
  good friend you, you know, I'm really well too.
• 54:06
  Byron Reese, he told me something which I had to
• 54:11
  actually Google because I hadn't heard it before.
• 54:14
  I why didn't Google I looked at be a ChatGPT, which is humanity
• 54:19
  50 to 70,000 years ago was down to 800 humans and I had to look
• 54:25
  it up to like verify and it's correct.
• 54:28
  It was between 800 and a couple of 1000 and it was during the
• 54:31
  Ice Age and there was a super volcano that nearly extinct us.
• 54:35
  It just covered the the earth. It was so big that it just
• 54:38
  blacked out the skies. And if our core nature was evil,
• 54:43
  that would have been it. We would just kind of destroyed
• 54:45
  ourselves. And that would have been the end
• 54:46
  of the human experiment. And I do think that this
• 54:50
  acceleration, you know, it's one of those situations where with
• 54:54
  great power comes great responsibility.
• 54:56
  So I think this is the penultimate creation time for
• 55:00
  humanity through technology and all these amazing things we're
• 55:05
  celebrating today, which I feel deeply in my heart, you know,
• 55:08
  whether it's Icon or Aptronic or, you know, Neurolink or
• 55:12
  Paradronics or any, any of these companies, they are showing us
• 55:16
  that we can get to an age of abundance for all.
• 55:19
  Like it's the beginning of that. But ultimately it's still up to
• 55:23
  us collectively in in humanity to leverage these technologies
• 55:29
  correctly. And we would not be.
• 55:32
  In. This race against China to build
• 55:35
  AGI before them if there wasn't some fear there, and China would
• 55:39
  not be in this race to build AGI before us if there wasn't some
• 55:42
  fear there. So that is our nature.
• 55:45
  But what I'm proposing, as in that short story, is we need to
• 55:48
  transcend our nature that, you know, there was a time where gay
• 55:53
  marriage was viewed as something that nobody could ever think
• 55:59
  would actually get passed as legal, but yet it did happen.
• 56:04
  And then society just changed. And and so we have transcended
• 56:08
  many times. I'm not sure.
• 56:09
  I mean, to me that's like. Actually like not transcending
• 56:12
  our nature, that's just actually our nature is that that's part
• 56:14
  of it. And so it was more like
• 56:17
  acquiescing to our. Nature.
• 56:20
  I don't know that I'm, I'm not sure that our nature, like I, I
• 56:23
  think that's pretty fundamental. Like that's what I was kind of
• 56:25
  saying before, Like I just don't know that human nature changes.
• 56:27
  I mean, this is it's funny that we're human.
• 56:29
  Nature, right? Yeah.
• 56:31
  So let's talk about the T-shirt. This T.
• 56:32
  Shirt, actually. Is one of the training we got in
• 56:35
  the Henry Crown Fellowship? Yes.
• 56:37
  What is human nature? Is human nature generally good
• 56:41
  or not? And there was the Thomas Hobbes
• 56:44
  view of Leviathan, which suggested the human nature is
• 56:47
  not good. And then there was the Eastern
• 56:49
  view that actually every baby, etcetera is part of the divine
• 56:53
  and and is a beautiful little, you know, loving creature.
• 56:57
  Yeah, well, you know, actually for me.
• 56:59
  This is also not, you know, this is the executive's compass on
• 57:03
  our first. And it's not actually like, a
• 57:06
  good or bad, right? Like in fact, when I first saw
• 57:08
  it, one of the first things that really struck me is that my
• 57:12
  initial inclination was to think that liberty and equality were
• 57:16
  synonyms, whereas here they're proposed as antonyms, right?
• 57:20
  I would think when I first, without thinking of it, like was
• 57:23
  what is liberty? And I'm like, oh, those mean the
• 57:25
  same thing. But actually what this shows is
• 57:28
  that liberty, which is the ability to do whatever you want,
• 57:32
  is actually the opposite and kind of positioned as a 0 sum
• 57:36
  game where in order to get to equality, you give up liberty.
• 57:41
  That's because equality is everybody being the same, right?
• 57:46
  And you have to enforce that because by naturally people are
• 57:49
  not all the same and things get unequal.
• 57:52
  And so if you let everyone be free, they will be less equal.
• 57:56
  But if you force them to be more equal, they'll be less free.
• 57:59
  And then similarly, community inefficiency, efficiency is
• 58:03
  really kind of letting the market and individuals, you
• 58:06
  know, drive and do whatever, you know, do whatever they think is
• 58:09
  best to push for advancement and the right outcome.
• 58:13
  Community is really taking into account externalities and what
• 58:16
  else you know might come into play.
• 58:18
  And again, they see that as kind of a 0 sum game.
• 58:21
  Now as you think about abundance, one of the things
• 58:24
  that I've learned the most interesting is does that change
• 58:29
  the math in the world of abundance?
• 58:33
  Is it a 0 sum game? Do we need to give up freedom in
• 58:38
  order to have equality is because there's so much more
• 58:42
  resources? Do we need to sacrifice
• 58:45
  community for efficiency when we have great technology and
• 58:50
  advancement and clean power and all these other things?
• 58:55
  And so for me, what's really, you know, really fundamental
• 58:57
  when I think about the world of abundance and what might really
• 58:59
  fundamentally be different, how human nature might change in
• 59:04
  that world. It's the fact that, yeah, that
• 59:07
  this is a 0 sum game right now. Or, you know, that's how it's
• 59:10
  positioned, giving up one to go to the other in every case.
• 59:15
  And could that fundamentally break the compass you know and
• 59:19
  like? You know.
• 59:20
  Brent close the gap you know between these different things
• 59:24
  yeah yeah, one of the books that I.
• 59:26
  Read early on in Leadership was written by my leadership
• 59:30
  professor at Warden. He was the founder of that
• 59:33
  program and it's called Total Leadership.
• 59:35
  His name is Stu Friedman and his thesis on a total leader is that
• 59:41
  you could you could create maximization across multiple
• 59:46
  things that you would view as kind of a work life trade off.
• 59:50
  For example, you would go through this exercise in the
• 59:53
  Total Leadership book where you would say, OK for family, how
• 59:59
  much time am I actually spending versus how much time I am?
• 1:00:03
  For career, how much time I'm actually spending versus how
• 1:00:06
  much time I optimally want to community, etcetera.
• 1:00:09
  And you just go through and then self, you know, was one of them.
• 1:00:12
  So those were the four poles and what he actually proposed in
• 1:00:17
  that book, which I felt was so brilliant and we implemented
• 1:00:19
  this a bizarre voice is that you could actually maximize if you
• 1:00:24
  thought kind of four dimensionally about those four
• 1:00:28
  at the same time. And you had the quote UN quote
• 1:00:31
  brave discussions with your boss to talk about maximization.
• 1:00:37
  Like, hey, you know, for for example, good, very good example
• 1:00:40
  is, you know, everything was done in person back then.
• 1:00:43
  It was pre zoom and and there was a woman who her parents were
• 1:00:49
  really struggling with their health in Houston and everybody
• 1:00:53
  was based in Austin at that point in time in the company.
• 1:00:56
  And so she started talking about that book to her boss and said,
• 1:01:03
  you know, do you think that I could spend like a couple of
• 1:01:06
  days a week in Houston because I'm really suffering.
• 1:01:09
  And my promise to you is actually my work productivity
• 1:01:13
  will go up. And guess what?
• 1:01:16
  It did right? And she would have never had
• 1:01:19
  that conversation had it not been for that book because she
• 1:01:21
  felt that gravitational pull. Like, we're all in person.
• 1:01:25
  I'm in Austin, I'm working for this great company and I think
• 1:01:29
  that collectively humanity, if, if we enter that age of
• 1:01:34
  abundance, which I'm, I'm quite certain we will, humanity is
• 1:01:39
  going to have to have that collective discussion.
• 1:01:42
  And the big question mark in my mind, it is 1.
• 1:01:46
  You know, how do we collectively wake up to have that and change
• 1:01:50
  that aspect of our nature? Again, there'll still be
• 1:01:53
  competition, but it's competition that's not 0 sum.
• 1:01:56
  It'll be competition. And I want to go to that planet
• 1:01:59
  and start life there. You know what is it going?
• 1:02:03
  To take for us. To collectively wake up and that
• 1:02:06
  that short story was a exercise at what it may be.
• 1:02:10
  And you may remember in the short story that the collective
• 1:02:13
  awakening happened when Doctor Alexander Bliss was able to
• 1:02:18
  definitively prove that we lived in a reality where the divine
• 1:02:22
  was part of it. And so humanity saw that
• 1:02:25
  together at that Telluride Film Festival, and it blew
• 1:02:28
  everybody's minds. They realized, oh, science and
• 1:02:30
  spirituality actually are intertwined like the two
• 1:02:34
  serpents of the catechist, as opposed to these separate poles
• 1:02:37
  where it's like if you're a scientist could then you believe
• 1:02:40
  there is no such thing as spirituality.
• 1:02:41
  Or if you're a religious person, you believe that you have to
• 1:02:45
  believe all the stories in the Bible or the Torah of Tehran or
• 1:02:48
  Quran or. And so therefore, you know,
• 1:02:51
  science is bogus. And the reality is they're both,
• 1:02:54
  they both can be true. There's elements of both that
• 1:02:58
  that can come together and that that helped bring humanity
• 1:03:03
  together in a beautiful moment. But that's one that the second
• 1:03:07
  is what would it actually take from a negative scenario for
• 1:03:13
  humanity to wake up? Like, what would the calamity
• 1:03:17
  need to be where humanity says, OK, we've got to wake up?
• 1:03:23
  Like for, for, for nuclear bombs.
• 1:03:25
  It was Hiroshima. It was like, that was the part
• 1:03:27
  where humanity was like, hey, we better collaborate on nuclear
• 1:03:31
  weapons because what just happened there was absolutely
• 1:03:34
  horrific. But it stopped World War 2.
• 1:03:36
  I mean, it was horrible, but it stopped World War 2.
• 1:03:38
  So you know the classic sci-fi. Answer is discovering other life
• 1:03:42
  yes, which then makes us all. Say like, oh shit, we're all.
• 1:03:46
  Humans right we better band together and make sure we
• 1:03:48
  survive right and drive us to Ajmi you know to to the global
• 1:03:52
  you know a global government yeah yeah well it's.
• 1:03:55
  It's an interesting thought because Mustafa Suleiman when he
• 1:03:59
  gave his Ted talk last year, he's the head of everything AI
• 1:04:04
  at Microsoft and the Co founder of DeepMind.
• 1:04:07
  It's interesting that he's the Co founder of DeepMind in charge
• 1:04:09
  of everything AI at Microsoft. And Dimas Asibis is the other Co
• 1:04:13
  founder of DeepMind in charge of everything AI at Google.
• 1:04:17
  And one of the things that Mustafa said in his Ted talk is
• 1:04:21
  that he was trying to describe AI to his nephew and his nephew,
• 1:04:27
  you know, has had that boundless curiosity and he was really
• 1:04:30
  struggling to to figure out how to describe it.
• 1:04:33
  And it crystallized for him. And he described it to his
• 1:04:35
  nephew as a digital species. He said it's like a species.
• 1:04:40
  And he had to unpack that and what that meant.
• 1:04:42
  And it's interesting because Mustafi Suleiman's most recent,
• 1:04:46
  you know, tweets, you know, post on LinkedIn, etcetera, had been
• 1:04:51
  all about that we shouldn't apply consciousness and
• 1:04:55
  sentients to something that isn't sentient, that it
• 1:04:57
  shouldn't have rights like a human being, etcetera.
• 1:05:00
  Because. So it's an interesting parallel
• 1:05:02
  because he was talking about his species there and now he's
• 1:05:05
  backing off of that now because he's in the know and he's like,
• 1:05:10
  no, these aren't conscious beings.
• 1:05:12
  This is technology, so. It's it's a.
• 1:05:16
  It's a way of me telling you that maybe the aliens are
• 1:05:19
  already here in a way, right? And I'm not suggesting the
• 1:05:22
  Terminator or the Matrix scenario.
• 1:05:24
  I don't believe that that's the scenario that we have to worry
• 1:05:28
  about. I believe the scenario we have
• 1:05:30
  to worry about is ourselves and ourselves using these
• 1:05:34
  technologies to create vast harm at a scale that is
• 1:05:40
  unprecedented. And that's, that's, that's the
• 1:05:42
  part that I think we need to have that collective awakening.
• 1:05:47
  And my thesis is that we're going to get to a point where we
• 1:05:50
  can see the age of abundance over the horizon and we can see
• 1:05:53
  it and we can see that it's real.
• 1:05:55
  And we're going to in disease and everything else.
• 1:05:58
  And then we need to make a choice in the world of whether
• 1:06:02
  or not we grasp that together and stop the, the 0 sum
• 1:06:08
  thinking. And I want to.
• 1:06:10
  Do you have any thoughts on that?
• 1:06:12
  Yeah, I, I don't think. I mean, I just I.
• 1:06:14
  Think it has to be instigated by a, you know, some some catalyst
• 1:06:19
  existential. Catalyst Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:22
  That, that is a fear I have. I mean, and I think there will
• 1:06:25
  be. Yeah.
• 1:06:26
  Existential catalyst. Yeah.
• 1:06:28
  Yeah. But like it requires existential
• 1:06:31
  catalyst, like something that threatens humanity as a whole
• 1:06:35
  that says we have to all work together.
• 1:06:37
  Yeah, Yeah. And then I think no.
• 1:06:39
  Yeah, I think we will. And, and, and again, I'm 95%
• 1:06:43
  certain that we will. And one of the things I'm
• 1:06:45
  exploring in the book I'm writing is what, what, what
• 1:06:50
  will. It be that.
• 1:06:51
  Truly is existential that all of humanity will look at and say,
• 1:06:57
  OK, we have to, we have to figure this out together because
• 1:07:00
  unlike nuclear weapons, AI is going to be infinitely portable.
• 1:07:06
  And I personally think that touch everybody's lives, it's
• 1:07:11
  going to touch everything. It's not just.
• 1:07:12
  Everybody's lives, like every business, every organization,
• 1:07:16
  every NGO and you know, it is going to be like electricity.
• 1:07:22
  And ultimately the, my thesis at least, and I'd love to know
• 1:07:28
  where you stand on this, is that I think open source is going to
• 1:07:30
  win. I think the frontier models will
• 1:07:32
  lead and obviously they're generating tons of revenue now,
• 1:07:36
  but I think we're going to hit hit a moment where it's just
• 1:07:40
  obvious that open source will win just like Linux won the
• 1:07:43
  Internet. And the DeepSeek moment, You
• 1:07:47
  know, the DeepSeek-R1 moment, which was on January 20th, the
• 1:07:52
  day before President Trump announced the Stargate project
• 1:07:56
  alongside Maiusha San Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, which 500
• 1:08:00
  billion of funding, more than we spend inflation adjusted on the
• 1:08:03
  Manhattan Project and more than we spent inflation adjusted on
• 1:08:07
  the space race versus the Russians the day before.
• 1:08:10
  That's when DeepSeek and China announced the R1 model, which is
• 1:08:14
  open source, which is vastly more powerful than GPT 4.
• 1:08:18
  And we're so far past that now in terms of the power of these
• 1:08:24
  models. And this thing that was shocking
• 1:08:27
  about the DeepSeek moment is the fact that, and we've got to take
• 1:08:31
  it with a little bit of grain of salt, but the, the DeepSeek, the
• 1:08:35
  company said that it only took $16 million of funding to create
• 1:08:39
  that. So it means that the weights can
• 1:08:41
  actually be stolen or borrowed or whatever, which means that
• 1:08:44
  these models, as they distill the massive amount of content
• 1:08:49
  into weights, they're portable. And that tells me that open
• 1:08:52
  source will end. You have a view on that?
• 1:08:56
  Or thesis on that. I think it's more.
• 1:09:01
  Likely that the paradigm changes.
• 1:09:05
  And I'm not an expert in the deep research of how AI works
• 1:09:09
  and the models work, but my understanding is that the
• 1:09:12
  fundamental core technology that we're working on has not
• 1:09:14
  fundamentally changed over the past few years.
• 1:09:18
  And primarily we've just thrown more hardware at it.
• 1:09:20
  Yeah. So just more compute, more
• 1:09:22
  resources. Obviously they've evolved it and
• 1:09:25
  they're optimizing it, but it's like it's working the same way.
• 1:09:28
  And that's why it just gets better with more hardware and
• 1:09:31
  more data. And I don't like think like, oh,
• 1:09:37
  I know who's got the answer or anything like that.
• 1:09:39
  But we are working with entrepreneurs who are looking at
• 1:09:43
  it from a different perspective, saying, you know, is there a
• 1:09:46
  solution that takes just a fundamentally different approach
• 1:09:49
  that doesn't require? All.
• 1:09:53
  The compute resources. And all the necessarily all the
• 1:09:55
  training, you know, or other things like that is not a
• 1:09:58
  transformer model, right? Right.
• 1:10:01
  And that kind of shift, like everybody's going like, oh, like
• 1:10:06
  the market's going to be this because you can't do it unless
• 1:10:08
  you can, you know, have billions of dollars in compute and like,
• 1:10:11
  you have to be alarming US can build this big cluster and, you
• 1:10:14
  know, it'll never work, right? And it's like, well, yeah,
• 1:10:16
  unless you take a different approach, that's the dollar at
• 1:10:18
  compute, you know, like, yeah, I totally.
• 1:10:20
  And like, yeah, I don't know what that is, but like, I know
• 1:10:24
  really smart people that are trying to, you know, like, and
• 1:10:26
  like, just when I kind of think I got shit figured out, usually
• 1:10:29
  somebody comes up with something different, you know, like.
• 1:10:32
  So I think it's possible. Yeah.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah. You know, like, yeah.
• 1:10:37
  I do think. Likely even paradigm will shift.
• 1:10:40
  I mean, we're in the early innings of large language models
• 1:10:43
  or whatever will supersede them. Let's let's talk about Watts.
• 1:10:50
  So recently you brought a film to Austin that you and I saw at
• 1:10:57
  the Aspen Action Forum, and it was a model.
• 1:11:00
  It was a model about how society could heal.
• 1:11:03
  You want to talk about that? I thought, I thought it was
• 1:11:05
  incredible. It's my second time to see the
• 1:11:07
  movie. That was just was that this
• 1:11:09
  week? I think that was this week that
• 1:11:11
  we saw that together. Yeah, me too.
• 1:11:12
  And that's my second time also. And yeah, one of the most just
• 1:11:16
  raw and impactful films I've ever seen.
• 1:11:20
  And that really encourage anyone to watch it if they get the
• 1:11:23
  opportunity. I think there will be more
• 1:11:24
  opportunities. But the film's called Nothing to
• 1:11:27
  See Here Watts, and it's a very unique film.
• 1:11:31
  It's a documentary. And it was created as an
• 1:11:34
  experiment by another 100 Crown fellow, our friend Mike Sonan.
• 1:11:38
  And he lives in the LA area and he was exposed to the Watts
• 1:11:43
  community, which is a small community, but one of the
• 1:11:46
  poorest, most least at least educated and most shortest
• 1:11:51
  lifespan, highest crime rate areas in the country.
• 1:11:55
  And it has been that way for a long time.
• 1:11:57
  And it's one of the places that, you know, nobody wants to go be
• 1:12:00
  a police officer everybody's trying to get out of.
• 1:12:03
  And it's really like horrific some of the things that go on
• 1:12:07
  there. And what he did is he just
• 1:12:12
  without really knowing exactly what's going to happen, he took
• 1:12:14
  20 iPhones and gave. Them out to 20 different.
• 1:12:18
  Did some research on who but gave them out to 20 different
• 1:12:20
  people in the community. Gang members.
• 1:12:25
  Police, students, activists and told.
• 1:12:33
  Them to just said tell. Your story, you know, and they
• 1:12:36
  had them for a while, for a year or two and the result of that
• 1:12:40
  was some just really incredible, really raw footage that came
• 1:12:43
  back that surprised everybody and bringing.
• 1:12:47
  These really different perspectives.
• 1:12:48
  Together. And at that point, it almost
• 1:12:51
  felt like they had something kind of sacred, like they didn't
• 1:12:53
  like, like, shoot, like, can I, can I, can an outsider come in
• 1:12:55
  and edit this? And so the next step was they
• 1:12:58
  invited the film makers, the people who had received the the
• 1:13:01
  cameras to come to a meeting to come talk to each other.
• 1:13:04
  And these were not people who, like, were receptive necessarily
• 1:13:07
  talking to each other. They're really distrustful and
• 1:13:11
  you know, they got them talking and showing each other the films
• 1:13:13
  and in the process of learning about the film and hearing each
• 1:13:17
  other's stories developed really unique bonds and we're able to
• 1:13:23
  humanize and understand each other a little bit better.
• 1:13:25
  And then through more effort produced the film.
• 1:13:28
  They they were the ones who really designed it and edited it
• 1:13:31
  and pictures what what the story was going to be.
• 1:13:34
  And it's incredible. And then?
• 1:13:38
  First, the first people they showed it to were other gang
• 1:13:40
  members and really kind of got it out into their community.
• 1:13:45
  And the result. Of that.
• 1:13:46
  Was a community pact being signed?
• 1:13:51
  And an area that had. Seen 100 murders in the past
• 1:13:55
  three years saw. 0 murders in the.
• 1:13:58
  Next six months after that pact was signed and since then
• 1:14:02
  approximately 90% reduction in homicides.
• 1:14:06
  So an incredible measurable impact like hundreds of people
• 1:14:11
  saved their lives, saved from brutal murders and crimes and
• 1:14:16
  all through people really relating and sharing and in a
• 1:14:20
  situation that was had no hope, unthinkable, untenable like we.
• 1:14:28
  Might compare. Even to.
• 1:14:30
  Israel and Gaza. To Cuba, to other places that
• 1:14:34
  we've singing where there's just, there's no hope.
• 1:14:37
  But yet somehow they were able to get people to relate and to
• 1:14:40
  talk and to humanize each other and to actually really address
• 1:14:45
  some big problems. And so that's an incredible
• 1:14:48
  story. It's a wonderful thing to see.
• 1:14:50
  It's really emotional. It's really moving.
• 1:14:53
  And maybe, just maybe what they're hoping is that that's.
• 1:14:56
  Yeah, that's a model that other people can use and can learn
• 1:14:59
  from. Yeah, it was incredible.
• 1:15:02
  I mean, there was not a dry eye in the house at the Aspen Action
• 1:15:06
  Forum when it concluded with the people that were part of that
• 1:15:11
  film, that made that film all going on stage and they had a
• 1:15:16
  chorus and Watts, which sang where the streets have no Name
• 1:15:20
  from U2, which might come in of age album.
• 1:15:22
  You know, I'm a little bit older than you, was the Joshua Tree.
• 1:15:25
  I mean, like, Oh yeah, seeing Bono at 18, that was a
• 1:15:29
  transcendent experience. Like I was at the Frank Erwin
• 1:15:31
  Center, which doesn't exist now in Austin.
• 1:15:34
  It's been replaced by better concert venues now, but that I
• 1:15:39
  just, I looked around, I, I had tears in my eyes, but there
• 1:15:43
  wasn't a dry eye in that house. And but, you know, not only
• 1:15:46
  that, it was very moving. It's very sad.
• 1:15:47
  There are parts that are very emotional.
• 1:15:49
  It's our mother who had her son murdered, who was telling that
• 1:15:52
  story, and it was just so powerful.
• 1:15:56
  And yet Mike, who helped make the movie happen, describes it
• 1:16:00
  as a love story. And by the end of the movie that
• 1:16:03
  that that that worked for me. Like I was like, no, it is love
• 1:16:06
  story because as much as it is super sad and it's disturbing,
• 1:16:11
  what you get through the story and through what happens from
• 1:16:15
  those people connecting is actually this just incredible
• 1:16:18
  feeling of hope and. This spirit of.
• 1:16:21
  Love between all those people and the how much they love their
• 1:16:27
  community, how much they love Watts and the love story is this
• 1:16:31
  love story of the community with Watts, right?
• 1:16:34
  And even though it's like, by some people's standards, one of
• 1:16:37
  the most terrible places in our country.
• 1:16:41
  Yeah, yeah. Well, with their community it.
• 1:16:44
  Is and they love it and they care about it and they care
• 1:16:47
  about the people there and they care about their kids and they
• 1:16:49
  and why don't they get better? And that's amazing.
• 1:16:55
  Like, you walk away feeling so good.
• 1:16:57
  Yeah, well, this is. My biggest prayer for humanity
• 1:17:01
  is that we wake up and collectively realize the beauty
• 1:17:06
  of the human race, not just, you know, the Crips and the bloods
• 1:17:09
  and Watts waking up and saying we need to stop destroying
• 1:17:12
  ourselves, but that humanity has a collective awakening.
• 1:17:16
  And in your my lifetime, that would be that'd be a beautiful
• 1:17:19
  thing. Look, Brett, I'm going to make a
• 1:17:21
  pledge right now. I.
• 1:17:21
  Will stop gang banging if you stop gang banging.
• 1:17:26
  Definitely I don't even we our our our games.
• 1:17:30
  You, you realize, would be extremely nerdy.
• 1:17:32
  Yes, I mean totally I nerdy so. It was like Catan battle, but
• 1:17:35
  right. Well, hey, I want to.
• 1:17:37
  I want. To make sure I thank you here in
• 1:17:41
  this podcast for believing in me over the years.
• 1:17:44
  It really means a lot to me. Our friendship means a lot to me
• 1:17:47
  and, and your belief in me has really helped fuel me.
• 1:17:51
  And your belief in the Austin community and all the
• 1:17:55
  entrepreneurs you've helped have really meant a lot.
• 1:17:57
  And thanks again for nominating me for the Henry Crown
• 1:17:59
  Fellowship. It's been transformational for
• 1:18:01
  me. Yeah, well, thank you for being
• 1:18:03
  such a great friend. Awesome.
• 1:18:05
  Look forward to me many, many more years.
• 1:18:07
  Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, brother.
• 1:18:08
  Yeah. Well, thanks everyone for tuning
• 1:18:10
  in to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
• 1:18:14
  I thought that was a great episode.
• 1:18:16
  I really care so much about Josh Baer and I'm very thankful for
• 1:18:20
  all that he's done here in Austin Beyond.
• 1:18:23
  And stay tuned. We've got a lot of guest coming
• 1:18:27
  up, amazing entrepreneurs, amazing investors, amazing
• 1:18:32
  spiritual teachers and philosophers and scientists.
• 1:18:36
  And we'll keep having these discussions and I'm having a lot
• 1:18:39
  of fun with it. And I hope all of you listening
• 1:18:41
  or watching are also having a lot of fun with it.
• 1:18:43
  This is a really, really important time for humanity and
• 1:18:47
  we're really on the cus of creating the age of abundance
• 1:18:50
  for all in this lifetime. Thanks again.