Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #8: Energy Changes Everything: Mini-Grids, Open Source, and the Near Future with John Kidenda

Transcript

#8: Energy Changes Everything: Mini-Grids, Open Source, and the Near Future with John Kidenda · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  Most of the news that gets pushed to you is pretty
• 0:02
  dystopian, and most of the social media that gets pushed
• 0:05
  here's pretty dystopian, and that's because of the way the
• 0:08
  algorithms are programmed to really capture your attention.
• 0:11
  My father has been in the shipping and logistics business
• 0:15
  ever since before I was born. Basically, oftentimes you get
• 0:18
  into environment, you find what are the most competitive people
• 0:21
  trying to pursue and then you somehow tell your brain and
• 0:24
  that's actually what I want when is the solar takeoff going to be
• 0:29
  happening? Many folks may already know
• 0:31
  this, 90% decline in costs over the past ten years in solar,
• 0:35
  something like 85% for batteries.
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  And then this Timber report comes out that between 2023 and
• 0:40
  2024, the amount of solar that Africa has imported from China
• 0:44
  has increased by 60%. Kenya as an entire country has
• 0:47
  like 3 gigawatts of power. So no, raise the money.
• 0:50
  It's a beautiful and powerful thing.
• 0:52
  It's called the Harambee spirit. It's in our shield.
• 0:54
  I actually think that AI is going to lead to an
• 0:57
  understanding of the divine. The first computer we ever got
• 1:01
  was IBM 486 with 4 megabytes of RAM, 170 megabytes of storage,
• 1:07
  and it felt like plenty. Every Doomsier to date has been
• 1:10
  wrong. Hey everyone, welcome back to
• 1:15
  another episode of Love Conquers Fear.
• 1:18
  I'm so excited about today's episode.
• 1:20
  We're going to dive into so many amazing topics from the
• 1:24
  continent of Africa to the country of Kenya to energy with
• 1:29
  an incredible friend. But first, I just want to give
• 1:33
  some news. So this this week, which will be
• 1:37
  dated by the time you see this, I'm actually publishing A
• 1:41
  novella named The Lattice. And this is the three short
• 1:46
  stories that I've been telling you about that I've gotten a lot
• 1:49
  of joy writing these. These stories are really a
• 1:54
  positive view of how we can make it to the age of abundance for
• 1:59
  all. And they build on each other
• 2:02
  with a protagonist, Dr. Alexander Bliss, who really
• 2:06
  discovers a key to waking up humanity collectively.
• 2:11
  And we make it to the age of abundance for all.
• 2:14
  And then all these amazing things happen as a result in
• 2:16
  terms of the way we evolve across the universe.
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  So it's a lot of fun. It's science fiction story and
• 2:23
  novella, and I had a blast writing it.
• 2:26
  And feel free to support it if you feel so moved.
• 2:29
  It's going to be available on Amazon by the time you see this.
• 2:34
  And it's, it's different than the type of science fiction
• 2:38
  you've read because most of the science fiction out there is
• 2:41
  pretty dystopian, frankly, most of the news that gets pushed to
• 2:46
  you is pretty dystopian. And most of the social media
• 2:49
  that gets pushed to you is pretty dystopian.
• 2:52
  And that's because of the way the algorithms are programmed to
• 2:56
  really capture your attention. Essentially, when you have
• 3:01
  algorithms that are that are trying to target monetization
• 3:05
  through advertising, the fastest way they can do that is to
• 3:09
  really target your amygdala. And your amygdala is based on
• 3:14
  fear and terms of the way we evolved.
• 3:17
  And so it pays a lot of attention to threats.
• 3:20
  And that's why they push all those threats to you constantly.
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  And I'm a big fan of the Free Press, to be clear.
• 3:27
  But ultimately, if you just whip saw it constantly by negative
• 3:32
  media and negative social media, it gives you a false pretense of
• 3:36
  what is actually going on with humanity.
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  The reality is, in a world of 8.2 billion people every day,
• 3:43
  there's mostly acts of love and connection and beauty.
• 3:47
  But those aren't exceptional. Those aren't news.
• 3:51
  And news by definition is an exception.
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  And so they're pushing the exceptions to you, the latest
• 3:58
  murder, the latest tragedy. And that's going to get you to
• 4:02
  click. And one of the ways that I know
• 4:04
  this is one of my friends is the founder of the Progress Network,
• 4:08
  which I highly recommend you subscribe to you just Google the
• 4:11
  Progress Network. Zachary Carabel is his name.
• 4:15
  He is going to be on the Love Conquer Sphere podcast.
• 4:18
  And I remember when Zachary was celebrating that they got to, I
• 4:21
  think of the milestone was 50,000 subscribers.
• 4:25
  And I was a very early subscriber.
• 4:27
  And I think it took them something like 3 or 4 years to
• 4:31
  get there. Whereas if you're the New York
• 4:33
  Times and you're pushing the latest story about some
• 4:36
  abduction, that's going to get to 50,000 readers very, very
• 4:39
  quickly because it's so exceptional in a bad way.
• 4:43
  So you really have to deprogram and reprogram yourself to tune
• 4:49
  into all the latest scientific breakthroughs that the Progress
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  Network covers, all the amazing acts of beauty that really are
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  exceptional, and all of the all of the incredible things
• 5:01
  happening in the world of 8.2 billion.
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  There are many, many incredible things happening constantly.
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  And they'll give you a different view overall of humanity.
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  And ultimately that will change you from the inside.
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  And that's part of what we need to do and what my book that I'm
• 5:18
  writing, which is called Love Conquers Fear, Humanity, AI and
• 5:22
  The Age of Abundance for all covers in Part 3, which is about
• 5:26
  transformation. How does humanity transform so
• 5:29
  that ultimately we can collectively make it together
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  versus the 0 sum fear based scarcity mindset that currently
• 5:38
  rules over humanity. And that's a big problem when
• 5:43
  we're dealing with accelerating technologies like this.
• 5:46
  But I'm going to get in all of that with with John Kanuta.
• 5:50
  So hey, John, it's good to have you here.
• 5:52
  Very nice to. Move, yeah, to meet the
• 5:54
  audience, Yeah. I mean, we've been having
• 5:56
  conversations for a long. Time.
• 5:57
  I know it's. Good to to finally get it to to
• 6:02
  a larger audience. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's so much
• 6:05
  fun. Like I always love our hikes
• 6:07
  together and we're just like jamming.
• 6:09
  Like we just don't even stop for a, for a pause.
• 6:12
  Yeah, we know. Yeah, it's over and program in
• 6:15
  the next. One yeah, so you know going in
• 6:17
  the Wayback Machine, you and I, you worked at Bizarre voice,
• 6:23
  right That was that was the way we.
• 6:24
  Originally met yeah, yeah, it was an it was an internship.
• 6:27
  It's it's actually an A funny story because how I ended up at
• 6:34
  bizarre voice was sort of like the turn of a tragedy because a
• 6:41
  good friend and mentor of mine, Rick Reader, knew the the team
• 6:46
  at Bazaar Voice and I I'd been interning, I'd been at UTI, went
• 6:51
  to UT for my undergrad Hook and Horns loved the experience.
• 6:56
  The started off at the engineering school and finished
• 6:59
  at the Business School doing the engineering route to business
• 7:02
  program. And while at the Business
• 7:05
  School, I spent 3 summers interning in investment banking
• 7:10
  and was all set to to join Merrill Lynch in New York at the
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  end of that of that process. Got my full time author,
• 7:22
  accepted it before the fall semester began.
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  All right. And this was September of 2008.
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  Oh, I remember what happened then.
• 7:32
  That was not the best here. Another very auspicious to be
• 7:35
  looking at Wall Street. And so Long story short, by
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  March of the next year, Merrill is no longer existing as an
• 7:45
  independent investment bank. It's been a.
• 7:49
  This is after Lehman Brothers went out of business.
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  Newman Brothers builds out of business.
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  Bank of America basically saves, you know, by by purchasing it.
• 7:57
  Goldman Sachs on this one. Not exactly.
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  That was when you're in Beverfield Buffett.
• 8:01
  Buffett steps in and and saves the day.
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  But the, the consequence of, of that was that basically Mel, now
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  Bank of America had to rescind all their offers to
• 8:15
  international students. And this was done in March and
• 8:19
  I'm graduating in, in like May of that year.
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  And I've obviously not been recruiting in the fall semester
• 8:25
  because I accepted my offer. And so that's this begins a
• 8:28
  scramble that ends with me extending my stay at UT for one
• 8:34
  more semester so that I can participate in the next fall
• 8:37
  recruiting season. And that summer is when I ended
• 8:41
  up at Bazarvois. Yeah.
• 8:42
  And so it all ended up working out great that I ended up
• 8:46
  instead of, you know, moving up to New York, stayed here, worked
• 8:50
  for a healthcare tech company in Austin, got to stay for another,
• 8:54
  another three years, which was very, very formative for.
• 8:57
  Me yeah. Well appreciate you working at
• 8:59
  Bazarvois. Those were and you and you
• 9:01
  joined us during really amazing years.
• 9:03
  So those were the those were the highest growth year.
• 9:06
  Exactly. It's an exciting, exciting.
• 9:08
  Yeah, it really was. So going back in time, I want to
• 9:12
  start with your childhood, you know, where did you grow up and
• 9:15
  tell me about the early influences and, and, you know,
• 9:18
  early career and schooling and all that stuff.
• 9:21
  Yeah, yeah. No, I was born in Kenya, in
• 9:24
  Nairobi, the capital of of Kenya.
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  The family moved fairly early on.
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  I was only one year old to Mombasa, which is at the coast.
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  My father has been in the shipping and logistics business
• 9:38
  ever since before I was born basically and he moved down
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  there to take the leadership of what is now one of the the large
• 9:48
  ship shipping and logistics firms out of Kenya.
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  But at the time was, you know, a tiny operation.
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  The first company car was off of original car.
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  It was, it was very much an entrepreneurial moved to the
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  coast and I grew up there until I was 14, at which point I moved
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  back to the Nairobi area for high school.
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  The way high school works in, in, in Kenya, everybody across
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  the entire country, as long as you're doing the national
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  education system, which is called the 844 system, 8 years
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  of primary school, 8 years of, I mean, four years of high school
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  or it is of college. As long as you're doing that
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  system, at the end of the first eight years, everybody takes the
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  same exam, the entire country, and that's used to rank
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  everybody. Wow, boy, that's kind of
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  intense. Yeah, it is kind of intense for
• 10:39
  a young kid and it can be very. What age is that?
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  So you're in 8th grade? OK, in 8th grade.
• 10:46
  Yeah, exactly. So you're really young, You're
• 10:49
  14 years and it's a very intense experience, but it's also very
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  formative for all those people. And the results that you get
• 10:58
  from there determine whether you go to what's called a National
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  School, a provincial school or a district school.
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  These are all public schools are funded by the, by the, by the,
• 11:12
  the, the government and, you know, alumni donations of often
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  times. And they all have different
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  pedigrees. And the main distinction with
• 11:22
  the national schools is that they have a mandate to pull
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  students from all corners of the country.
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  They think it's actually really compelling as a, as a thesis
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  because people forget how young these countries are.
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  You know, Kenya achieved independence in 1963.
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  You know, it's a, it's a very young country.
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  Like my, my parents were alive, you know, and can remember the,
• 11:45
  the, the country becoming a country.
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  And so how do you stitch together a country that is not,
• 11:52
  you know, doesn't it doesn't have the same visceral realness
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  on like, you know, a country that's been around for like 200
• 11:59
  years and everybody just, it takes it for a fact that this is
• 12:02
  that where they're from. And I think the National School
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  system actually does a really big job in doing that because it
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  it it creates A conduit through through which, you know, smart
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  kids from across the entire country, from very different
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  socio economic backgrounds can meet each other often for the
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  first time. They're meeting people from a
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  different tribe, from a different socio economic level.
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  They're all coming together in this boarding school, wearing
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  the same uniform, bunking together and getting to, you
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  know, sort of dispel all these ideas that they might have of
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  each other and building true legitimate friendships.
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  And so anyway, so Long story short, I went to a high school
• 12:47
  called the Alliance High School in Kenya, which happens to be
• 12:50
  the the oldest high school for black Kenyans.
• 12:55
  Every high school prior to that to the formation of of of
• 12:59
  Alliance, which will soon be a 100 years old, if not 100 a
• 13:06
  little longer was reserved for for British expected to during
• 13:12
  the the closing period. So it does a very deep and rich
• 13:16
  alumni base. I rent to to to that school and
• 13:20
  built lots of lifelong friendships and then graduated.
• 13:25
  I spent two years sort of on sabbatical doing all kinds of of
• 13:31
  things, working at a one of the early Internet companies in
• 13:36
  Kenya called 3 MICE and. Build some of the it's called 3
• 13:40
  mice, Three mice. OK, Yeah, OK.
• 13:41
  That's mine. It was back when, you know, I
• 13:44
  don't know if you remember building websites.
• 13:46
  The Dreamweaver, of course. Yeah.
• 13:47
  Framing. Yeah.
• 13:49
  So I. Got I was coding HTML too and
• 13:51
  like the hard way exactly any of those two.
• 13:54
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. And this is, you know, super.
• 13:56
  I mean, kudos to my parents who gave me exposure to these
• 13:59
  things, you know, back when you know, computer lessons and you
• 14:03
  know, you know, basic, you know, and really, you know, MS-DOS
• 14:09
  type of a type of interactions, but you know, work that that can
• 14:13
  be built. You know, some of the early
• 14:15
  corporate websites in in Kenya with with that company had a
• 14:18
  great experience. Then got accepted to UT, didn't
• 14:23
  know anything about Austin, didn't even know when somebody
• 14:26
  gave me at the airport the UT hat in the Longhorn that this
• 14:29
  was like the school, right? I just knew that it was a, you
• 14:34
  know, a top ten engineering school and it was right, tied
• 14:37
  for A&M actually for affordability.
• 14:39
  And so packed my bags and came out to the US.
• 14:43
  That was actually my second trip to the US.
• 14:45
  My first one was to an exchange program with my high school
• 14:49
  between my high school and a school called Brooks, the Brooks
• 14:53
  School in North Andover, MA. OK.
• 14:55
  It was super formative. And that's when I took my first
• 14:58
  They, they would pay for you to take your SA TS and just expose
• 15:02
  you to just a completely different world.
• 15:07
  It's this is this is a school that, you know, competes in
• 15:12
  athletics with Exeter and Phillips Academy and all these,
• 15:15
  it's a very ratified part of, of, of, of society, even within
• 15:20
  the US. And so it was mind expanding in
• 15:22
  a lot of ways. But big thing that they did was
• 15:25
  encourage you to take their cities while you were there and
• 15:28
  pay for it. And yeah, So came out here,
• 15:32
  started off at the engineering school before it was the
• 15:35
  cockerel school in the EE building.
• 15:39
  Yeah. In the basement.
• 15:44
  Halfway through my program, found out about the engineering
• 15:46
  route to business. Yeah.
• 15:48
  A program. And just felt like it was
• 15:51
  absolutely the right fit for me from what I learned so far at
• 15:56
  the school. So I about 2 1/2 years in
• 15:59
  transferred to that program and graduated.
• 16:01
  I'm from the McComb school. Yeah, yeah, Awesome, awesome.
• 16:05
  Yeah, I'm actually keynoting the alumni event on September 19th,
• 16:12
  which which I'm so, so honored to do.
• 16:14
  And you know, at UT is where I met my wife.
• 16:18
  I met her in my freshman year and then took me all the way
• 16:22
  until our senior year to convince her to go out with me.
• 16:25
  But they've been married 29 years, you know?
• 16:28
  Hey, entrepreneurship, as you know, it's like, all about
• 16:30
  persistence. Yeah.
• 16:31
  No, you need the value we'll bring into the.
• 16:34
  Exactly. Well, yeah, I was hoping.
• 16:37
  I was hoping she would. Eventually.
• 16:39
  You were right, right? Yeah.
• 16:40
  Nobody. Yeah, McCombs is a special
• 16:43
  place, Yeah. And in my heart and and so does
• 16:47
  UT and and yeah, and it just the entire experience was great.
• 16:51
  Yeah. Where I met Rick, where I
• 16:52
  mentioned previously. Was he like a mentor or
• 16:55
  something there or he was, yes. He was a Texas X's mentor.
• 16:58
  OK, Yeah, that's how he initially met.
• 17:00
  They just have, you know, lists of people who are meeting
• 17:03
  student as an engineering student.
• 17:06
  He was working at Dell at the time.
• 17:09
  He he was one of the people who were listed or was listed.
• 17:12
  I said I would love to connect and we were blind match and he
• 17:17
  took me on a tour of the of the Dell facility.
• 17:21
  I think back then they were still making computers in
• 17:24
  Austin. I don't know if they they still
• 17:25
  physically do that. Yeah, but it was it was an eye
• 17:29
  opening experience. And then he just stayed in touch
• 17:32
  and and he became a good, good, good friend.
• 17:34
  And halfway through my program, my mom fell sick and financial
• 17:40
  support from home basically dried up at that point because
• 17:43
  it was being directed to fairly more more urgent needs.
• 17:47
  And he stepped up and formed the African Leadership Bridge, which
• 17:51
  is a scholarship foundation that I'm on the board of and help
• 17:54
  grow. That's awesome right now.
• 17:56
  And that's really what enabled me to finish finish college.
• 18:00
  And since then through the African Leadership Bridge, we've
• 18:04
  educated, we've put six students through colleges in the US, 17
• 18:08
  through colleges in Nigeria. Just last year, we became the
• 18:13
  first Africa focused endowed scholarship at UTDL.
• 18:18
  Our 15 year relationship with the global office just began
• 18:21
  with a completely blind mark by the Texas, Texas organization.
• 18:24
  So, you know, I mean, I think that to me actually underscores
• 18:29
  the value of people who build that type of community, people
• 18:35
  who volunteer their time to to speak to students, people who
• 18:39
  keep the UT alumni community together, people who build other
• 18:43
  types of community of shared interest.
• 18:45
  Yeah, it it makes it a huge difference.
• 18:47
  That's awesome. That's awesome.
• 18:50
  And then, you know, following UT, obviously it came to bizarre
• 18:54
  voice. And then after that you went
• 18:57
  into a health tech company. So with a company.
• 18:59
  Called the Advisory Board company, Yeah, subsequently
• 19:03
  renamed Advisory and I think I. Actually know that that company,
• 19:06
  yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 19:07
  So I, I, I joined advisory, I worked with them for three
• 19:11
  years, very formative, incredible opportunity to stay
• 19:15
  in Austin and, and experience a different kind of Austin and
• 19:19
  then applied and got accepted to the Kennedy School at Harvard.
• 19:24
  They have an incredible program called the MPID program, Masters
• 19:29
  in Public Administration in International Development, which
• 19:32
  is kind of like an economics, econometrics masters smashed
• 19:37
  into like a public policy masters.
• 19:41
  Very international, very quantitatively rigorous.
• 19:45
  The smallest program at the Kennedy School, but also more
• 19:49
  often than not the most endeavours and international.
• 19:52
  I think our year was the largest group that they had accepted to
• 19:57
  to that date. There was 70 people.
• 20:00
  I think there were at least 30 different countries.
• 20:04
  Wow, yeah, wow. And so it's.
• 20:06
  Why is it talking about reverse? Yeah, that's so cool.
• 20:08
  Yeah. So when you're reading about
• 20:10
  International Development and you're seeing, you're talking
• 20:12
  about, oh, this policy worked or didn't work here or this
• 20:18
  initiative does or doesn't work here, whether that whether it's
• 20:23
  Colombia or Iran or Korea, there's somebody in the class
• 20:28
  who can speak, you know, from a local perspective on that
• 20:33
  policy. And you just enrich the
• 20:34
  conversation to a level that it's frankly difficult to find
• 20:38
  in any of. Us yeah, that's so cool yeah,
• 20:41
  yeah. What were what were the maybe
• 20:43
  the highlight moments for you in that program at at Harvard?
• 20:47
  I think 1 So I, my second year I, I Co chaired the African
• 20:53
  Development Conference. So a lot of the, the highlights
• 20:58
  I think were, were associated with that one.
• 21:03
  As part of that, that that whole experience, we organized a
• 21:09
  spring break trip to Cameroon and brought people from all
• 21:15
  different walks of life, you know, many of them to their on
• 21:19
  their first Africa trip to a part of Africa that even I was
• 21:22
  unfamiliar with. And, and just found that
• 21:25
  experience so enriching because I was learning, I was watching
• 21:29
  other people learn about my continent and, and, and, and
• 21:33
  they were enriching my experience.
• 21:35
  I was enriching theirs and that I found very, very fulfilling.
• 21:38
  The conference itself was amazingly successful.
• 21:41
  We got the president of Niger to come and speak as our keynote
• 21:44
  speaker. And then he, you know, did a
• 21:47
  phenomenal job presenting his vision for his country in a
• 21:52
  very, very difficult, difficult context.
• 21:54
  You know, is one of the the the poorest countries in Africa and
• 21:59
  in in the world in a very difficult neighborhood in hell
• 22:02
  with challenges with the Boko Haram and and other al al Qaeda
• 22:09
  affiliates to the north very rich in in natural resources.
• 22:14
  Uranium is is a big resource that they that they mined there.
• 22:21
  And so just hearing for first hand from somebody who couldn't
• 22:25
  articulate the challenges of trying to navigate such an
• 22:30
  environment to to produce a positive outcome for your people
• 22:34
  was really, really fulfilling. And I deeply, deeply enjoyed
• 22:39
  that. And then I think third, together
• 22:42
  with a very great friend of mine called Josh, who is South
• 22:48
  African, we set up this morning Africa talk series, which had we
• 22:57
  known in advance how difficult it would be to keep, keep, keep
• 23:01
  a 7:00 AM appointment, you know, every week through the winters.
• 23:07
  And had we known that, you know, snow we're getting was going to
• 23:09
  happen while we're in school, guys not have signed up for, but
• 23:13
  we would try through the snow. You know, you know at 6:45
• 23:17
  you're walking across the quarter, you're like, why am I
• 23:20
  doing? This in my.
• 23:21
  Bed right now, you just finished problem sets after midnight.
• 23:25
  And you'd walk into this little library room at the at the
• 23:28
  Kennedy School and you'd see, you know, 15 to 20 other people
• 23:34
  in Parkers, you know, shutting them.
• 23:36
  And you'd sit down and had the most compelling conversations
• 23:39
  about the continent. Wow, first thing in the morning.
• 23:42
  That's awesome. Here and and you'd leave every
• 23:44
  time saying like why did I even question why is coming here?
• 23:49
  And it is a very simple thing, but it's still one of the the
• 23:53
  clearest memories from that experience that I that I take
• 23:56
  away. And I guess it, it connects to
• 23:58
  that, that previous point about, you know, forming communities of
• 24:01
  shared interests. You know, it's one of the most
• 24:03
  enriching things you can do. Yeah.
• 24:05
  Yeah. Was there any particular
• 24:07
  interview that you were just like, Oh my gosh, I can't
• 24:09
  believe we just did that? Yeah, I think the the IT seemed
• 24:14
  like, you know, even then, you know, history was happening in
• 24:17
  real time as, as we were as we were speaking.
• 24:22
  And so there I think that the the ship up girls is the, the,
• 24:31
  the kidnapping of the girls in in Nigeria happened while we
• 24:34
  were there. And just having, you know, first
• 24:38
  hand conversations about that was was really deeply
• 24:42
  meaningful. You know it, you know, it paid
• 24:45
  Harvard you like you have people from all different walks of
• 24:49
  life. You have children of presidents
• 24:51
  there and you have people who are the first people in their
• 24:56
  community to go to college or also also arriving and having,
• 25:02
  you know, really compelling conversations.
• 25:04
  So I think just being able to, to really discuss current
• 25:11
  affairs with people whom I'm not interested in the hype and the
• 25:17
  hyperbole and, and, and, and sensationalizing the, the, the
• 25:21
  moment. And I actually often very
• 25:23
  skeptical of of that perspective because Africa has filled that
• 25:29
  role in people's hands for so long that it it it's exhausted a
• 25:34
  lot of people, you know, like the homo of crisis, you know,
• 25:38
  And so to have be able to have intelligent conversations and
• 25:41
  acknowledge where the challenges are, but also speak, you know,
• 25:44
  intelligently about the opportunities and where you're
• 25:47
  seeing significant progress taking place and have
• 25:52
  legitimate, you know, tested solutions proposed by people who
• 26:00
  understand the nuance, you know, and, and understand why so many
• 26:05
  solutions that are parachuted in from outside don't work was just
• 26:11
  really, really. Great.
• 26:11
  That's cool man. Good on you for doing that.
• 26:14
  That's so awesome. That was fun, yeah.
• 26:16
  And then So what happens after Harvard?
• 26:19
  So the reason I, I even started thinking about going to grad
• 26:22
  school was I gave myself 10 years about two years into
• 26:27
  probably I gave myself 10 years to graduate and, and go back
• 26:30
  home because I, I had in that two years, I'd met too many
• 26:35
  people. Who?
• 26:37
  You know, we're very successful here.
• 26:38
  You know, they would come to speak to us on campus and they'd
• 26:41
  come from different parts of the world, some from Africa, some
• 26:44
  from India, from other parts of the world.
• 26:47
  And too often I heard the refrain, they didn't know how 15
• 26:53
  years had passed, how 20 years had passed.
• 26:55
  And too often I met people who it seemed that they didn't know
• 27:01
  how to go back. They they had been away so long
• 27:05
  that home started feeling like a like a foreign land and I didn't
• 27:10
  want. That right?
• 27:12
  Right, that to happen. So I, I figured, you know, 10
• 27:14
  years, good amount of time I can study, I can get, get work
• 27:19
  experience, which I thought was as much an education as as
• 27:23
  reading the books that called, of course, yeah, because I do
• 27:25
  think that the, the American corporate culture and, and, and
• 27:30
  entrepreneurial environment is just, it is a unique unto
• 27:34
  itself. And you, you have to immerse
• 27:36
  yourself in it to understand why it works the way it does and why
• 27:40
  it performs so exceptionally well.
• 27:43
  And so I wanted to, to, to, to experience that.
• 27:46
  And so it was about year 8 when I started to think, OK, I need a
• 27:51
  strategy to go back and I need to go back feeling confident
• 27:55
  that I'll be, I'll be useful. And that's actually when I
• 27:59
  started looking for grad programs or founder Empedee
• 28:02
  program fit exactly. You know, this focused on
• 28:04
  International Development and I can understand what people have
• 28:08
  tried before, what's worked, what's not worked, and and then
• 28:12
  hopefully, you know, go work on solutions that are more likely
• 28:15
  than not to succeed. So in my, in the middle of my
• 28:20
  grad program, I interned with a, with a company called Dalberg,
• 28:25
  which is a development focused strategy consulting firm founded
• 28:29
  by a a few Excellency people initially as an organization to
• 28:36
  specifically aim to bring, you know, high level strategy
• 28:43
  consulting to the UN. And then grew and broadened its
• 28:47
  mandate to basically, you know, being the consulting company to
• 28:54
  to go to for or development focused work.
• 28:57
  They had a office in Kenya. I'm helmed by two people from my
• 29:03
  high school. Wow, speaking, Speaking of how
• 29:05
  those connections happened. And I, I interned with them and
• 29:12
  went and and joined them, worked there for two, 2 1/2 years,
• 29:18
  learnt a ton. And one of the things I learnt
• 29:21
  was that I wanted to work on energy.
• 29:25
  That's when I started my first. I had my first product in the
• 29:30
  energy space. Prior to that, excuse me, I was,
• 29:35
  I was sure I wanted to be on the continent.
• 29:37
  I knew I was interested in, in, in, in information technology,
• 29:42
  megaculture and energy. Didn't know which one I really
• 29:44
  wanted to work on for the long haul.
• 29:47
  After my FirstEnergy project was clear that this is what I wanted
• 29:50
  to do and started looking for opportunities to do that full
• 29:53
  time other than just work on whatever consulting project came
• 29:56
  through. Yeah, that type on a company
• 29:59
  called Powergen Renewable Energy, which is arguably the
• 30:04
  the leading distributed and energy utility on the continent.
• 30:11
  They basically build and operate smart renewable mini grids
• 30:17
  across across the continent. By the time I was leaving them,
• 30:24
  you know, serving over a quarter million people with, you know,
• 30:27
  clean reliable power that's more reliable than the power you get
• 30:31
  from the National Grid in pretty much any country that we operate
• 30:33
  in. Yeah.
• 30:35
  And so worked there for seven years, 6-7 years, started off
• 30:40
  basically just leading their, their IT team, ended up as the
• 30:44
  chief of utility operations, running their assets once
• 30:49
  they're, they have been financed and built and, you know, learned
• 30:53
  a ton, worked with incredible people.
• 30:56
  Some, some of the smartest and most passionate people have,
• 31:00
  have, have, have come across and went on sabbatical in May of
• 31:06
  last year when my wife was graduating from her PhD and
• 31:11
  moved back to Austin. Yeah.
• 31:13
  So that's how I ended up back in on this.
• 31:15
  Yeah. That's.
• 31:16
  Awesome. And and where did your wife go
• 31:17
  to school again? So she did her undergrad at
• 31:20
  Stanford, and then she did her masters and PhD at MIT.
• 31:23
  Yeah, yeah. The, the reason I ask is because
• 31:25
  I knew that it's and it's just so impressive.
• 31:29
  Like you guys have checked all the boxes, you know, UT,
• 31:32
  Harvard, MIT, Stanford. I do have to work.
• 31:35
  I I'm a long time to yeah, to. It's always I, I think I
• 31:39
  mentioned to you on one of our hikes, I'm like, I don't, I'm
• 31:42
  not worried about your kids being smart.
• 31:44
  Indeed, I mean, hopefully we don't put first on them.
• 31:47
  They they. I have a 3 1/2 year old or 8
• 31:50
  month old, as you know. And yeah, they're, they're,
• 31:53
  they're clearly running the household already.
• 31:54
  So right, right, right, yeah. Watch out, smart kids, they
• 31:57
  really take over. It's happened here.
• 32:01
  And so, so that company that that's where you met Tom Berry,
• 32:05
  right? Yeah.
• 32:06
  Cuz, cuz I, I, you know, thinks to you.
• 32:08
  I just met him in New York City. I was just, I was just up there
• 32:12
  with Deborah. Yeah, and gosh, I love that guy.
• 32:16
  Like I had such a great connection with him, like you
• 32:19
  thought I would. So tell me about tell me about
• 32:21
  him and and how he helped you because I know he, he's a big
• 32:25
  believer in you. He we if your ears were buzzing
• 32:27
  this week, He, he loves you. Yeah, no, he's, he's a really
• 32:31
  special guy. He's a special guy.
• 32:33
  And he lived, you know, I, I really overtime, I've gone to
• 32:38
  really value, you know, people who like you have lived so many
• 32:42
  lives. You know, you can, you can live
• 32:45
  vicariously through, through other people who have just, you
• 32:49
  know, taken so many turns around there.
• 32:51
  The other, I mean he's as you know, an older gentleman who has
• 32:59
  been to the heights of the finance world in in New York and
• 33:03
  still remains in, in those in those.
• 33:07
  But very early on, well before the hype and before, you know,
• 33:14
  Africa's start up scene was routinely raising, you know, two
• 33:18
  $3 billion a year and made a commitment to supporting and
• 33:24
  doing venture in Africa and in India through his his entities
• 33:31
  of a Capital Management. And one of the ventures that he
• 33:37
  supported really early on was Powergen, which is this smart
• 33:44
  many good developer and he was on the board as as a result of
• 33:48
  that. And so I met him while we were
• 33:51
  on the board and he just from the get go, came across as just
• 33:57
  a straight shooter, you know, somebody who, you know, has a
• 34:01
  lot of wisdom and has taken the time to distill it right.
• 34:08
  So that it can be delivered in a way that, you know, people who
• 34:11
  don't have that life experience can, you know, digest it and,
• 34:15
  and, and benefit from it and is not afraid to, to, to tell it
• 34:20
  like it is, which, you know, I find open and increasingly it's
• 34:26
  hard to find, especially to people who will tell it like it
• 34:30
  is with love, right? You know, who are not trying to
• 34:33
  own you or like, you know, put you down, but are are, are, are
• 34:39
  interested in you not deceiving yourself or or or being and I, I
• 34:46
  just that's a quality that I, that I, that I, that I
• 34:49
  appreciate a lot. And so we.
• 34:51
  Yeah, it is rare just because most people really conflict
• 34:55
  avoid a lot and and it's and it's a real gift when you get
• 35:00
  actual feedback from from the heart, like someone who really
• 35:03
  wants you to succeed exactly, exactly and knows.
• 35:07
  You know, somebody who's both wise and is willing.
• 35:10
  Yeah, to tell you because they're rooting for you.
• 35:13
  Yeah. You know, Yeah.
• 35:15
  And so. Yeah.
• 35:15
  And you can always tell. You can actually feel the energy
• 35:18
  from Someone Like You can feel the energy if someone wants you
• 35:22
  to lose like you can feel that versus if they want you to win.
• 35:26
  Exactly. Yeah.
• 35:27
  And and you know. I'm a product of many mentors
• 35:29
  that have given me the energy of wanting me to win, and I really
• 35:33
  try to honor them a lot. Yeah, no, I, I tell my, my
• 35:36
  siblings this all the time. It's, you know, the, the, the,
• 35:40
  the best, really the best thing that you can do in life is find
• 35:48
  and surround yourself with people who want you to win.
• 35:52
  You know, because you, you know, you can optimize as much as you
• 35:55
  want for your success. But just as a number of
• 36:00
  statistics, most of the opportunities that are available
• 36:03
  to you are not, are not going to be in your purview, right?
• 36:07
  The, the people who surround you are going to encounter so much
• 36:11
  more, You know, that may be of benefit to you.
• 36:14
  You know that, that even that it's, it's almost feels
• 36:20
  irrational to try and, you know, maximize every encounter, you
• 36:24
  know, to, to, to your personal benefit.
• 36:27
  Because because if you're not, if you're not enriching other
• 36:33
  people's lives and trying to, to, to, to, to, to, to build
• 36:37
  them up, then it becomes very difficult to, to, to find people
• 36:43
  who are similarly invested in your, in your success.
• 36:46
  And and so find somebody who's who wanted to win just because
• 36:54
  they think that the world would be a better place if you
• 36:57
  succeeded in in what you're doing, which again, also then
• 37:01
  speaks to, you know, the validity of the mission that
• 37:05
  you're on and then is willing to be honest with you.
• 37:11
  And and and and and and and pour some of their wisdom into you is
• 37:16
  is invaluable. It's the same thing that with,
• 37:18
  with with Rick, yeah, who was both a mentor and friend.
• 37:22
  And these it's, it's funny to me because these end up being sort
• 37:25
  of the most consequential, you know, relationships and you have
• 37:30
  no control over when they come into your life and how they pan
• 37:35
  out, right. I mean, Rick was a somebody in
• 37:39
  the Texas Texas office today, this guy and this guy, you know,
• 37:42
  right, Tom was a random, you know, dinner at A at A at A at a
• 37:50
  company, you know, bizarre voice and and you was, you know, a
• 37:56
  rescinded, you know, offer, right?
• 37:58
  Because again, also either speaks to the fact that, you
• 38:02
  know, I think it was this opportunity is the you can't
• 38:07
  really value it. Whether somebody has had a good
• 38:09
  life until good until they're gone, you know, because in the
• 38:14
  moment when I was experiencing that is sending all that offer.
• 38:18
  This was the worst thing, of course, you know.
• 38:21
  The worst thing? Yeah.
• 38:22
  It it, you know, I was investment banking was the path,
• 38:28
  you know, and you know, for a competitive person, as you might
• 38:33
  know, you know, often times you get into, into, into an
• 38:37
  environment, you find what is what are the most competitive
• 38:40
  people trying to pursue? And then you somehow tell your
• 38:44
  brain that that's actually what I want, right, right.
• 38:47
  That's the thing that that that will make me feel fulfilled.
• 38:50
  So I was all in. But in hindsight, it was the
• 38:53
  best thing that that ever happened to me because you
• 38:55
  enabled me to stay in Austin, enabled me to meet to meet.
• 38:59
  You enabled me to staying in Austin also resulted in me
• 39:04
  meeting my wife, you know, and so it, it transformed my life in
• 39:08
  lots of really positive ways. That work, you know?
• 39:12
  Yeah. As job says, you know, you
• 39:14
  can't. You can Only Connect the dots
• 39:16
  looking backwards. Yeah.
• 39:18
  Yeah. It's so, it's so crazy you just
• 39:19
  said that because I just. I just finished my novella with
• 39:23
  that last night. No, yes, I did.
• 39:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, serendipity.
• 39:28
  I don't actually believe in coincidences anymore, like
• 39:33
  reading books like the Celestine prophecy now I just see, I see
• 39:37
  so much order to things and this thing's constantly appearing.
• 39:40
  TomTom was one of those for me. I mean, you saw that for, you
• 39:45
  know, love conquers fear. You're like, Oh my gosh, Tom is
• 39:48
  going to really be helpful on this.
• 39:50
  And I have a feeling that he and I are going to be friends for
• 39:52
  the rest of my life. You know that he, he, he really,
• 39:55
  he's all in on on the project and he really agrees with me
• 40:00
  that humanity has this next 10 to 15 years ultimately for us to
• 40:05
  make it to this age of abundance for all versus destroy
• 40:09
  ourselves. And again, I'll just say that
• 40:12
  I'm mostly in the we're going to make it in camp.
• 40:18
  So so let's talk about the the age of abundance for all.
• 40:23
  One of the things that I talked about in in my book.
• 40:28
  And I mentioned on this podcast is I was picked up by an Uber
• 40:32
  driver on the way to give a presentation actually at MIT to
• 40:37
  a group of 50 CE OS and it's picked up 4:30 in the morning.
• 40:43
  And the driver's name is Calibu. And Calibu, like great guy.
• 40:47
  Like we just immediately started talking.
• 40:50
  And even though it's so early, we just it was, it was, it was
• 40:53
  awesome. And I was using Cha Chi PT the
• 40:56
  whole time to learn about his country of Chad.
• 40:59
  I knew nothing about Chad. I don't know if you know much
• 41:01
  about Chad, but, you know, most people in America don't realize
• 41:05
  that Africa is a huge continent and with many countries.
• 41:09
  And, you know, it's like, it's, you know, it's like asking an
• 41:13
  American like, for every single thing that they would know about
• 41:16
  Mexico or Canada, which most Americans would not know that
• 41:19
  much about even those countries. And Africa has like so many
• 41:22
  more. But Chad is, is a country where
• 41:26
  the GDP per person is $660. It's really suffering.
• 41:32
  It's #187 out of 189 on the Human Development Index ranking.
• 41:39
  And as I talked with him and he, you know, he's saving up all
• 41:44
  this money to ultimately bring his, his wife and kids here
• 41:50
  maybe six to seven years from now.
• 41:53
  And he's sending actually a lot of his money back to support
• 41:56
  them as well as his parents. And they view him as rich,
• 42:01
  right? He's like in America driving for
• 42:03
  Uber, like this guy must just have all types of money versus
• 42:07
  Chad. And, and I, I really
• 42:11
  crystallized on that Uber drive. I was like, wow, the hope for
• 42:17
  Chad are robots and this acceleration with AI like an NGO
• 42:22
  going in 10 years from now being able to build all the clean
• 42:26
  water supply they need the the solar grid.
• 42:30
  You know that that ultimately, you know, a lot of people don't
• 42:33
  realize that the continent of Africa like kind of leapfrogged
• 42:37
  us with mobile. You know, we we had all these
• 42:40
  landlines and all the stuff that didn't make any sense for Africa
• 42:43
  to adopt. And so they just kind of, you
• 42:47
  know, jumped over that with with mobile.
• 42:49
  And so, you know, Chad would have an opportunity to just jump
• 42:52
  over it once we get solar energy to the point through the
• 42:56
  material science breakthrough where, you know, the battery
• 43:00
  storage is such and the capture of such that that Chad could
• 43:04
  just create unlimited energy in that in that country.
• 43:06
  And, and the robots could come in and build everything that
• 43:10
  they need, the desalinization plants for water and all of
• 43:14
  that. You know, and in the book I talk
• 43:19
  about if you can create an Oasis in Chad, you could create an
• 43:22
  Oasis anywhere on Earth. So, so I'm just, I, I, I'm
• 43:28
  curious what you think about that thesis And, and do you
• 43:31
  agree with me that, you know, let's call it the next 10 to 15
• 43:35
  years we could make it to this age.
• 43:37
  Well, I, I agree and disagree. Yeah.
• 43:39
  So I agree that it is possible. I actually think it is probable.
• 43:44
  I, I disagree that it will happen through an NGO and, and
• 43:51
  actually in the last week or two, I've become even more
• 43:55
  convinced on that thesis because there's a great, there's an
• 43:59
  organization called Ember that does really great reporting
• 44:02
  across the world on, on energy and energy transition.
• 44:06
  And they came out with a report last week.
• 44:09
  I believe that that answer the question that I've been having
• 44:13
  in my head for a very long time. When is the solar take off going
• 44:19
  to be happening? In Africa.
• 44:20
  Because you, you started seeing these dominoes falling and you,
• 44:24
  you know, we've seen and you know, many folks may already
• 44:30
  know this, you know, 90% decline in costs over the past ten years
• 44:35
  in solar, but something like 85% for, for, for batteries.
• 44:39
  And the prediction for the next decade is another 90%
• 44:43
  redemption. Like this is a true, you know,
• 44:45
  it's law, you know, like curve that is just, you're blasting
• 44:50
  through every cost floor that we've ever we've ever seen and
• 44:54
  creating, you know, a truly transformational opportunity in,
• 44:58
  in energy. And as a consequence, you
• 45:01
  started seeing just through, you know, often times, you know, the
• 45:08
  removal of, of, of of arcane or or restrictive regulation that
• 45:16
  had prevented people out of their own self-interest
• 45:21
  procuring these, these products huge explosions in in, in the
• 45:26
  procurement of solar. Case in point was Pakistan two
• 45:30
  years ago where they, they imported some something like,
• 45:36
  you know, 1/4 of the countries installed base of power in solar
• 45:43
  panels by private individuals. So they saw all this solar
• 45:47
  coming in from China and it wasn't going to industrial, you
• 45:54
  know, traditional utility scaled solar plants, right?
• 45:59
  And so then the question was like, where's this solar going?
• 46:02
  Because people are buying it, you know, people are shipping it
• 46:04
  in, in container loads. And it was just people, once the
• 46:11
  regulation had been shifted to allow people to, to self-serve,
• 46:15
  buying this stuff and just carpeting their their factories
• 46:19
  with these solar panels and generating for the first time
• 46:25
  power that they had control over.
• 46:28
  Right. And when I saw that happening in
• 46:30
  Pakistan, I was like, this is going to happen in Africa.
• 46:32
  It is absolutely inevitable. And so wait, if I hear I wasn't
• 46:38
  seeing anything and then this Ember report comes out that
• 46:43
  between the 20/20/24 and the 2023 and 2024, the amount of
• 46:49
  solar that Africa has imported from China has increased by 60%.
• 46:54
  That's in one year, right? Like 15 gigawatts of solar has
• 46:59
  been imported into into Africa. Yeah, Kenya as an entire country
• 47:05
  has like 3 gigawatts of power in all the base.
• 47:09
  So that gives and Kenya is one of the top economies.
• 47:11
  Yeah, in America, right? Yeah, 15 gigawatts of solar
• 47:14
  panels, the amount of solar panels that has been imported in
• 47:18
  Sierra Leone alone is is equivalent to 61% of the
• 47:23
  country's installed capacity to generate.
• 47:26
  Wow. It's as such a transformational
• 47:31
  mount and there is no sign of slowing down you.
• 47:34
  A lot of the grass that you see for solar information in these
• 47:37
  countries look like that. You know, it's that autistic
• 47:39
  back, back-to-back to back. And you know what, next year
• 47:43
  it's going to be more and nobody has coordinated this.
• 47:49
  Nobody has created some sort of program to get solar into these
• 47:55
  countries. It is simply actually the
• 47:57
  biggest thing that does that does that does is going to
• 48:03
  accelerate this in the next year is probably the one big
• 48:07
  beautiful act. You know, because what you've
• 48:10
  seen is at the amount of exports from China has gone like into
• 48:15
  the US has gone like this. The amount of exports from China
• 48:17
  into Africa is going up like that because they're seeking new
• 48:22
  markets, right? And the, and their pricing to
• 48:26
  those markets because there is an imperative to really pump
• 48:31
  these, the, the, these, these panels out because they're also
• 48:36
  being consumed in mass in, in China.
• 48:39
  And so energy abundance. I I feel more confident than
• 48:44
  ever before as of this this report, which I'll which I'll
• 48:48
  share with you. I'll, we'll, we'll put it in the
• 48:50
  show notes here. Yes, yeah.
• 48:52
  Will happen and it is happening this decade and it is happening
• 48:56
  it'll be happening in a completely decentralized bottom
• 48:59
  up way. And eventually it will, it will
• 49:03
  be supported because these countries will see most of these
• 49:07
  countries are net energy importers, whether they're
• 49:11
  importing oil or they're importing natural gas.
• 49:13
  That's money that they, they had foreign exchange that they get
• 49:17
  from, you know, selling agricultural products of raw
• 49:20
  materials, Right. And to get dollars to go and buy
• 49:22
  this oil to bring into the country to burn, you know, in
• 49:25
  order to produce energy. They'll really lucky.
• 49:27
  I, I can keep those dollars. All right, you know, and we can
• 49:30
  generate the power here. Yeah.
• 49:32
  You know, and so eventually to be supported.
• 49:34
  But what gives me so much hope is that this is happening
• 49:38
  despite rather than because, and this is we, we, we mentioned
• 49:42
  this in our in our, in our walk last year.
• 49:44
  You know, I am a firm believer that that the only solutions
• 49:54
  that matter are the ones that can happen despite A
• 50:00
  dysfunctional, you know, regulatory political environment
• 50:07
  because those are the those are the ones that will create the
• 50:11
  base from which you can create more functioning systems then
• 50:15
  you can build, you know, the more fragile types of solutions
• 50:19
  on top of right. But eight, it tires me so much
• 50:23
  when people, you know, say things like, oh, you know what?
• 50:26
  You know what Africa needs? They need to end.
• 50:29
  Corruption. You know, you know what Africa
• 50:31
  needs? They need better leaders.
• 50:34
  OK, Yeah. OK.
• 50:35
  So we need better leaders. How do you get from here to
• 50:38
  there, right? You know, right, That's what I'm
• 50:40
  interested in. What's, what is the step that
• 50:43
  moves us in that direction? Because if I had, if I had a
• 50:46
  magic wand, I would read that magic wand and have better
• 50:49
  leaders. Yeah.
• 50:49
  In Africa, the fact is we have the leaders that we have.
• 50:53
  Right. The fact is we have the
• 50:55
  corruption situation that we have though, which, you know, is
• 50:59
  not novel. You know, every country in the
• 51:02
  in the world has different levels of, of, of corruption,
• 51:05
  right? We need to solve that problem.
• 51:07
  But if you make solving that problem problem a prerequisite
• 51:12
  for improving the livelihoods of the people in Africa or in
• 51:16
  Kenya, yeah, then it's a non starter.
• 51:18
  It's a non starter. And so energy abundance, yes.
• 51:22
  And it's going to happen from the ground up.
• 51:24
  And as you as, as you alluded to, because this is a, you know,
• 51:30
  a foundational technology, it unlocks so much, you know it.
• 51:34
  Unlocks, I mean, everything she has with energy, Yeah, in fact.
• 51:37
  Everything, every price of everything is the price of the
• 51:41
  energy that went into producing it, right.
• 51:44
  And then you can lay on, you know, the other things like
• 51:48
  brand and all these other things, but the fundamental
• 51:50
  input is energy. And so when you when you solve
• 51:55
  energy and bring that cost down, you find out that, oh, we didn't
• 51:59
  actually have. A water problem?
• 52:02
  We had an energy problem, and now we have energy and
• 52:04
  desalinate. We didn't actually have, you
• 52:07
  know, agricultural productivity problem.
• 52:11
  Oh, we had an energy problem. Now we can produce hydrogen,
• 52:16
  make our fertilizer, make agriculture more productive.
• 52:20
  All of these things are just downstream.
• 52:22
  Yeah. And so the fact that that base
• 52:25
  thing is being solved ground up gives me so much hope, yeah.
• 52:30
  That's awesome. And yeah, it's, you know, in the
• 52:32
  chapter that I just finished in my book on climate change, on
• 52:36
  how do we solve climate change with these accelerating
• 52:39
  technologies, I talked about that, the Maslow hierarchy of
• 52:44
  needs. I was referencing a friend's
• 52:46
  book, Pablo Solman, who's going to be on this podcast.
• 52:49
  It's a book called Deep Future. Amazing, amazing book you should
• 52:52
  read. And he talks about that.
• 52:55
  The base of the Maslow hierarchy should actually be energy,
• 52:58
  because everything come comes out of that.
• 53:01
  Yeah. That's what we have been doing
• 53:04
  as a species from the beginning. Yes, you.
• 53:07
  Know with the discovery of fire exactly think about that and
• 53:09
  we're like OK. And lot more calories, the same
• 53:12
  amount of of, of, of food, right?
• 53:14
  And then, you know, we, we invent agriculture and we can
• 53:18
  control, you know, and we pay a big cost to, to be sedentary.
• 53:24
  You know, we ruin our, our, our, our, our diet, you know, But the
• 53:30
  benefit of being able to predictably produce a surplus,
• 53:36
  an agricultural surplus is a price we as, as which is, choose
• 53:41
  to pay so that we can build civilization, you know, and then
• 53:45
  we invent, you know, fertilizer, you know, we, we unlock real oil
• 53:56
  and then fossil fuels. And now the ultimate, all of
• 54:02
  these being transformations of solar energy.
• 54:06
  As you, as you mentioned on our, on our previous walk, you've
• 54:08
  just been finding more and more efficient ways to get to how the
• 54:15
  sun produces energy, right. You know, yeah.
• 54:19
  Well, I mean, one, one of the things that I think is so funny,
• 54:22
  it like literally made me laugh out loud And this journey I had
• 54:26
  is that the sun is staring at us everyday and almost all of its
• 54:32
  energy doesn't go to use. And of course it sustains the
• 54:37
  whole earth and all of our plant life and frankly our life too.
• 54:43
  But you know, God put this there staring this everyday saying I
• 54:50
  have provided nearly unlimited energy for you.
• 54:55
  It's seconds of the sun. If you could just harness all of
• 54:59
  the power of it would just take care of us for a massive,
• 55:04
  massive amount of time. And it's just obvious to me that
• 55:08
  we're going to crack the code on that.
• 55:09
  And I think the acceleration, you know, take, take something
• 55:13
  like a deep mind and the protein folding problem, you know, alpha
• 55:17
  fold and alpha fold 2, that same type of solutioning through AI
• 55:26
  running just a massive number of simulations is going to happen
• 55:29
  with all there is a material science.
• 55:31
  And, and, and we're for sure going to figure out a way to get
• 55:36
  that curve. You know, I don't know what that
• 55:38
  law will be called. It won't be Moore's law will be
• 55:40
  something else. But they continue that, that
• 55:43
  solar curve just constantly just driving down to essentially
• 55:48
  where it's almost free. Because if, if, if we have a
• 55:53
  world of pretty much infinite energy from the sun, then in
• 55:59
  that type of world, it unlocks tremendous possibility.
• 56:03
  I mean, you know, this country, you know, America before we had
• 56:07
  electricity is just not even conceivable to us today.
• 56:13
  But there are countries in Africa that do not have
• 56:16
  electricity today in 2025. Very viewer like when we're
• 56:21
  Paragon, we very quickly became the second largest utility in in
• 56:26
  in interlion. And that's not because we're
• 56:29
  this massive company, it's because the national utilities
• 56:34
  had like 150,000 connections. We got that.
• 56:39
  You know, for a country of millions, you know, I think 3 or
• 56:43
  4 million at the time do that's the number of people who have
• 56:47
  connections to the National Grid, The capital of of Sierra
• 56:55
  Leone, a significant portion of that capital or is powered by a
• 57:03
  ship that is docked off the coast of Sierra Leone that had
• 57:10
  giant generators on it and runs wires to shore to power the
• 57:17
  country. And that I think that ship is a
• 57:19
  Turkish ship, not a Sierra Leone.
• 57:22
  And, and so how do you, you know, how do you build a
• 57:26
  functioning economy when your base input is that precarious?
• 57:31
  Right. You know, right?
• 57:32
  Yeah. And so at it's very difficult
• 57:35
  providing how transformative this will be for like for, for,
• 57:40
  for for Freetown in in Sierra Leone to be energy independent.
• 57:45
  Yeah. Because if Freetown doesn't pay
• 57:48
  it's electricity a bill in time, that ship can sail away.
• 57:51
  Right, right. Yeah.
• 57:52
  How do you build? Yeah.
• 57:55
  Yeah, that's, that is unbelievable.
• 57:57
  Yeah. Absolutely crazy.
• 57:59
  But yeah, as you think. And that's the that's the
• 58:01
  capital. So, you know, nobody outside of
• 58:05
  there right, has electricity. How are they even supposed to
• 58:08
  begin to get on the journey to access the abundance of
• 58:13
  knowledge that the world has to offer?
• 58:16
  Right. If they're at at that place.
• 58:18
  Yeah. And then then flip the switch
• 58:21
  and not only give access to energy, but make it so that, you
• 58:26
  know, and it sometimes it feels fanciful for when you talk
• 58:29
  about, you know, energy to keep to meter and things like that.
• 58:32
  But we forget that there was a time when Internet was a luxury
• 58:39
  in our lifetimes. You know, I was just a civil
• 58:41
  girl before, before I came. Out.
• 58:44
  Yeah, Great, great coffee shop. Great coffee.
• 58:46
  Shop and I walk in and I order my lemonade.
• 58:51
  I sit down and I asked the barista, could I have your Wi-Fi
• 58:56
  password? Doesn't that tell me that'll be
• 58:58
  $5? Right.
• 58:59
  Exactly. Yeah.
• 59:00
  Yeah, it was. Done some.
• 59:02
  It wasn't about long ago when I would go into a Wi-Fi cafe in
• 59:06
  Europe. You know when what And he did
• 59:09
  Wi-Fi. I remember Cyber cafe.
• 59:10
  Cyber Cafe. Exactly, and but it is worth it
• 59:15
  for that institution to provide me free high speed Internet for
• 59:20
  whatever I want to do. I could watch YouTube on it or
• 59:22
  whatever because the cost is so low relative to the convenience
• 59:27
  that it provides and the attraction that it provides in
• 59:32
  terms of customers, which is where the real value lies.
• 59:36
  We didn't get to that place with energy where the energy energy
• 59:43
  treaty. To me, that doesn't mean then
• 59:45
  there's there's an organization that somehow have the intrinsic
• 59:48
  incentive to just provide free energy to people, right?
• 59:52
  Entities that will be providing energy will be different kinds
• 59:55
  of entities. They, they, their business model
• 59:58
  will be built on the services that layer on top of the energy.
• 1:00:03
  But the energy itself, it would just be given to you.
• 1:00:06
  You know we can get there because we this is that type of
• 1:00:11
  transformation like you know orders of magnitude shift in the
• 1:00:16
  kind or or in in the price or or by especially as we re.
• 1:00:22
  Orient to the realization that that there is massive value to
• 1:00:30
  design your industrial processes around an intermittent source of
• 1:00:37
  power, right, Because one thing is making storage Jeep and
• 1:00:41
  there's people working on that day and night and tremendous
• 1:00:44
  progress being had. But there is so much in our in,
• 1:00:49
  in a current industrial system that is, it is, it is the, the,
• 1:00:55
  the, it is designed around a world in which energy is
• 1:00:57
  expensive. And so the optimization function
• 1:01:01
  is wrong in a world where energy is cheap, right?
• 1:01:05
  And so when you start designing for a world where energy is
• 1:01:09
  cheap, where you start building electrolyzers that are don't
• 1:01:14
  take, you know, rare materials to build the most efficient, you
• 1:01:19
  know, filter so that you can use the least amount of energy to
• 1:01:25
  get the most amount of, of, of water and hydrogen out of it.
• 1:01:30
  But instead you use cheap, inefficient materials and just
• 1:01:36
  use tons of free energy in the middle of the day to do exactly
• 1:01:41
  the same thing. The whole system changes.
• 1:01:44
  And you're starting to see that because people are realizing,
• 1:01:48
  and I mean, it's happening here, but in Europe, it's really
• 1:01:51
  happening in Europe. In countries like Spain, hours
• 1:01:54
  of negative energy prices are like, it's growing like that.
• 1:02:01
  And it's in the summer in Spain has tons of wind even in in in
• 1:02:08
  the autumn and winter. They have multiple hours on a
• 1:02:12
  daily basis where people are being paid to take energy.
• 1:02:17
  All right. And that cannot help but
• 1:02:20
  transform an economy. Yeah, that's so cool.
• 1:02:22
  You know, one of the things that just to bring it back home,
• 1:02:26
  given that we're in Austin, TX right now is, you know, Texas
• 1:02:32
  had a near failure of its power grid because we're on our own
• 1:02:36
  little island. You know, we don't, we don't
• 1:02:38
  work with other states in terms of connecting power.
• 1:02:42
  And one of the things that people don't realize that
• 1:02:47
  happened as a result of that near tragedy.
• 1:02:50
  You know, fortunately it didn't happen, but I heard that it was
• 1:02:53
  within hours of failure. Is there have been an incredible
• 1:02:58
  number of solar starts here. I mean, it's, it is off the
• 1:03:01
  charts if if people look at it. And so I, I'm, I'm curious on
• 1:03:07
  how you see the world because you've thought more about energy
• 1:03:11
  than almost anybody I personally know, right?
• 1:03:14
  So, so I'm curious like, how do you see the world actually
• 1:03:18
  transforming? And I'm talking about the US
• 1:03:21
  too, like, like with nearly unlimited energy.
• 1:03:25
  Like right now, there's so much talk about the grid being
• 1:03:30
  stressed by AI consumption and AI training.
• 1:03:35
  But let's just say that problem is solved and we blast past that
• 1:03:41
  problem to the point where we have, you know, just just
• 1:03:44
  abundance of energy everywhere in the world.
• 1:03:48
  What are the dream scenarios that you think of that we do
• 1:03:52
  with nearly unlimited energy? Like what kind of world is that?
• 1:03:56
  Well, I mean, it's an interesting time to be thinking
• 1:03:58
  about that because what we have, we have discovered over the
• 1:04:02
  past, you know, five years is, you know, we, we, we were, we
• 1:04:11
  were, we are as a society was, were finding ways to unlock
• 1:04:16
  energy, right? But really, if you take that to
• 1:04:21
  its logical conclusion in the context of humans, we were
• 1:04:27
  finding ways to unlock energy so that we could consume it in the
• 1:04:31
  form of food, because we were the only entities we knew of
• 1:04:38
  that produced intelligence, right?
• 1:04:42
  And so we would transforming energy into intelligence, which
• 1:04:46
  was then creating, you know, the, the world that we live in,
• 1:04:52
  you know, the Anthropocene or whatever you want right to call
• 1:04:54
  it. And now we have found another
• 1:04:59
  part, you know, that that you know, through our transformation
• 1:05:06
  of energy into intelligence, we have found a way to basically do
• 1:05:11
  the same thing in silicon, right?
• 1:05:13
  Yeah. And so because now that we have
• 1:05:18
  that direct relationship, there is a direct relationship between
• 1:05:22
  energy abundance to for all and unlimited intelligence.
• 1:05:27
  Yes. Unlimited cognitive abilities.
• 1:05:33
  And that you know, it's, it's, it's almost impossible to
• 1:05:37
  imagine what, what that means because just like it's, it's, it
• 1:05:42
  takes a long time for people to adjust to a world where energy
• 1:05:46
  is, is abundant and cheap. Like so much of our the
• 1:05:52
  constraints that have shaped, I would think about the world have
• 1:05:55
  been constraints around intelligence.
• 1:05:59
  Right. So I, I like to think of just
• 1:06:01
  the basic, the basic things, you know, the simple things that can
• 1:06:05
  be, can be solved because those to me are profound enough
• 1:06:09
  without even extrapolating that that far.
• 1:06:12
  We've talked about people don't have electricity.
• 1:06:15
  You know, in a lot of countries, the ratio of doctors to people
• 1:06:24
  is thousands to 1. You know, as in even if
• 1:06:31
  everybody in that country had the means to purchase access to
• 1:06:36
  healthcare, this just would not be enough.
• 1:06:42
  And yet we are rapidly entering a world, and this is happening
• 1:06:47
  now, where the AI diagnostics is routinely surpassing human level
• 1:06:59
  for trained doctors. It's surpassing not just doctors
• 1:07:05
  alone, it is surpassing doctors assisted with.
• 1:07:09
  AI. Right, The AI alone is providing
• 1:07:14
  fewer false positives and fewer false negatives.
• 1:07:19
  It is. We are getting to the place
• 1:07:22
  where with a cheap cell phone powered by cheap power, most
• 1:07:29
  people will have the ability to accurately diagnose their
• 1:07:34
  situation. Right, right.
• 1:07:36
  That's before we you talk about any sort of material science,
• 1:07:39
  you know, that will produce the medicine to, to, to, to heal
• 1:07:43
  them. It's, it's, it's hard to
• 1:07:46
  imagine. I told, I mentioned that my mom
• 1:07:49
  was sick when I was an undergrad.
• 1:07:53
  Ended up actually turning out that she had non Hodgkin's
• 1:07:56
  lymphoma. It took years to get that
• 1:08:01
  diagnosis. We had to fly her to South
• 1:08:04
  Africa for the longest time. She, you know, she had, you
• 1:08:10
  know, incredible headaches and pain like that, almost blind one
• 1:08:16
  of our eyes. We'd take her to the doctors and
• 1:08:19
  they would diagnose something. We we lost so much time by the
• 1:08:24
  time we got the right diagnosis in, in South Africa and then
• 1:08:28
  took her to India for treatment, which you could have gotten in
• 1:08:32
  Kenya, yes, but it would have been way more expensive in, in
• 1:08:35
  Kenya. They in India, they built a low
• 1:08:37
  cost healthcare system that is, you know, a wonder to behold for
• 1:08:42
  treatment. She was in stage 4.
• 1:08:45
  Wow, right. And you know, thank God she is
• 1:08:49
  in in remission and there's been in.
• 1:08:51
  Remission for, you know, going. On 20 years now from stage 4 non
• 1:08:57
  Hodgkin's lymphoma, but in that's so much suffering, so
• 1:09:00
  much suffering to get to that point.
• 1:09:02
  You know. And, and the crazy thing is that
• 1:09:04
  it's not that we didn't. Have the medicine, Yeah, we
• 1:09:10
  couldn't. Diagnose right my mom passed
• 1:09:12
  away from. Lung cancer.
• 1:09:14
  Unfortunately, she. Didn't make it, but they they
• 1:09:18
  I'd say it's I miss her a lot. This is a bit over.
• 1:09:22
  My gosh, I think it's been 14 years now, but she they kept
• 1:09:27
  misdiagnosing the fact that she had they didn't know that she
• 1:09:31
  had a tumor growing. There was lung cancer.
• 1:09:33
  She never smoked in her entire life and 10% of women that get
• 1:09:37
  lung cancer never smoked. It's like something
• 1:09:40
  environmental. And they kept misdiagnosing her
• 1:09:44
  as having bronchitis and kept giving her antibiotics and she
• 1:09:49
  would be alive today because. It was a very.
• 1:09:52
  Slow growth tumor, But by the time it got diagnosed, it was
• 1:09:56
  stage 3. And then we thought that we had,
• 1:10:00
  we had a beat. But then unfortunately it went
• 1:10:02
  stage 4. And it was just, yeah, it was
• 1:10:04
  just so sad. Yeah.
• 1:10:07
  I will tell you one aside, though, that was that was just
• 1:10:10
  incredible. You know, I was, and it's a
• 1:10:15
  bizarre voice story. So bizarre voice.
• 1:10:17
  After it went public, we, you know, the stock traded up and we
• 1:10:23
  could do a secondary IPO. And so I'm I'm I'm at the
• 1:10:28
  office, my mom is in the hospital and not doing well, but
• 1:10:35
  I had to meet with these bankers.
• 1:10:36
  This takes you back to your investment banking base.
• 1:10:38
  OK. So I was meeting with these
• 1:10:40
  bankers about the secondary IPO and I just had to have that
• 1:10:46
  meeting that my wife was at the hospital.
• 1:10:48
  I get out of that meeting, you know, successful meeting.
• 1:10:51
  I'm like, I have to go back to a hospital.
• 1:10:54
  I just kind of felt it in my soul.
• 1:10:55
  I'm driving back. My wife calls me and she says,
• 1:11:00
  your mom is passing by right now.
• 1:11:01
  I'm going to put you on speaker. I'm on speaker tears, you know,
• 1:11:06
  telling her goodbye. It's just absolutely horrible.
• 1:11:10
  And I thought, man, I just missed my mom's passing because
• 1:11:15
  of capitalism, which I love capitalism, but I love my mom
• 1:11:19
  more than capitalism. And, and, but I just keep
• 1:11:23
  driving. My wife calls me back 5 minutes
• 1:11:26
  later and she says it's a miracle.
• 1:11:28
  They don't know what happened. She's back alive.
• 1:11:31
  They're like, nobody knows what's going on, Like they're in
• 1:11:34
  uncharted territory here at the hospital.
• 1:11:36
  Yes, yes, I get there. My mom passes away with me
• 1:11:40
  holding your hand, my my wife and my sister.
• 1:11:45
  And the doctor said, if you don't believe in God, no, you
• 1:11:50
  really should because we're like, we've been seen.
• 1:11:52
  But you know, but that's how much my mom loved.
• 1:11:55
  Like that's how much my mom loved.
• 1:11:56
  Like the, the love I have in my heart came from that
• 1:12:01
  unconditional love from her. That's just so incredible and
• 1:12:05
  such a mom. Thing you know, that's when you
• 1:12:08
  realize I hit the mom back. But it is impossible.
• 1:12:11
  It is impossible. To to understand.
• 1:12:15
  Like the feeling that a mom has for her kids.
• 1:12:20
  Yes. Yeah.
• 1:12:21
  Like. It it will, it will jump.
• 1:12:24
  Over the the entire doctor's, you know, textbook, yeah.
• 1:12:29
  And say Nope, yeah, pause. Yeah, yeah, you know.
• 1:12:34
  Breath's coming, yeah, you know, and it.
• 1:12:36
  It it, I mean, I think if your point about the the news, like I
• 1:12:41
  think this happens so often everywhere and it's.
• 1:12:44
  Just. It's not further for for new
• 1:12:47
  schools like my mom similarly like she so she went multiple
• 1:12:50
  times to to to India for treatment for chemo.
• 1:12:56
  He she lost so much weight that she was wearing my little
• 1:13:00
  sister's clothes. You know, that is just
• 1:13:04
  impossible for me. To even.
• 1:13:06
  Conceptualize but she was she was beating it and then she came
• 1:13:10
  back to 10 year and she went for a scan and they they said found
• 1:13:17
  something and who are like what is going on and and this was my
• 1:13:25
  mum at this point was like you know what like I don't know how
• 1:13:29
  much more of this I can take and.
• 1:13:30
  Right. And everyone.
• 1:13:31
  Like, OK, we'll do one more more trip, we'll raise the money.
• 1:13:35
  You know, it's a lot of great thing about Kenya, this Harambee
• 1:13:38
  spirit where we come together, we raise so much because there
• 1:13:42
  is no there is no for most people like like in the
• 1:13:46
  insurance that is going to to to pay for this.
• 1:13:49
  Like the community around you is the insurance, right, Right.
• 1:13:53
  So, you know, raise the money. That's beautiful.
• 1:13:56
  Yeah, we and it's very, it is like how most people get to like
• 1:14:01
  in, in, in Keda. And it's a.
• 1:14:04
  Beautiful and powerful thing it's called the Harambee spirit.
• 1:14:08
  It's in our shield, you know, at the bottom and we take a that
• 1:14:14
  and she goes in and she's supposed to go in now for
• 1:14:20
  surgery slash slash chemo the next day.
• 1:14:22
  So they do the pre screening. They do take her to to the
• 1:14:26
  hospital, They do all the texts. She comes back to the hotel
• 1:14:30
  where she was staying. She goes the next day and the
• 1:14:33
  doctor is looking at her hand and like here's your scan.
• 1:14:40
  There is nothing like she has. Her cancer caliot, she goes
• 1:14:49
  there, sits down, and the thing has disappeared.
• 1:14:55
  And from that day to today, she's been in a relationship.
• 1:15:01
  Wow. Well, thank.
• 1:15:02
  Goodness for that you. Know.
• 1:15:04
  Beautiful. How do you?
• 1:15:05
  How? Yeah.
• 1:15:07
  So you were like, yeah, OK, OK. God.
• 1:15:09
  Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Thank you for OK you.
• 1:15:11
  Know I did do that, you know? Yeah.
• 1:15:13
  Yeah, but there is, you know, there is and, and perhaps again
• 1:15:20
  there is the profoundness of, of the presence of God will will be
• 1:15:33
  further unlocked by what we are, what we are going through right
• 1:15:36
  now in this explosion of of of of, you know, basically
• 1:15:42
  capacity, you know, it maybe it ends up reinjecting a.
• 1:15:49
  Sense of wonder. In the world that has that has
• 1:15:52
  been lost. You know, I actually think that
• 1:15:54
  AI is going to lead to an. Understanding of the divine and
• 1:16:00
  science and spirituality coming back together.
• 1:16:03
  And that's, that's part of what I explore in my short story, My,
• 1:16:08
  my, my 3 short stories, which starts out with God's final
• 1:16:12
  exam. Like I, I honestly think this is
• 1:16:15
  the time, it's this lifetime where we are being awakened to
• 1:16:22
  what's at stake. And technology is the catalyst.
• 1:16:26
  And technology is the catalyst because we're going to have
• 1:16:30
  tools that are so powerful. I mean, you know, as of this
• 1:16:34
  recording, it has been 1013 days since the launch of ChatGPT
• 1:16:40
  right now. Like so think about another 1014
• 1:16:45
  days in an exponential curve. Which is why I don't I don't
• 1:16:49
  understand anybody who. I don't care at all about what
• 1:16:56
  ChatGPT can do right now, even though what he can do if if you
• 1:17:01
  told somebody three years ago that it could do what it does
• 1:17:08
  now, most people evaluated it three years ago and think that
• 1:17:12
  that typically is still what they tried three years ago,
• 1:17:14
  which was not able to add, I don't know, 23 plus, yeah,
• 1:17:17
  whatever to add 24. They haven't even updated what
• 1:17:21
  it can do now. But I don't even care what it
• 1:17:24
  can do now. Are you seeing this trajectory?
• 1:17:27
  Right? Yeah.
• 1:17:28
  And anybody that's been in tech like knows.
• 1:17:31
  Like like because. At the beginning of every tech
• 1:17:34
  revolution, whether it's mobile like the initial mobile websites
• 1:17:37
  look like horrible, whether it's the beginning of social, the
• 1:17:40
  original social media sites were absolutely horrible for Hitch or
• 1:17:44
  is the beginning of printers. Like for me, it was like it just
• 1:17:49
  took forever just to print one page and it was horrible.
• 1:17:52
  I mean, I yeah, dial em. My first modem was 110 volts.
• 1:17:56
  Yeah, I could almost type faster than the text when across the
• 1:18:00
  screen. But the first computer we ever
• 1:18:03
  got was BM. 486 with 4 megabytes of RAM, 170 megabytes of
• 1:18:09
  storage, and it felt like plenty.
• 1:18:12
  Yes, you have. You know exactly so it's not
• 1:18:15
  new. Like, all right, we've seen
• 1:18:17
  this. And it's every.
• 1:18:19
  The thing is, every subsequent one has been faster.
• 1:18:22
  Yeah. And so, you know, like.
• 1:18:27
  It would. Be.
• 1:18:28
  It would be. It would be.
• 1:18:31
  It would be so unusual if this was slower than the previous
• 1:18:38
  transition. Your expectation should be that
• 1:18:41
  it's faster and it is showing you that it is way faster so.
• 1:18:49
  You. Should expect, you know, the
• 1:18:51
  thing that needs to be explained is somebody you think that the
• 1:18:53
  line is going to go like this, right?
• 1:18:56
  And it's been going like this, right?
• 1:18:57
  You know this. Needs more explanation.
• 1:18:59
  Than this right? This is the baseline
• 1:19:03
  transpector, right? Right.
• 1:19:04
  Yeah. It's incredible.
• 1:19:05
  And so it sounds like you're. Pretty positive that we're going
• 1:19:10
  to make it to this age of abundance for all I I am because
• 1:19:14
  you know for. One thing you know, every
• 1:19:20
  doomsday to date has been wrong. You know, I, I, I think that the
• 1:19:26
  people who are invested in and. Doing the work to help.
• 1:19:33
  Us get across the finish line will never get as much attention
• 1:19:42
  as the people who say, you know, nuke the data centres, you know,
• 1:19:47
  yeah. And so this goes back to my
• 1:19:50
  prior point at the beginning of this.
• 1:19:52
  Where in the introduction where it's, you know, the most
• 1:19:56
  dystopian thing is constantly being fed to us exactly because
• 1:19:59
  that is newsworthy, you know, and and not to them, there
• 1:20:04
  aren't any risks, but there was a risk.
• 1:20:06
  When we invented fire, there was a risk.
• 1:20:11
  When we invented nuclear energy, there's there's a risk when we
• 1:20:20
  invented. Cars.
• 1:20:22
  If there is no powerful technology that does not have
• 1:20:30
  risks, this is it is a it is a characteristic of powerful tools
• 1:20:37
  to be risky. Yeah, right.
• 1:20:40
  And which is? Why it is important?
• 1:20:42
  For us to elevate. Ourselves as.
• 1:20:47
  We are bringing this this tool. Into existence, right?
• 1:20:51
  But we have. We forget.
• 1:20:55
  How many opportunities? We have had for.
• 1:21:00
  Self annihilation. The the, the, the, the pure.
• 1:21:03
  This simple fact is, if we wanted to annihilate ourselves
• 1:21:06
  right now we have all. We don't need the AGI to destroy
• 1:21:12
  the plan in in short order, yeah.
• 1:21:15
  We have the tools. Right now.
• 1:21:18
  We can do. It right and so you have to
• 1:21:22
  explain why why we are still here despite we we already have
• 1:21:34
  God like powers in our hands, the power to to destroy at a
• 1:21:40
  level that is unfathomable to to to most people.
• 1:21:43
  And yet we have a society walked forward and I see everyday
• 1:21:50
  people who are so invested in ensuring but that work, that
• 1:21:54
  thankless work that doesn't make the headlines, that doesn't get
• 1:21:59
  people hysterical. And you know, running with that,
• 1:22:03
  with that, with the hair on fire, I see people everyday
• 1:22:11
  working. To.
• 1:22:13
  Bring about that positive outcome and I and I see that I
• 1:22:17
  have to work so much harder to find them than the people who
• 1:22:22
  are screaming about stop everything.
• 1:22:25
  You know, you know, the entire world is about to, to to, to
• 1:22:32
  collapse. And so as long as that's the
• 1:22:34
  case, I will be, I'll be worried when I start seeing that it is
• 1:22:44
  that it is easier for me to find.
• 1:22:48
  The people who? Are doing the good work than the
• 1:22:52
  people who are yelling fire that that to to me that world is a a
• 1:23:01
  bit murkier because the the the I know that the human instinct
• 1:23:10
  is to focus on the negative. That's that's actually that's an
• 1:23:16
  important element of who we are. That's how we have been able to
• 1:23:19
  survive. Yeah.
• 1:23:20
  From the Savannah. It's very, Yeah.
• 1:23:22
  It's an amygdala's evolution. Exactly.
• 1:23:24
  Yeah. Your brain wants you to survive
• 1:23:27
  and therefore. It wants you to avoid danger,
• 1:23:30
  right? But we have to be balanced and
• 1:23:36
  we have to understand that the benefits that we that are on the
• 1:23:41
  table are not frivolous. We've just been discussing in a
• 1:23:45
  world where you can go down to the ER anytime, you know, and
• 1:23:49
  get healthcare, you know, where you, where you, where you, you,
• 1:23:56
  you can trust that the person sitting across the table is
• 1:24:00
  qualified, you know, and will do their best to give you a good, a
• 1:24:05
  good diagnosis. Whether they do or not is is is
• 1:24:08
  is a separate question. In a world where you can open
• 1:24:12
  the tap and drink the water that comes out of it and not get
• 1:24:16
  diarrhea, you know, in a world where you can flick a switch and
• 1:24:20
  know that the power will will come on, it's difficult to to
• 1:24:25
  see why we would take the risk, right?
• 1:24:31
  But that is obscuring the fact that this is a.
• 1:24:35
  Very narrow slice of society, right, that has those things.
• 1:24:38
  Africa has 1.2 billion people here by 2025, by by 2050 it will
• 1:24:44
  be half of the world world's working age relation.
• 1:24:51
  Yeah, that's on the on the continent.
• 1:24:54
  What happens when that? Working age population.
• 1:25:00
  Doesn't have electricity. And what is our?
• 1:25:03
  Plan to get there this. Drive towards abundance that we
• 1:25:09
  are in. Right now I think is not, not
• 1:25:13
  just necessary, it is essential if those people are to feel
• 1:25:18
  invested in the world. That we have built.
• 1:25:22
  And to be contributing positively to it, yeah.
• 1:25:24
  Because as it stands right now, we are inevitably going to end
• 1:25:28
  up in a 0 sum environment. You know, because we're going
• 1:25:34
  to. Not have enough to go around
• 1:25:36
  right and that is that risk is way bigger than any risk of you
• 1:25:43
  know I don't know how you know right you know in the health
• 1:25:47
  30,000 of destroying humanity right right right and
• 1:25:50
  especially. Because also what?
• 1:25:55
  I don't know. I I for me the the the most
• 1:25:57
  realistic depiction. Of of what you know and and AGI
• 1:26:02
  might be is is that movie her you know where they just and
• 1:26:06
  they get bored and they and they and they leave.
• 1:26:08
  You know, it's because it's it speaks to not that that would
• 1:26:13
  happen. Is that to project human desires
• 1:26:20
  onto something that scale is feels like folly, which is why
• 1:26:27
  again I I try to focus on the immediate what are the things
• 1:26:32
  that if we achieve abundance, the basic simple things that
• 1:26:36
  what we when you achieve abundance will be available to
• 1:26:40
  all and how can it transform them right a reliable diagnosis
• 1:26:45
  for. Your disease.
• 1:26:47
  The ability to access. Energy.
• 1:26:51
  Whenever you need it at almost no cost.
• 1:26:54
  The ability to have and it infinite cognitive reserve at
• 1:27:03
  your disposal to learn anything that you want to learn to
• 1:27:09
  whatever level you want to learn it.
• 1:27:13
  Those things are priceless and they they're just not available
• 1:27:20
  to too many people. And there is no path anywhere in
• 1:27:25
  our lifetimes to getting it too the majority of humanity without
• 1:27:31
  this drive. Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 1:27:33
  Ranked and. In.
• 1:27:35
  Terms of in terms of you personally, like you're how old
• 1:27:41
  are you now? Today's my birthday.
• 1:27:44
  I'm turning 41. Oh yeah, today's.
• 1:27:46
  Your birthday. Awesome man, thanks for.
• 1:27:49
  Doing this on your birthday, That's, that's, that's, that's
• 1:27:52
  really kind. How do you, how do you see your
• 1:27:57
  life unfolding given what's at stake over this next 10 to 15
• 1:28:01
  years? Like what are you doing to put
• 1:28:02
  it all on the field? Like for humanity, you know,
• 1:28:06
  whether that's in Kenya or here or where, where are you?
• 1:28:11
  Where are you placing your energy to help us get there?
• 1:28:14
  Well, passing to the kids. They're the.
• 1:28:18
  Direct, by the way. I tell everybody there's nothing
• 1:28:22
  harder. Than I've ever done than trying
• 1:28:24
  to raise kids like it's much easier to start a company and
• 1:28:28
  it's so funny because was in it for the long haul either you
• 1:28:31
  don't get to IPO, you don't get to.
• 1:28:33
  You sell. That's so funny, no?
• 1:28:38
  No, no, it's a, it's, it's a lifetime.
• 1:28:40
  It's a lifetime commitment. Exactly.
• 1:28:42
  So you know them definitely. And I mean.
• 1:28:45
  They, you know, because you know, just seeing them grow and
• 1:28:53
  and discover the world is, is, is super profound.
• 1:28:59
  And then I, I, I, as you know, I work in energy right now.
• 1:29:05
  I work, I basically do par markets forecasting, trying
• 1:29:11
  helping energy developers get financing for the energy assets
• 1:29:18
  that they're building. And I, I, I was at a conference
• 1:29:23
  a few months ago and somebody said that energy is the Rev
• 1:29:30
  limiter to AI. And I thought that that was a
• 1:29:34
  very succinct way of connecting, you know, the air revolution to
• 1:29:41
  the work that we're doing. Because right now, the only
• 1:29:45
  thing that that the person who with all the money in the world
• 1:29:55
  cannot get is enough energy to. Power a data center, you know.
• 1:30:01
  It's, you know, it's easier to get your hands on Nvidia's
• 1:30:07
  latest chips than to get the gigawatts of power that are
• 1:30:12
  necessary to power those chips. There's it's gotten to a point
• 1:30:16
  where you know, if you want a gas turbine from GE or Siemens
• 1:30:24
  or Mitsubishi and you have the money right now, these are, you
• 1:30:30
  know, these are, you know, multi $100 million million billion
• 1:30:35
  dollar deals, you have to wait seven years.
• 1:30:41
  Wow, you have them and like. If you if somebody was to give
• 1:30:46
  you the term by now. But that's the wait list.
• 1:30:49
  Wow, right? And so.
• 1:30:53
  If we want to do. This in 10 years, we're going to
• 1:30:56
  have to figure out where the power is going to come from
• 1:31:00
  between. Now and.
• 1:31:02
  When that that that wait list gets whittled down, which it
• 1:31:06
  will, you're already seeing people in the species saying
• 1:31:08
  they're going to double there. They're they have like a $32
• 1:31:11
  billion backlog, order backlog that they're doubling the
• 1:31:16
  capacity. To to meet.
• 1:31:18
  So I, I support developers that are looking to, to, to get
• 1:31:27
  financing for these purchases because as you, as we mentioned,
• 1:31:31
  it's hundreds of $1,000,000. Usually 60% of that is debt
• 1:31:35
  from, from the bank. And the bank wants to know that,
• 1:31:38
  that the numbers for your asset make sense.
• 1:31:42
  And so they need an independent third party to keep the tires
• 1:31:46
  on, on, on those, on those numbers.
• 1:31:48
  And that's us especially because those numbers need to make sense
• 1:31:52
  over, you know, 25 year forecast horizon.
• 1:31:56
  So what are? Prices of power.
• 1:31:57
  Going to be in 2050. That's a record question for,
• 1:32:02
  for, for, for, for these people. So that's one thing that I'm
• 1:32:07
  doing, supporting and investing in in the.
• 1:32:11
  Progress movement in any. Way that I that I can know
• 1:32:14
  whether that's, you know, consuming materials from the
• 1:32:19
  Progress Network, the roots of Progress Institute, all these
• 1:32:27
  people who are at the, at the coalface people.
• 1:32:32
  Like Casey Handler. That we mentioned before are
• 1:32:36
  working on, on directly synthesizing fossil fuels from
• 1:32:42
  air and and water, seeing what they're they're working on and
• 1:32:48
  supporting in in, in, in, in any way we can and then trying to
• 1:32:53
  make sure that in all this conversation Africa does.
• 1:33:00
  Not get lost. Because, you know, for better or
• 1:33:05
  for worse, the future is African, because it's the only
• 1:33:11
  continent that is actually growing in terms of population,
• 1:33:17
  right? We have.
• 1:33:21
  You know. A very.
• 1:33:23
  Serious demographic. Challenge on the horizon.
• 1:33:26
  Most developing countries, most developed countries, and many
• 1:33:30
  developing countries, including countries like Iran and
• 1:33:33
  Bangladesh, are struggling to maintain replacement.
• 1:33:40
  Great in terms of population, all right?
• 1:33:43
  And so a larger and larger proportion of the humans that
• 1:33:49
  are going to be on this planet on 2050 and beyond are going to
• 1:33:53
  be Africans, most of them in Africa.
• 1:33:57
  And so when we talk about an abundant future for.
• 1:34:00
  All right, we're largely talking about these people.
• 1:34:04
  Yeah. And so if they're not part of
• 1:34:05
  the conversation and we just. We are writing stories about
• 1:34:10
  people who are not in the room and that is not bound to end.
• 1:34:15
  And well, so whenever I can, you know, speak on the role of
• 1:34:26
  Africa in this future, I try to do so.
• 1:34:29
  Yeah. So I want.
• 1:34:31
  To talk about. Just with the scale of the
• 1:34:36
  challenge and with the, with the fact that a lot of countries are
• 1:34:40
  locked into this kind of 0 sum mindset, this this battle
• 1:34:45
  between the US saying if we get AGI before China, we're going to
• 1:34:50
  subjugate China. If China gets AGI before us,
• 1:34:53
  they're going to subjugate us. And just this kind of ridiculous
• 1:34:57
  notion that we currently have because of the way we've evolved
• 1:35:02
  in the government's, we have. I just, I just find the whole
• 1:35:06
  thing almost laughably ridiculous in a world of 8.2
• 1:35:11
  billion people. And my thesis here is that we're
• 1:35:15
  going to hit a a precipice in the future.
• 1:35:18
  Like right now, the race is. On, you know there was.
• 1:35:21
  There's just the White House dinner last week where over $2
• 1:35:24
  trillion was pledged by some of the most, you know, prominent
• 1:35:30
  tech leaders in the. United States, that was just.
• 1:35:32
  That was that just happened last week and I think that the race
• 1:35:39
  being on, right. Now is a very good.
• 1:35:40
  Thing because technology is the catalyst to create the
• 1:35:44
  abundance, but at some point like we're going to be able to
• 1:35:47
  see over the horizon and see this future of abundance for
• 1:35:51
  all, like the end of disease, near unlimited energy.
• 1:35:54
  And we're going to have the free will and make a choice.
• 1:35:57
  And so much of humanity is going to have access to artificial
• 1:36:02
  super intelligence, not just AGI that ASI and we have the free
• 1:36:09
  will to decide what to do with that.
• 1:36:12
  So I'm just curious like geopolitically, how you see it
• 1:36:15
  playing out for how are we going to wake up and realize we have
• 1:36:18
  to work together as opposed to this subjugation type of mindset
• 1:36:26
  one? I just, I hope that we do.
• 1:36:29
  I think what's dangerous about it, you know, is just the the
• 1:36:39
  same thing. That makes me.
• 1:36:42
  Skeptical of utopian visions is the same thing that makes me
• 1:36:49
  skeptical of like dystopian visions.
• 1:36:53
  It it too. Often.
• 1:36:55
  Becomes a tool to apply and justifies the means thinking.
• 1:37:03
  Because if what is on the horizon is utopia, you know
• 1:37:09
  everybody. 'S equal and everybody.
• 1:37:11
  Has everything that they need. You know, what's a few more
• 1:37:15
  people, you know, trampled under the hoof of this machine, you
• 1:37:20
  know, for this amazing future that we have.
• 1:37:23
  And it's the same thing with dystopia.
• 1:37:25
  If what's at risk is the annihilation of all of humanity,
• 1:37:30
  you know, what's a few bombs dropped here and there you know,
• 1:37:34
  to prevent that. And that's what I what I I don't
• 1:37:38
  like about this race dynamic because thought experiment two
• 1:37:44
  years from now. We get.
• 1:37:46
  Incontrovertible evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt.
• 1:37:52
  That. China is 2 weeks away from AGI
• 1:37:58
  and we are two months away. What do we do?
• 1:38:02
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that.
• 1:38:06
  In that scenario, we we continue to.
• 1:38:12
  Race along, but we. Probably start to say like, hey,
• 1:38:16
  we've got our partner, we've got our partner, somebody will be
• 1:38:19
  like. And what this is the?
• 1:38:21
  Thing and that's the problem. Because people keep imagining
• 1:38:26
  these deals that they will present to China.
• 1:38:30
  And in my mind I'm thinking. What incentive does China?
• 1:38:33
  Have right to agree to this deal because you wouldn't agree.
• 1:38:37
  To this deal. If the situation was flipped, if
• 1:38:41
  the US was two weeks away and China was two months away, so
• 1:38:45
  why should they agree? So I think in that situation
• 1:38:47
  people are like at lunch. You start taking.
• 1:38:52
  Destructive action. To try and.
• 1:38:55
  Prevent that last two weeks from being crossed.
• 1:38:58
  And that is really where we spiral into the bad scenario
• 1:39:04
  that we're trying to avoid, right?
• 1:39:06
  And I find it, it becomes too. Easy for people to.
• 1:39:10
  Start presenting that as the lesser of two evils when we have
• 1:39:17
  this hyper competitive dynamic, right?
• 1:39:20
  Because see or in two weeks they're going to have this thing
• 1:39:24
  that is going to keep them ahead of us for forever.
• 1:39:27
  Then they're going to subjugate us and then it will be a
• 1:39:29
  terrible feature for humanity. So we need to bomb them now or
• 1:39:33
  whatever, you know, and a situation where that.
• 1:39:39
  Type of thinking rules the. Roost just tilts the skills.
• 1:39:45
  Towards, you're not going to. Make it right.
• 1:39:49
  The difficulty is that, as you mentioned, within.
• 1:39:55
  Reason a race. To the top.
• 1:40:00
  Makes sense, right? Because it keeps people engaged.
• 1:40:05
  It's, it's, it's what actually fuels the necessary investment,
• 1:40:11
  you know, to keep this, this, this machine going.
• 1:40:13
  So then how do we achieve balance?
• 1:40:17
  How do we create a condition where we have positive friendly
• 1:40:25
  competition as opposed to this destructive rivalry where people
• 1:40:31
  make this blind statements about, you know, what China will
• 1:40:37
  do and how we and you know, and all circumstances must prevent
• 1:40:45
  them from achieving, you know, X thing.
• 1:40:49
  Otherwise, you know, it's it's it's it's the end of the world
• 1:40:52
  and and imagining to ourselves what you know what what deal we
• 1:41:01
  we should put. In front of.
• 1:41:03
  Of, of, of China knowing very well that was that if that deal
• 1:41:09
  was presented to us, we would reject it out of hand, as, you
• 1:41:13
  know, uncalled for, you know, constraint on our national
• 1:41:18
  sovereignty. You know, So I don't think that
• 1:41:21
  the sort of any sort of dialogue with China or India or any other
• 1:41:28
  country that is predicated on some sort of dictation of terms
• 1:41:35
  had any legs will go anywhere. And I think that too much of the
• 1:41:39
  discourse is in that vein. I I really like the push that
• 1:41:53
  you're you're seeing with the open source movement.
• 1:41:57
  Yeah, I was just about together. Yeah, and and big.
• 1:42:01
  Bill Gurley talks a lot. About this.
• 1:42:03
  As we've talked about it in the in the past, yeah, great
• 1:42:06
  podcast, BG Squared podcast, absolutely.
• 1:42:09
  Amazing. And this is what he keeps
• 1:42:11
  hopping on, you know? We talk about.
• 1:42:16
  These countries as if they're. Machines.
• 1:42:18
  They're human beings. They're just like you and me who
• 1:42:22
  wake up in the morning. They have their kids.
• 1:42:25
  You know they have them. They go to the office, they do
• 1:42:28
  work. They're not automatons.
• 1:42:29
  You know, there are things being pulled by some, you know that,
• 1:42:34
  you know, nefarious cabal. They have a different system
• 1:42:38
  running there, but it is composed of human beings just
• 1:42:42
  like you and me, Right? Right.
• 1:42:45
  And so we have to start. Relating as if we are.
• 1:42:48
  Relating with humans as opposed to relating with systems.
• 1:42:54
  And you're starting to see this with the, with the spread of
• 1:43:00
  the, the open source movement, because people are, people are,
• 1:43:05
  are, are engaging at a human level.
• 1:43:11
  And, and, and it, it helps them filter through this, you know,
• 1:43:17
  great power politics is, is, is can be very deep dehumanizing
• 1:43:22
  because it, it, it is necessary to obfuscate the individuals who
• 1:43:28
  are going to have to take the actions that are being
• 1:43:30
  prescribed. And so I guess my, my main
• 1:43:34
  prescription on, on the geopolitical front is to bring
• 1:43:39
  the scale down as much as possible to the individual.
• 1:43:42
  And a good way to do that is to empower the individual to do as
• 1:43:48
  much of what the organization can do.
• 1:43:51
  And open source is a very powerful tool for doing that.
• 1:43:53
  Yeah. Because then what was only
• 1:43:56
  possible for a billion dollar corporation with, you know, the
• 1:44:04
  $100 million training run six months ago can be run on
• 1:44:09
  somebody's desktop. Yeah, with a six month delay.
• 1:44:13
  And as long as you keep pushing those capabilities down as far
• 1:44:18
  as possible, one it stops it, it makes the whole idea of
• 1:44:24
  controlling this from some sort of central office in the White
• 1:44:26
  House a moot point. It's impossible.
• 1:44:29
  Well, I actually. I mean I.
• 1:44:31
  Covered this earlier on the podcast but.
• 1:44:33
  I To me, it's obvious at this point that open source is going
• 1:44:37
  to win. And the reason it's obvious is
• 1:44:40
  that it was January 21st that President Trump announced
• 1:44:44
  Stargate, which was 500 billion of funding.
• 1:44:47
  He announced that alongside my Yoshi's son, Sam Altman and
• 1:44:51
  Larry Ellison. And we are so far past the
• 1:44:54
  Stargate. Moment I.
• 1:44:56
  Mean like just last week again, over 2 trillion pledge towards
• 1:45:00
  this, this race by the biggest tech leaders in in the United
• 1:45:05
  States. And you know, this amount of
• 1:45:08
  money, just the Stargate amount of money, which is an incredible
• 1:45:11
  amount of money, is more inflation adjusted than we.
• 1:45:15
  Spent on the Manhattan Project. And it's more inflation adjusted
• 1:45:19
  than we spent on the space race versus the Russians.
• 1:45:21
  So but the day before January 20th, we cannot script this like
• 1:45:28
  better for TV. That's when China announced deep
• 1:45:32
  seats are one model which is vastly more powerful than GPT 4
• 1:45:36
  was, which triggered the moratorium call in March of
• 1:45:40
  2023, four months after the launch of Chaochi PT.
• 1:45:45
  And so you have vastly more powerful technology announced
• 1:45:52
  the day before. It took the market a week to
• 1:45:54
  realize it and that's when NVIDIA lost 600 billion in
• 1:45:58
  market cap that next week. But what we've actually learned?
• 1:46:03
  In the way these models. Work is that once you've
• 1:46:06
  distilled the weights, they're portable and they're cheaper.
• 1:46:11
  Yeah, it's you could put it on a hard drive.
• 1:46:13
  Actually, our youngest child is running 5 open source models on
• 1:46:18
  their computer like right now. And that is stunning today.
• 1:46:24
  That is a major that is a very big blessing and one one way you
• 1:46:29
  could look at that because nobody, we can't know like what
• 1:46:34
  were the Chinese government's thinking and making an
• 1:46:38
  announcement. But one way you could look at is
• 1:46:40
  it's an olive branch to humanity.
• 1:46:43
  That would be a very charitable way of looking at it.
• 1:46:47
  I hope that that's the case. But the that was an olive branch
• 1:46:51
  the day before the Stargate announcement.
• 1:46:54
  So let's let's let's pray that that is in fact the case.
• 1:46:58
  But but I really think it will be and that and by the way, it
• 1:47:01
  doesn't mean that frontier models won't have a huge
• 1:47:05
  outcome. I mean, you know, open AI today
• 1:47:08
  is at over 12 billion of ARR. And again, they launched ChatGPT
• 1:47:14
  just a bit over 1000 days ago. And Tropic is it over 5 billion
• 1:47:18
  of AR. I mean, you know, they launched
• 1:47:20
  after ChatGPT. As a matter of fact, it was
• 1:47:23
  formal open AI people that went there.
• 1:47:25
  So the, the milestones being reached by these frontier models
• 1:47:29
  were really unprecedented. We've never seen companies grow
• 1:47:32
  this fast, but I think it's a great outcome for humanity that
• 1:47:37
  open source, it's pretty obvious, is going to win and we
• 1:47:40
  have to understand that it is in the interest of.
• 1:47:44
  You know, open AI and. It's investors.
• 1:47:47
  To to to imagine, perhaps even believe that this is a winner
• 1:47:55
  take all game because that is the outcome that maximizes the
• 1:48:00
  return. But that doesn't mean that that
• 1:48:03
  is the reality on on the ground. You know, I mean, I remember
• 1:48:06
  when people were saying, you know, that, you know,
• 1:48:10
  calculating the value of Tesla based on its self driving and,
• 1:48:14
  and imagining that, you know, oh, it's going to be the best
• 1:48:17
  self driving. So nobody would want any other
• 1:48:19
  type of self driving. Obviously everybody would want
• 1:48:21
  this self driving, but the use cases for this technology are so
• 1:48:26
  broad and it is not the case that everybody is.
• 1:48:30
  Always going to be. For every situation in running
• 1:48:33
  the frontier model in the latest hardware to solve that problem,
• 1:48:37
  most problems are going to be solved by models that run on
• 1:48:41
  people's phones that are not the bleeding edge, because the
• 1:48:47
  marginal return from that extra amount of of intelligence is
• 1:48:53
  negligible relative to the problem that's being solved.
• 1:48:57
  And so as as these these solutions spread and more open
• 1:49:03
  source expand and as it seems the the time between the release
• 1:49:10
  of a new frontier model and the release comparable open source
• 1:49:15
  models shrinks. Yeah, I think as long as that
• 1:49:19
  continues to happen. Your thesis, I mean, that's
• 1:49:23
  actually why I don't, you know, going.
• 1:49:25
  Back to the scenario where we know China is like 2 weeks away,
• 1:49:29
  etcetera, I just don't even think that's realistic because
• 1:49:32
  because these models are so neck and neck and there's so much
• 1:49:37
  there, there's so much talent movement that has the knowledge
• 1:49:41
  of how they work all over the world that yeah, that I just I,
• 1:49:47
  I, I, I, I don't think it's going to happen that way.
• 1:49:50
  I think, I think if I think, if if open AI is the first to
• 1:49:54
  create AGII think enthron fix a week and and deep seeks like a
• 1:49:58
  week behind that or maybe a week.
• 1:50:00
  I mean, it's just not going to matter.
• 1:50:02
  I don't think this breakout scenario of like, you know,
• 1:50:06
  someone's going to get AGI and it's such a head start that
• 1:50:10
  nobody can catch up. And then that leads that one
• 1:50:13
  company to create artificial super intelligence.
• 1:50:15
  And then that leads that one company to create God like
• 1:50:18
  intelligence that then rules the world.
• 1:50:21
  I just don't think that's the way.
• 1:50:23
  I don't even think that's realistic.
• 1:50:25
  Like this is, this is so fundamental to what will be the
• 1:50:30
  operating system for humanity that it, it, it's, it's too good
• 1:50:36
  not to share. You know what I mean?
• 1:50:38
  It's it's like, it's, it's it's like in the tribal days, you
• 1:50:41
  know, if if your tribe had fire, you're still going to share it
• 1:50:45
  with me. And and you know, one thing's
• 1:50:47
  it's amazing from the genealogical records.
• 1:50:50
  I had to Fact Check this because this is a Byron Reese telling me
• 1:50:53
  this. He's one of my favorite authors,
• 1:50:54
  one of my best friends. He said, you know, 50 to 70,000
• 1:51:00
  years ago, we're down to 800 humans on Earth.
• 1:51:02
  Did you know that? No.
• 1:51:04
  Yeah. So like most people don't know
• 1:51:06
  that. I didn't know.
• 1:51:07
  That at the. Time, by the way.
• 1:51:08
  And I had to like go Fact Check it.
• 1:51:11
  And it was because we're in the Ice Age and there was a super
• 1:51:15
  volcano, a near extinction event.
• 1:51:17
  The the skies were blackened and we're suffering in the hole
• 1:51:21
  already. And we were down to, it was
• 1:51:24
  somewhere between 800 and several 1000 people.
• 1:51:26
  And we know this from the genealogical records like your
• 1:51:30
  and my DNA is almost identical because we this was like the
• 1:51:34
  seed for all of us today. And if our core nature was to be
• 1:51:38
  evil, it would have been over human experiment done, done like
• 1:51:42
  50 to 70,000 years ago. So I think our core nature is
• 1:51:46
  loving. It's the programming that we
• 1:51:48
  have to overcome this, this deep level of programming that babies
• 1:51:53
  don't have. You know that it's like, you
• 1:51:56
  know, US versus China or you know, man versus woman or this
• 1:52:00
  race versus that race and all the stuff that that you know,
• 1:52:03
  this religion versus that religion.
• 1:52:04
  The gist is man made junk, you know, human made stuff that we
• 1:52:09
  just need to deprogram and get back to our divine nature of the
• 1:52:12
  fact that we are genetically almost all identical.
• 1:52:17
  I'm penis like the 9/9. .99 I mean, it's just.
• 1:52:21
  It's it's, it's that that's part of the collective Wake up.
• 1:52:25
  The the hardest part about this book I'm writing honestly, is
• 1:52:28
  Part 3 transformation is like, how do we transform?
• 1:52:32
  So it's it's, it's, it's one thing I'm thinking really deeply
• 1:52:35
  about right now, but I do think there's a consciousness
• 1:52:38
  awakening happening. I I believe and honestly, first
• 1:52:44
  of all, if that. Wasn't true.
• 1:52:46
  We wouldn't. Have made it this far as a
• 1:52:49
  species, you know, And I think people people are hungry for
• 1:52:57
  that type of awakening, you know, like seeing we've seen
• 1:53:03
  what being cut off from each other, you know, feels like, you
• 1:53:09
  know, most viscerally with with what happened with the with the
• 1:53:12
  COVID pandemic. We had a real life experiment of
• 1:53:18
  what it feels like. Yeah.
• 1:53:20
  Not to have human to human contact yeah.
• 1:53:23
  And I think that has that's such a good point yeah.
• 1:53:26
  Has made it so recent. It's so recent and it's this
• 1:53:29
  and. People felt.
• 1:53:30
  It in their bones. You know, this thing that we
• 1:53:32
  took for granted, Yeah. You know, just being able to
• 1:53:36
  meet with other people, right? We felt What?
• 1:53:39
  What? That isolation.
• 1:53:43
  Could do to us and and I think it then.
• 1:53:45
  Triggered the question. You know, shouldn't we be a
• 1:53:48
  little more intentional? Right about.
• 1:53:51
  Trying to build these connections right, and to reach
• 1:53:55
  each other across this, this gap, this divide that we have
• 1:53:59
  created and to see each other as human, Yeah.
• 1:54:03
  One thing I I. I want to close on because I
• 1:54:05
  know we're we're short. On time now I wouldn't be doing
• 1:54:09
  my job in Austin given that we're in Austin if if I didn't
• 1:54:13
  talk to you about the University of Austin UATX.
• 1:54:17
  And the reason I think it's important to talk about is that
• 1:54:20
  you were in the first ever program there and you're my only
• 1:54:25
  close friend who is actually been in the school as a student.
• 1:54:31
  I, I, I very close with, with Pano, who is now the chancellor.
• 1:54:35
  And I know Joe Lonsdale well also.
• 1:54:39
  And you know, I, I think, I think it's so cool that that's
• 1:54:43
  happening in Austin because what people watching this that aren't
• 1:54:50
  from Austin don't realize about Austin is that a lot of things
• 1:54:54
  have been birthed from Austin, like, like we are constantly
• 1:54:57
  trying new things. And I'm just curious if you can
• 1:55:01
  tell me a little bit about that experience and what it was like
• 1:55:04
  for you. It was great.
• 1:55:08
  You know what? Was funny is that when I.
• 1:55:09
  Went to that program. I was actually still in Kenya.
• 1:55:12
  So it was a hybrid program with, you know, stints in Austin and
• 1:55:18
  stints at 10. And I would fly from Kenya to
• 1:55:21
  Austin. Actually the first, the first
• 1:55:25
  session was in Dallas and then then the second one, I'll
• 1:55:29
  remember that. Yeah, was in Austin and I would
• 1:55:32
  fly back and forth for for the program.
• 1:55:35
  And so the question, why was I do it right to myself?
• 1:55:38
  Because yeah, I just. It's a pretty, you know.
• 1:55:40
  As for those who don't know, it's like a 24 hour flight,
• 1:55:43
  yeah, you know from it make me think a little bit like that
• 1:55:46
  trudging through the snow at. Harvard Seven, 6:45 AM.
• 1:55:51
  Yes, and and the answer is simply.
• 1:55:54
  That I, I want, I want them to succeed.
• 1:55:58
  And I want them to succeed, especially because I know how
• 1:56:02
  hard it is one to birth a new institution, one with a mission,
• 1:56:10
  you know? As.
• 1:56:11
  Ambitious. This is a fearless pursuit of
• 1:56:13
  truth and avoid the the pitfalls of either just becoming the
• 1:56:25
  opposite of what you are trying to push against or just becoming
• 1:56:32
  a lukewarm institution. Because I'm a big, you know,
• 1:56:37
  believer in, you know, the golden mean.
• 1:56:41
  You know that the solution to most things lies in the middle.
• 1:56:46
  And that balance is really important, right?
• 1:56:49
  And so when you have a mission such as the pursuit of of
• 1:56:56
  fearless pursuit of truth, and you feel like the existing
• 1:57:01
  institutions have skewed too much in One Direction and you
• 1:57:06
  want to be a corrective, the initial instinct is to flip.
• 1:57:11
  And be the. Opposite all right, but that's
• 1:57:13
  not where the. Truth lies, all right, right?
• 1:57:16
  The truth lies in a fair consideration.
• 1:57:18
  Of both sides because. These, you know, as much as we
• 1:57:21
  like to imagine people on either side are not crazy.
• 1:57:24
  They're just human beings and their life experience and their
• 1:57:30
  their their circumstances have brought them to the conclusion
• 1:57:34
  that where they stand is the right place to be.
• 1:57:39
  And unfortunately, too often it it then becomes an excuse to
• 1:57:44
  demonize whoever is on on the opposite side.
• 1:57:46
  And so to build an institution that does not engage in
• 1:57:52
  hyperbole in either direction suffers from the same challenge
• 1:57:57
  that building a news organization does.
• 1:57:59
  Not sensationalize things because it's unsexy, you know,
• 1:58:04
  and it's hard and you have to constantly be annoying people on
• 1:58:10
  both sides and you need the support of the people on both
• 1:58:13
  sides in order to succeed. And so I was like, this is such
• 1:58:16
  an ambitious mission and it's hard.
• 1:58:21
  Honestly, I was like. It's probably going to fail.
• 1:58:24
  But I really wanted to succeed, you know, and so.
• 1:58:27
  I'm going to. I'm going to, I'm not just going
• 1:58:30
  to be sit sitting on the sidelines and saying it's too
• 1:58:33
  hard. They're going to fail, right?
• 1:58:35
  I'm going to step in. I'm going to 1 experience it for
• 1:58:38
  myself, to validate for myself that this is actually the
• 1:58:41
  mission that they're on, that in the programming, they're not
• 1:58:45
  just flipping from from one extreme to the other.
• 1:58:50
  And they're actually trying to teach you how to think from the
• 1:58:55
  ground up as opposed to teach you what to think right.
• 1:58:58
  And, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that that was
• 1:59:03
  in fact the case, that the, the, the they brought together an
• 1:59:10
  incredible, very talented, very accomplished group of people.
• 1:59:15
  And I can honestly say I was not.
• 1:59:19
  Once preached. To about why UTXS.
• 1:59:23
  Position is the right. Position or those guys have it
• 1:59:27
  wrong. The entire program was a
• 1:59:31
  consideration or questions like how do we come to know the
• 1:59:36
  things that we know? You know, how do we, what makes
• 1:59:43
  good leadership? How does good leadership fail?
• 1:59:47
  You know what? What, what tools do we have to
• 1:59:57
  discern truth, you know, and to have the confidence in your
• 2:00:04
  student body to give them those tools?
• 2:00:08
  And send them off, you know, to find the answers wherever they
• 2:00:12
  lie, I think speaks volumes and, and speaks to people who are
• 2:00:18
  actually dedicated to, to, to the outcome.
• 2:00:23
  Because, you know, just like everybody else, they have their
• 2:00:27
  own beliefs about what the truth is, right, right.
• 2:00:31
  And the instinct is to impart that on on the people that you
• 2:00:37
  are engaging with and to have the intellectual humility and
• 2:00:41
  the integrity to restrain yourself from that impulse and
• 2:00:45
  instead to provide the tools and allow people to come to the on
• 2:00:48
  conclusions. Is is solely lacking in my view,
• 2:00:53
  in most academic programs. And I think they're doing a good
• 2:00:56
  job of and, you know, just speaking to some humility that.
• 2:01:00
  I had with it because because I'm not perfect, not even close.
• 2:01:05
  You know, I I actually succumbed at the beginning to I saw the
• 2:01:13
  the cancel culture kind of firestorm when it was launching
• 2:01:18
  and it was getting ridden off as like a far right fashion.
• 2:01:23
  And I thought, oh, well, I'll just, you know, kind of write
• 2:01:26
  that one off in my mind. And I was really embarrassed,
• 2:01:29
  like because I am involved in programming for this Jewish
• 2:01:33
  Austin men's gathering. It's like the largest gathering
• 2:01:37
  of Jewish men in Texas. Actually, you know, there's lots
• 2:01:41
  of women's gatherings. And so we have this men's
• 2:01:43
  gathering. And Pano was one of our
• 2:01:46
  speakers. And at that point he was, he was
• 2:01:49
  the president. Now he's the chancellor.
• 2:01:52
  And I was so moved by that presentation.
• 2:01:55
  And I thought, man, I also have programming that I was
• 2:02:00
  programmed and I succumbed to the program and I am fiercely
• 2:02:05
  independent, you know, politically.
• 2:02:08
  And I stand actually where you do too.
• 2:02:11
  Like I'm very in the center in the way I look at things.
• 2:02:15
  So the world is very Gray. It's like there's, it's not just
• 2:02:19
  this is right or wrong, etcetera.
• 2:02:21
  There's, there's some things like, you know, that are clearly
• 2:02:23
  wrong, but there, there's a lot of Gray and, and, and, and
• 2:02:29
  actually, the more, the older I get, the more I see the Gray.
• 2:02:35
  And so many. Things that you really need to
• 2:02:38
  approach things with a deep level of humility and empathy to
• 2:02:41
  understand. But it banned the swarm came out
• 2:02:46
  like trying to make sure that nobody paid attention to this
• 2:02:50
  thing. It actually worked on me.
• 2:02:52
  I was very embarrassed to say. And so I write, I, I, I righted
• 2:02:56
  that with writing this super long distillation of why it was
• 2:03:02
  so perfect for Austin and quoting Willie Nelson and the
• 2:03:05
  beginning where he's like, it doesn't matter if you're a
• 2:03:07
  Republican or Democrat. We just kick back and have a
• 2:03:11
  beer because and talk about all the things we have in common
• 2:03:15
  because you know what? We have most things in common.
• 2:03:18
  And that actually is the way of the world.
• 2:03:20
  That's humanity actually in a nutshell.
• 2:03:23
  Is it a big part of what humanity needs to get to is
• 2:03:27
  realizing how much we are, again, genetically almost
• 2:03:31
  identical and how much we care about the same things.
• 2:03:34
  We ultimately just want like a good life, you know, like, we
• 2:03:37
  want to love our kids. We want to celebrate our
• 2:03:40
  birthdays. That's part of the reason I need
• 2:03:41
  to let you go here and you know, just be the beautiful divine
• 2:03:46
  creatures that we are and create a better world together.
• 2:03:52
  Well, this was this was a real pleasure, my friend.
• 2:03:54
  I really, really enjoyed. It Yeah, this is thanks for the
• 2:03:58
  friendship. Yeah, and and.
• 2:04:00
  Thanks. Thanks for the long.
• 2:04:01
  Hikes and thanks everybody again for tuning in to Love Conquers
• 2:04:06
  Fear. I absolutely love this
• 2:04:08
  conversation with my good buddy John.
• 2:04:10
  This really mimics like what we do on hikes hikes together and
• 2:04:15
  stay tuned. We have just an incredible
• 2:04:18
  lineup of scientist coming up, entrepreneurs, amazing
• 2:04:23
  investors, philosophers, and spiritual teachers, and I can't
• 2:04:28
  wait to share all that with you. And I'm really enjoying this and
• 2:04:31
  hope you are too. Thanks a lot.