The Exchanges

Q used to, right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens. And many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right, they're not in the third dimension, they feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, they stopped playing their game after five hours, and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse, and I've 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. A lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a flat window into a three-dimensional world. So if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. But now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face, and it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse, In order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian technology, and yet t…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse”

Q kind of the early stages of fintech, and we've talked about crypto. You've now written a book, Termination Shock, about carbon removal and What's going on with climate change, and so I know this is a broad question, but where do you get these ideas from? Where do you actually synthesize the seeds of these books when they're so far before what many other people come to see in reality?

A A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology that's being described. So in the case of Snow Crash, that emerged from a project I had been working on for a couple years previously in computer graphics, where I was writing code, a lot of code. Um, I was trying to push hardware to do things it wasn't quite ready to do yet. Um, and it got me thinking about, um, About the future of that, you know, three D graphics as a medium and having that kind of direct involvement sort of helps in two ways. One is just give you some ideas, but also it helps because you're, um, you're exposed to some of the specifics of how the system works. And so that produces ideas for, for plot devices, let's say in the case of, um, Termination shock. We've got someone who's launching sulfur into the stratosphere to do geoengineering. If you sit down and actually kind of run the numbers on what it would take to do that, you know, it's a, it's kind of an interesting engineering problem unto itself. And by, um, By, by thinking through some of the, the engineering details, um, you, you can come up with, with ideas, um, that, uh, uh, that if you were just kind of freestyling might not occur to you.

AI assessment note: “A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology”

Q used to, right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens. And many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right, they're not in the third dimension, they feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, they stopped playing their game after five hours, and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse, and I've 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. A lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a flat window into a three-dimensional world. So if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. But now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face, and it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse, In order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian technology, and yet t…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse”

Q do you think AI will Interoperate with IP, if that makes sense. How will these AIs generate a bunch of objects, maybe even generate games themselves eventually? And then who owns those things? Obviously the AI is trained on many different data sets. So do the people who supplied that data own the eventual creation from the AI, or have you started to think about how, how that might work?

A My other co-founder at Lamina One, Peter, Investments has actually been thinking a lot about this. It went deep down the rabbit hole of mid-journey and all that last month, and, and very quickly when you're thinking about applying those kinds of systems to build, um, experiences that might make money, you're up against an ethical question. For exactly the reason you said, which is that, um, these AIs are harvesting work from, um, millions of people. And, um, you know, you might ask Dali to make a painting of a dog in the style of, and that's fine. But when you do the same thing and you specify a living artist, then you, you can be sure that the system is going around and ingesting Data from, um, uh, from everything that artist has ever created, and then doing a mashup, um, to produce a result. And so why shouldn't, I mean, if you're just screwing around, it's one thing. In the terms of service of DALI, I don't know about the other programs, but they're, they're pretty conscious of this, and they're, they're trying to prevent people from just, um, monetizing the crap out of it. In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut? We've been talking to, um, Shrapnel, which is a, it's a game that's being put out by a company in Seattle called Neon Machine. And, um, it's a blockchain web three kind of game, uh, from the ground up. And,…

AI assessment note: “In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut?”

Q kind of the early stages of fintech, and we've talked about crypto. You've now written a book, Termination Shock, about carbon removal and What's going on with climate change, and so I know this is a broad question, but where do you get these ideas from? Where do you actually synthesize the seeds of these books when they're so far before what many other people come to see in reality?

A A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology that's being described. So in the case of Snow Crash, that emerged from a project I had been working on for a couple years previously in computer graphics, where I was writing code, a lot of code. Um, I was trying to push hardware to do things it wasn't quite ready to do yet. Um, and it got me thinking about, um, About the future of that, you know, three D graphics as a medium and having that kind of direct involvement sort of helps in two ways. One is just give you some ideas, but also it helps because you're, um, you're exposed to some of the specifics of how the system works. And so that produces ideas for, for plot devices, let's say in the case of, um, Termination shock. We've got someone who's launching sulfur into the stratosphere to do geoengineering. If you sit down and actually kind of run the numbers on what it would take to do that, you know, it's a, it's kind of an interesting engineering problem unto itself. And by, um, By, by thinking through some of the, the engineering details, um, you, you can come up with, with ideas, um, that, uh, uh, that if you were just kind of freestyling might not occur to you.

AI assessment note: “A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology”

Q on this topic because it's something that interests you. It's, it's certainly an area of opportunity. As I mentioned, we'll be doing a separate episode on it, but given that you've dived so deeply into this arena, what would you say are some of the most exciting, maybe more optimistic things that you've learnt, or maybe certain companies that you're seeing attack this problem that you think are really exciting?

A I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California, uh, founded by a friend of mine named Casey Hanmer, who's a physics PhD who was, uh, in space, working in space, you know, JPL and that kind of thing, but decided to address this, this issue, and they are developing a system for using photovoltaics to extract carbon From the atmosphere and, and turn them into synthetic fuels. Net zero carbon exchange because, you know, you're, you're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, you're selling fuel, which gets burned in an airplane engine or whatever, and puts the carbon back in. But, uh, still a big improvement on sucking it out of the ground and adding, adding new carbon. You know, we've all gotten kind of conditioned to Think that anytime you're using energy, it's bad, and you should, you should feel bad, and you should curtail your use of energy. That's only true, really, if it's energy produced by burning fossil fuels. Energy from renewable sources, and particularly photovoltaics, you know, isn't hurting anyone, and the cost of Making photovoltaics is, is coming down. It's come down a lot already, and it's still going down. So, so I think where we end up is in a situation where, um, we're using energy from those kinds of sources to, um, to get carbon out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere. For me, that's an optimistic trend that I…

AI assessment note: “I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California”

Q some of them may actually want those developers to focus on advancing that centralized game that they love so much, and so I'm curious to know how you think about that, and also I'm sure you've seen some of the pushback even within the gaming community around this idea of interoperability and the integration of Web three or some of these open standards, and so what's your take on that?

A Uh, there's a kind of People talking past each other, a phenomenon where you've got game developers interacting with crypto bros on social media, and they don't always get along. Let's put it, that's, that's putting it mildly, right? So the game developer mentality, um, for their position may be like this. I'm a game developer. I've spent my whole career Developing an advanced skill set that I'm very proud of, is very important to me, and building unified experiences, uh, for people to, to play in. Um, and every aspect of the art direction, the sound design, gameplay, the backstory, the programming, the engineering, it's all just exquisitely tuned in to deliver a particular kind of experience. Um, And, um, so when somebody shows up, you know, uh, wanting to bring extraneous, uh, things into my game, it's bad on two levels. And, uh, one is just that on an engineering level, to even suggest that kind of shows Total ignorance of how games actually work. So it's kind of in the not even wrong category of bad ideas. And the other objection is aesthetic. Um, so it's just kind of an abomination to think of, you know, bringing a lightsaber Into Assassin's Creed or, you know, something like that. And it's an insult to, um, to game developers. Um, and it's reasonable for them to feel insulted by those suggestions. Games like that may be a little bit like a Ren Faire. You know, you go to a…

AI assessment note: “wanting to bring extraneous, things into my game, it's bad on two levels”

Q And you, you just wrote Termination Shocked. You've written tons of books. I'm curious to know from the perspective of twenty-twenty-two, what are some of the clues that you're looking at? What are some of the themes that you're noticing about today that you think might be really important clues about, let's say, the next 30 years?

A Yeah. Well, to me, the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization of, of society, um, and, and the way that polarization is being fostered and kind of weaponized by, by bad actors who, who benefit, you know, from that, that polarization. And, you know, so those are both things that we've talked about during this interview. Um, the, um, and as I said before, like, I kind of don't know what the answer is on polarization. I mean, there's a lot of people thinking about this and writing about it now and writing some really good stuff. Um, I was just talking the other day to Anne Applebaum, who's written a book called The Twilight of Democracy, uh, that's on these themes. Um, uh, really great book describing her personal experience with Growing polarization. Um, and, uh, and we met, Anne and I met when we were helping Jonathan Rauch launch his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, which is also about all this. So there's all kinds of really smart, uh, very well-informed people thinking about this and writing great stuff about it. But, you know, I think what's missing is, um, a solution. Um, like, like at the end of the day, when you ask these people, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to fix it? Um, no one's got a silver bullet or anything close to it. I am thinking a lot about the other problem I mentioned, the equally big problem of, of carb…

AI assessment note: “to me, the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization”

Q is a frivolous industry. Um, I'll just read you one tweet for fun, uh, from someone that I saw recently that said, no offense, but I a hundred percent think space colonization is a childish desire. So feel free to respond to that particular tweet. But really what I want to get at is within the sphere of things that you could pursue within Hadrian. Why specifically space to start?

A The really short version is like Stripe doesn't get to sell to AT&T until they sell to a bunch of white combination startups. There's just a bunch of huge amounts of capital flowing into commercial space, which means there's a bunch of net new spend and they're being run by thirty-year-olds, not fifty-year-olds, which You know, you want to sell the startups at first and you want to hit that early adult spectrum. So commercial space has all of the complexity of every other industry that we would want to serve in the future. So the automation we're building for commercial space is almost completely transferable, but there's a real need because these companies are trying to go super fast and they will pay for speed. You know, if they are sick of calling Bob's machine shop, but they're young enough from, you know, all these rocket and satellite companies that they're willing to take a shot on something new and really work with us to develop the system versus, so it's just your classic early adoptive problem. Then I think holistically is like, why go to space, uh, at all? Like why put humanity's resources out there? And I think, you know, we could go through this argument of like, you know, space is a war fighting domain. Like you need observability of the planet to stop nuclear launches. So you need satellites, you know, like GPS is a great example. We can go through all like the t…

AI assessment note: “There's just a bunch of huge amounts of capital flowing into commercial space”

Q I think it's, it's interesting that this term advanced manufacturing covers an industry which at least isn't always that advanced or maybe hasn't kept up with the time. So could you give a couple examples of ways that this space of advanced manufacturing is maybe not the reality that people might expect?

A On the defense side is a great example. Um, you know, everyone sees Defense primes coming out with drone programs or, you know, advanced fighter jets and stuff and, you know, really flashy products and marketing and things. Wow. Like everything, everything works perfectly. Um, under the hood, once you get below the assembly level, you know, someone making a fighter jet, really what they're doing is outsourcing all of the components, but the wing, the engine, you know, everything to a tiered layer of, you know, It's like, um, you know, we have, uh, 10 mini primes, then 20, you know, tier three suppliers, and then literally 10,000 small suppliers dotted across the country that are doing everything from a machine component to, I don't know, the circuit board that is one part of the fire control system or whatever. um, have, And that entire layer is basically, basically chaos. You know, the B two bomber, which is one of our most strategic assets in terms You know, the nuclear program about a year ago, the government had to issue an RFQ for some of the parts on the B to not just to replace the parts, but because no one, you know, the guy that designed it or engineered it retired and they didn't have it documented anywhere. Like there's literally no, you know, manual or document of how to make that part. So the government had to go out and say, Hey, we need someone to come up and lik…

AI assessment note: “On the defense side is a great example.”

Q don't I just acquire them? Why don't I do like a private equity play and just acquire these shops instead of doing what you've done now, which is more so build the technology, train individuals to, to service, um, them are almost like absorb that That intelligence. So can you tell us a little bit more about why you pivoted there and why you didn't go with that original approach?

A One of the things that, you know, you don't really learn until you're in the weeds is every, every piece of hardware variability, whether that's a different machine or a different cutting tool or a different vice or piece of work holding every new combination of those things that you add on to the kind of like the search space of the problem. Has a nonlinear impact on the software engineering complexity that you need to build to like, you know, get to that, get to a level of automation that actually solves the problem versus just, Hey, you're 20% better than your competitors. So you have a great private equity rollup. It wasn't until I was in the weeds of that problem that I realized that most legacy machine shops have one of every machine ever made. And even within, you know, they have 20 machines, five of them might be the same, but even those five are set up a completely different way. And that adds this In enormous nonlinear complexity in terms of the software automation that you have to build on top of those systems to the point where it's, it's close enough to impossible that you can call it impossible and you can squeeze out some margin improvement, but you would never ever, ever get it to the point where it was a scalable system or it was repeatable enough that it was, you know, going to solve the problem at the kind of multi-billion dollar level that I want to solve th…

AI assessment note: “every piece of hardware variability... has a nonlinear impact on the software engineering complexity”

Q place because, I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I imagine they, they might feel like their jobs are being automated away or that they're being replaced in some way. And of course, some of them, it sounds like they're planning to retire, but how do you actually convince the person who has all this knowledge to, to want to share it and be part of this new system?

A I think there's a couple of things. The first one is the smartest and best people know that the industry is due for a transformation and that it's inevitable that someone's going to come along and do this and they want to be part of the winning team, not, not left behind. So that's a big part of it. Yeah. Incentives really matter. And I think. Culturally in manufacturing, you don't get many opportunities for growth. And there's a bunch of really smart people out there who've been kind of siloed and not given the opportunity to stretch and grow. And I think Culturally, they understand that if we're automating one part of the factory, we're not going to suddenly like fire 20 people. Like, no, no, no. Go pick whatever else you want to do. You know, manufacturing, engineering, or CMM, or a higher skill level of CAM programming. Um, and I think the other thing is, yeah, incentives really matter, and I think we're probably the only factory on the planet outside of SpaceX that is giving everyone in these roles, you know, the same Uh, tier of equity as the best software engineers have, you know, uh, every technician in Hadrian, whether you're packing boxes or whether you're an absolute master of your trade and maybe you, you know, you're one of the only 20 people left that can do it is being given the opportunity to have, you know, probably the only opportunity they've ever had to crea…

AI assessment note: “you're an owner of the company, and then you're highly incentivized to contribute”

Q I was going to say how many people fit that bill? Three?

A Handfuls. Yeah. Handfuls. Um, the factory talent is, yes, we always need more people, but there's no like one critical talent base where we're really, really struggling. I think in terms of automation, yeah, we just need all hands on deck. And I think what people don't realize that we struggle with sometimes in recruiting or at least have to Over message, you know, to make sure people understand is that you don't need a hardware or manufacturing background to come into a business like Hadrian or SpaceX or Anduril to be able to, you know, be a competitive candidate or create value, you know, with your software skills. Like a lot of what we're building looks and smells like enterprise SAS, except our customer is internal users, not external users. Um, and even the deep tech side is very close to like, you know, if you're a developer that's been working on like unity, And building like video game, you know, geometry engines and stuff like that. Uh, that's, that is very close to the software engineering we're doing internally and even integrating with the hardware. If you're the type of software engineer that is okay with like, Reverse engineering, some crappy API, you know, which anyone from like a rippling, for example, is done with like some crappy payroll API from the one vendor that like doesn't have it fully documented. That's the exact same problem space. And I would say tha…

AI assessment note: “Handfuls. Yeah. Handfuls. Um, the factory talent is, yes, we always need more”

Q at it. So capacity for collective action, you have these thousand people, they take a territory in the middle of nowhere that doesn't mean anything and they make it into something and now suddenly it's valuable, right? This, this dance, right? That collective action turned something that any one person could not have done Into something that a thousand people can do together when they're moving as a multicellular organism.

A Just one example, by the way, of that is, is Canggu, which I mentioned earlier. Back in, I think it must have been around, like, 2013 or so, Canggu was very empty. Um, you know, there's pictures of it back in the day where there's, like, Deus and one other building and then a bunch of rice fields, and it took one person, uh, who ran a co-working space or wanted to open one, and he worked with the locals, he built a fiber line there, and now if you look at Canggu, it's, I mean, it's, it's completely full, thousands of nomads, And to your point about property values, I think I saw a tweet the other day of someone, a friend of mine who lives there, who basically said that his rent there was more expensive than his rent in Singapore where he used to live. And so, yes, that's like a, a perfect example of where property, as you're saying that no one cares about can be turned into property that people care about. Uh, but do a lot of people want to do this?

AI assessment note: “yes, that's like a, a perfect example of where property”

Q Yeah. And it's his fight to, to basically get that access and also get that access for other people. And I think he basically ends up breaking the law, getting in trouble because he's getting these drugs to himself and other people. Uh, he ends up dying, I think, but sorry, another spoiler. Um, but am I remembering that correctly?

A That's right. But basically the primary agency preventing him from getting the drugs is the FDA, right? And this is based on the true story of like ACT UP where, um, you know, people would do die-ins Uh, where the FDA was preventing them from getting access to these. I mean, these people were, you know, had this life threatening condition, obviously. Fundamentally, they're miscalibrated on terms of risk, right? They want to minimize PR risk for themselves, the agency, as opposed to allowing people to take a risk on their own, right? And why is that? It's because media Only covers it when a drug doesn't work and doesn't cover it when, um, a drug does work, but it's been delayed. Calculations of so-called drug lag, um, depending, you know, like Alex Tabarrok and, you know, others have pulled things together on this, right? You know, Daniel Henninger has written about this. Depending on how you calculate it, the number of lives that's been caused by the FDA. Basically, if you have a drug and it was held up by 10 years, and then once it was approved, it reduced morbidity and mortality by X percentage. That means FDA's delay of 10 years multiplied by that is how many lives it cost. Relative to just taking the risk at the beginning and shipping it. Right now there is risk.

AI assessment note: “That's right. But basically the primary agency preventing him from getting the drugs is”

Q currencies as well, right? The network has changed that. And your book discusses how technology can actually potentially create new states. Very interesting concept. Um, and in order for us to dive into that, why don't we start off with what we have today, which are nation states. So how would you define a nation? And how would you define a state and how do those kind of interplay together?

A I actually have this at the beginning of chapter five in the book. And the thing is we hear the term nation state as a compound, you know, like a, you know, the phrase really, And we don't really give too much thought as to what it means, but, um, it's useful to think about the distinction between those two words because they're actually very different. The nation, that's like, that comes from the same root as natality, like the Latin, like Nazis, and so it's like common birth, common descent. So like the Japanese nation, they have shared ancestry, shared culture, going back hundreds, you know, of years and, you know, shared language, all that type of stuff. And then separate from that is the state, which is the administrative unit that Thin layer that sits over the nation, okay? And the state could be of, you know, the Japanese people themselves, or it could be, you know, for example, in the, after World War II, the American government was basically the state over the Japanese nation, right? And so, once you think of this distinction between the nation and the state above it, the cons of the nation state was every, you know, ethnic group Has the right to have its own government. Now, the thing about this, of course, is, um, that's like an abstraction, but in con, in concrete terms, um, many of the ethnic groups on the planet do not have their own government and or they do not …

AI assessment note: “state, which is the administrative unit that Thin layer that sits over the nation”

Q Yeah. And it's his fight to, to basically get that access and also get that access for other people. And I think he basically ends up breaking the law, getting in trouble because he's getting these drugs to himself and other people. Uh, he ends up dying, I think, but sorry, another spoiler. Um, but am I remembering that correctly?

A That's right. But basically the primary agency preventing him from getting the drugs is the FDA, right? And this is based on the true story of like ACT UP where, um, you know, people would do die-ins Uh, where the FDA was preventing them from getting access to these. I mean, these people were, you know, had this life threatening condition, obviously. Fundamentally, they're miscalibrated on terms of risk, right? They want to minimize PR risk for themselves, the agency, as opposed to allowing people to take a risk on their own, right? And why is that? It's because media Only covers it when a drug doesn't work and doesn't cover it when, um, a drug does work, but it's been delayed. Calculations of so-called drug lag, um, depending, you know, like Alex Tabarrok and, you know, others have pulled things together on this, right? You know, Daniel Henninger has written about this. Depending on how you calculate it, the number of lives that's been caused by the FDA. Basically, if you have a drug and it was held up by 10 years, and then once it was approved, it reduced morbidity and mortality by X percentage. That means FDA's delay of 10 years multiplied by that is how many lives it cost. Relative to just taking the risk at the beginning and shipping it. Right now there is risk.

AI assessment note: “That's right. But basically the primary agency preventing him from getting the drugs is”

Q at it. So capacity for collective action, you have these thousand people, they take a territory in the middle of nowhere that doesn't mean anything and they make it into something and now suddenly it's valuable, right? This, this dance, right? That collective action turned something that any one person could not have done Into something that a thousand people can do together when they're moving as a multicellular organism.

A Just one example, by the way, of that is, is Canggu, which I mentioned earlier. Back in, I think it must have been around, like, 2013 or so, Canggu was very empty. Um, you know, there's pictures of it back in the day where there's, like, Deus and one other building and then a bunch of rice fields, and it took one person, uh, who ran a co-working space or wanted to open one, and he worked with the locals, he built a fiber line there, and now if you look at Canggu, it's, I mean, it's, it's completely full, thousands of nomads, And to your point about property values, I think I saw a tweet the other day of someone, a friend of mine who lives there, who basically said that his rent there was more expensive than his rent in Singapore where he used to live. And so, yes, that's like a, a perfect example of where property, as you're saying that no one cares about can be turned into property that people care about. Uh, but do a lot of people want to do this?

AI assessment note: “Just one example, by the way, of that is, is Canggu”

Q Is it, is it the phone Matrix one?

A Yeah. It's like the low budget camera tricks. So, uh, there was one video actually where I attached like a phone to a ceiling fan and then made that into like a matrix bullet time effect. And I got. 300,000 followers from that one video. So every time I got a surge of followers, it was the same thing. It was like, I would, I would attach a phone to some household object, find like some like hack to do a camera trick with it. And, um, People are following me for that. And I was just like, I'm like out of household objects. I'm out of ideas. Um, and I just felt like I was, I just felt like I was running out of ideas and I was like, I have to find new like tools to, new toys to play with. And in the meantime, I was, I was starting to see some of like the really insane AI stuff coming out in white papers, but it was all like two minute papers, like Research videos of researchers like shooting whatever they had in their bedroom. And of course they're so focused on the research. It's not their job to think about the storytelling or the cinematics of it. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I don't think anyone is actually doing that yet. So I could try doing that. And so I started experimenting with like, well, let's take the research from white papers and make it a social media friendly video, you know? Um, and I started doing that at the beginning of this year. And it was just …

AI assessment note: “Yeah. It's like the low budget camera tricks.”

Q Is it, is it the phone Matrix one?

A Yeah. It's like the low budget camera tricks. So, uh, there was one video actually where I attached like a phone to a ceiling fan and then made that into like a matrix bullet time effect. And I got. 300,000 followers from that one video. So every time I got a surge of followers, it was the same thing. It was like, I would, I would attach a phone to some household object, find like some like hack to do a camera trick with it. And, um, People are following me for that. And I was just like, I'm like out of household objects. I'm out of ideas. Um, and I just felt like I was, I just felt like I was running out of ideas and I was like, I have to find new like tools to, new toys to play with. And in the meantime, I was, I was starting to see some of like the really insane AI stuff coming out in white papers, but it was all like two minute papers, like Research videos of researchers like shooting whatever they had in their bedroom. And of course they're so focused on the research. It's not their job to think about the storytelling or the cinematics of it. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I don't think anyone is actually doing that yet. So I could try doing that. And so I started experimenting with like, well, let's take the research from white papers and make it a social media friendly video, you know? Um, and I started doing that at the beginning of this year. And it was just …

AI assessment note: “Yeah. It's like the low budget camera tricks. So, uh, there was one video”

Q Like lying on the ground and then you basically get dragged across and that's, is that using Dane?

A Right. Exactly. So, um, if you're just listening to this, imagine like a stop motion of someone like on the ground, like, uh, planking basically, and then just like slithering across the ground in stop motion. Right. But then with, with Dane, you can make it perfectly smooth. And so it looks like I'm literally being dragged on the ground by like an invisible string or something. Um, but actually that was just a stop-motion video that we used AI to smooth out, and so I did that with James Perlman, so he helped me out with, like, smoothing everything out. Um, other tools are Nerf, so Nerf has gotten pretty popular. Nerf is a way to use any camera, like your phone, to scan a scene, and then all of a sudden you have this beautiful, three-D, like, scan of it, and the, what's interesting about it is it's different than photogrammetry because it can handle Like, light. It's basically constructing, like, a particle light field, and so when you look at things from different angles, the light changes, and so that's why it can handle mirrors, whereas, like, traditional photogrammetry can't. Then there are other tools, too, that we've played with. Um, I recently discovered EBSynth, which I actually learned is not an AI tool, um, but I use that to basically figure out how to make Dali work for Um, video. So Dolly's photo only, but using EBSynth, I was able to make Dolly work for video.

AI assessment note: “Right. Exactly... But then with, with Dane, you can make it perfectly smooth.”

Q I know you originally created something called Astrograph, and I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating, or maybe let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?

A My career started NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Mali in I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mount Kaliakala, and all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage. And I'm like, what? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Holy cow! Like, this is ridiculous. How is that, how is it okay for, like, 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out To be garbage. Like, we don't see that in other domains. We don't, we don't have as acceptable, okay, we're gonna put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're gonna put out is gonna be trash. Like, we don't do that.

AI assessment note: “there were only 1200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage”

Q I know you originally created something called Astrograph, and I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating, or maybe let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?

A My career started NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Mali in I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mount Kaliakala, and all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage. And I'm like, what? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Holy cow! Like, this is ridiculous. How is that, how is it okay for, like, 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out To be garbage. Like, we don't see that in other domains. We don't, we don't have as acceptable, okay, we're gonna put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're gonna put out is gonna be trash. Like, we don't do that.

AI assessment note: “there were only 1200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage”

Q Alex, I want to hear from you. How much space debris are we talking? Sounds like it has increased with time, but I don't know if many people have a sense of the sheer magnitude of stuff up above us.

A So we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter. But the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar is stuff that's bigger than the size of a softball. So, you know, when, when Morbus says there's these 26,000 things or, you know, whatever that, that, that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly 18,000 miles an hour. And, you know, MV squared, still MV squared. So it's, it's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see can really hurt you. In space. Uh, you, you wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you got told when you boarded the plane, there's a million little bullets flying around, and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Um, hope you make it. Like that would be, but that's kind of what's going on with space flight. The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. And Astrograph, Wayfinder, these are tools to help enlighten Uh, the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of Privateer's mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.

AI assessment note: “we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter”

Q working on? Again, really foundational technologies, whether it's AI or crypto, insert other foundational technology here, that eventually doesn't work out? And I'm asking you this because actually several of us on the editorial team were trying to think of an example, and as someone who has been investing in technology for so long, I was wondering if there has been a case where so many people have been wrong.

A Well, the big probably famous example was, uh, alchemy, um, which is a term that people have, it's A-L-C-H-E-M-Y. So alchemy was the technology to transmute lead into gold. Um, and, uh, there was this concept that you'd be able to, that you'd be able to build some form of machine or discover some material that they actually, and this is like, you know, 300 years ago now, uh, they actually had this term they called the philosopher's stone, and there was, and basically all these smart people trying to figure out how to basically adventure, discover the philosopher's stone. By the way, talk about smart people. Isaac Newton spent 20 years trying to figure this out, right? So, like, maybe the smartest human being in history of the planet spent 20 years on this. Um, so at, at the time, you know, they were serious.

AI assessment note: “Well, the big probably famous example was, uh, alchemy”

Q and all the things that people are trying to tackle. There are levels out there for how people describe these things. And so Elon Musk will make a claim about Tesla's and people will say, well, they can't handle all these edge cases, et cetera. So in this state of autonomy, where are we on the levels of autonomy? And can you quickly break down that taxonomy for our listeners?

A Sure. So going through the levels, just, just one by one. So level zero is where most production vehicles are today. And so this would be, uh, A car that perhaps has, uh, anti-lock brakes and traction control, some version of electronic stability control, uh, but the, the systems are, are all fairly, uh, they're, they're fairly dumb in the sense that they're not necessarily seeing the world in any way. Uh, level one system will mean that there's, uh, some level of automation, so adaptive cruise control is an example of a level one system where typically there's a radar that's, that's seeing the vehicles in front of you on the road, and then the vehicle's able to accelerate and apply the brakes automatically. Level two is where things get pretty interesting. That's where you typically have a, a combination of a lane keep system with an adaptive cruise system. So for example, the Tesla autopilot system is a, is a level two system. It's able to maintain its, its own lane safely on the highway. And, uh, right now that the trend in production systems is automakers are trying to go to what they're calling level two plus, which is taking these level two sort of lane keep plus adaptive cruise systems and And they're adding on functionality for, uh, automatically taking freeway interchanges. And so if you can automatically take an exit, and then perhaps, uh, automatically merge into a f…

AI assessment note: “So going through the levels, just, just one by one. So level zero is”

Q a little bit about pricing and packaging? Because that's such an interesting subset of this. So we've so far talked about the go, the product market sales fit, the go to market and the product as a part of that, obviously, because those are the two things you need. How does pricing and packaging come into this? Because that's a really top of mind question for a lot of founders.

A Pricing and packaging is a, is a complex thing. Pricing is probably more complex than packaging in some ways. I look at pricing as more, uh, a function of what is the business value? If someone buys your product, is it worth 50,000 dollars? Is it worth a 100,000 dollars? Is it worth 300,000 dollars? What would, how would people justify? So that's definitely one function. Second is like, you know, the rule that I've used for pricing is, can your salespeople describe it simply? Like if a customer is going, going to ask you a simple question, so how, how do you price your product? And if you can't describe it in half a sentence, That's a, you have too complex of a pricing. And yes, there could be like nuances to it, and there could be like details to it, but you have to be able to describe it. Like in AppDynamics, we are monitoring all kind of different systems, right? So the pricing was complicated, but we said, okay, the simple pricing philosophy that our salespeople can tell is we price by how many production systems you have. And that was kind of the rough unit of pricing. And we can measure production systems in different ways, but that's how we price it.

AI assessment note: “the rule that I've used for pricing is, can your salespeople describe it simply?”

Q It's like a good team. You complement each other's skills, and that's the composition of an ideal team, while you have more than an individual contributor. Okay, so any parting takeaways, given your, I'm sure you have a million takeaways, Jyoti, but any big message for our founders and other founders out there trying to do this, whether enterprise or not?

A It was a good discussion on the product market sales kind of fit, but my primary advice I will give to founders listening to this is don't overthink too far ahead in many cases as well. Like, you know, the skills you need to master, zero to one million dollars of revenue, find the product market fit, one to ten million dollars, find the product market sales fit, trade on it, let's say 10 to seventy-five million dollars, Scale the sales organization and go to your go-to market. Then, seventy-five million plus is when this, how do you build our product number two and product number three and product number four starts. You know, anyone listening to this, I don't want them to like, you know, when they are in the zero to one million stage, they're trying to figure out how to do product number two. That's, there's no point spending time on that. So the, the skills that you have to learn in the, the, you know, the organizationally, as an organization and also as a founder, they change as you go. And my advice to People focus on the thing that you need to learn the most to get to the next milestone, and excel at it, then worry about the next one when you get there.

AI assessment note: “my primary advice I will give to founders listening to this is don't overthink too far ahead”

Q a little bit about pricing and packaging? Because that's such an interesting subset of this. So we've so far talked about the go, the product market sales fit, the go to market and the product as a part of that, obviously, because those are the two things you need. How does pricing and packaging come into this? Because that's a really top of mind question for a lot of founders.

A Pricing and packaging is a, is a complex thing. Pricing is probably more complex than packaging in some ways. I look at pricing as more, uh, a function of what is the business value? If someone buys your product, is it worth 50,000 dollars? Is it worth a 100,000 dollars? Is it worth 300,000 dollars? What would, how would people justify? So that's definitely one function. Second is like, you know, the rule that I've used for pricing is, can your salespeople describe it simply? Like if a customer is going, going to ask you a simple question, so how, how do you price your product? And if you can't describe it in half a sentence, That's a, you have too complex of a pricing. And yes, there could be like nuances to it, and there could be like details to it, but you have to be able to describe it. Like in AppDynamics, we are monitoring all kind of different systems, right? So the pricing was complicated, but we said, okay, the simple pricing philosophy that our salespeople can tell is we price by how many production systems you have. And that was kind of the rough unit of pricing. And we can measure production systems in different ways, but that's how we price it.

AI assessment note: “the rule that I've used for pricing is, can your salespeople describe it simply?”

Q What's the driver for the change? One I would think of off the top of my head is just the mobile phone, things like push-button experiences, but...

A I think one of the things that is a driver is we've got 10,000 boomers aging into age 65, and it's having a different sort of user experience, and because people are living longer doesn't mean we're living healthy longer. And so they're going to be dealing with lots of issues that their forebearers didn't have to deal with because people didn't live this long. I mean, a hundred years ago, a 120 years ago, the average lifespan was about 48. Now we've artificially extended that to about, let's say, 83. And these are approximate numbers. But who's to say that we're really improving the quality of life? So people are going to retire and become more engaged than their parents were in their own health care. And I know my parents go to a doctor and say, here's what I can share with you, now save my life, please. I think the next future generations are going to be much more engaged.

AI assessment note: “I think one of the things that is a driver is we've got 10,000 boomers”