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a16za16z Podcast: Best Clips of 2022
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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
45 min read · 9,325 words- 0:00 – 1:00
Introduction
- SSSteph Smith
We've had some incredible guests join us on the a16z Podcast this year, ranging from moonshot entrepreneurs, to top creators, to some of the most forward-thinking technologists, all of which are busy shaping the future right before our eyes. And we have so much in store for 2023, and truly cannot wait for you to hear who we have on the roster. But before we turn the calendar and close out the year, we wanted to cover some of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and important segments from our 2022 roster. By the way, as we look to the new year, make sure you drop in the comments who you'd like to see on the podcast.
- SPSpeaker
[upbeat music] The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
- SSSteph Smith
[upbeat music]
- 1:00 – 5:59
Marc Andreessen (a16z)
- SSSteph Smith
So in our first clip, we have none other than Marc Andreessen. Marc has the unique perspective of someone who's helped both build and invest in the future, but he's also spent a wealth of time studying history. So in this clip, Marc discusses the moral panic that's accompanied new technologies throughout history, and specifically one of the most unique ways that society responded to one of those technologies, the automobile. [upbeat music] Could you speak a little bit more to the red flag laws that were implemented when cars were coming to be?
- MAMarc Andreessen
Yeah, so cars. So th- this is another great one. So, like, cars, it's like, okay, [laughs] like, we all live with cars. We, we all can't live without cars. Like, you know, there's still huge fights about how, you know, cars should be used in our society, but, like, there's cars everywhere. Like, our society doesn't function without cars, and we just kind of take them totally for granted. Uh, by the way, we take them so for granted that we just, like, repeatedly bail out the big car, car [laughs] companies, right? Like, at this, at this point, like, the taxpayers have kept them in business for a long time. Um, and so, you know, the car... A- and so and then you're ju- you're just like, you know, it's just like, okay, the car must have been this obvious thing. Like, of course you want the car. And who, you know, who, you know, who could, who could've fought the car at least for any kind of, you know, kind of valid reason. And so again, to your point, like, it, it turns out actually the cars were re- were actually a, a profound threat to the sort of s- so- social order of that time, uh, of the era. This is, like, going back 100, 120 years. Um, and, uh, and, and it was basically this exact same kind of process played out with the car. Um, and so the, the, the, the thing you mentioned, basically, the thing that happened at the peak of kind of the anti-car hysteria at the time, uh, the moral panic around cars, was basically, [laughs] so basically what happened was cars were a threat to basically the... They were the threat to, like, the ordering of, like, everything from how cities were laid out. They were, you know, a threat to, you know, they were gonna upend, you know, the, the ability to have, like, modern transportation, modern shipping. You know, they were gonna up- upend everything from the role of local merchants. Uh, they were gonna upend, you know, there, there was an entire industry of blacksmiths. You know, uh, the, you know, the horse was, like, central to a lot of economies. A lot of people made, made, made their living off of, you know, dealing with, you know, dealing with horses. Um, you know, there were people who were, like, trained, you know, carriage drivers who all of a sudden were out of jobs. And so there, there was this, like, all of a sudden this, this huge backlash. And so what happened was, uh, a bunch of sort of state, municipal level, uh, areas, um, you know, both in the US, like, at, you know, in and around Pennsylvania at the time, and then also in the UK, um, uh, implemented... The, their, their legislators implemented at the time what, what became known as the red flag laws. Um, [laughs] so the red flag law looks, works as follows, um, which is, okay, Mr. Car Owner, you've got your fancy new car. Congratulations. Um, you know, you're, you're very proud of yourself. You're probably, you know, a, you know, you're probably a, a pretty, uh, you know, well-off person, uh, in the community. People probably generally are probably jealous of you to start with. You've got this fancy new automobile. Um, and, a- and by the way, in those days, like, cars broke down all the time. And so, you know, when you would take your car out for a ride, you'd have, like... You'd be driving the car, um, and then you'd, you'd, uh, you'd often, like, have to bring a mechanic with you, um, right? [laughs] To basically fix the car when it broke. They were st- still getting everything to work. Um, and so you and your mechanic or whatever, your family, you'd be, you'd be out, you know, motoring along in your car on, on whatever dirt road, you know, dirt road at the time. Um, and the law was that you had to employ another guy. You had to employ a guy, um, to walk, you know, 50 feet in front of the car, uh, carrying big red flags, right? Okay, so picture this. You're driving along. You're out for a nice Sunday drive. You got your kids, whatever. You got your m- mechanic, and you're, you're, you're, you're going along. And you know what, cars in those days didn't go very fast, but they did go faster than you could walk. And so you're driving along at whatever, 10, 20 miles an hour. But according to law, you have to have a guy in front of you on foot, like, out in advance, and he's got these, like, big r- big red flags. And you have to follow this guy, 'cause he has to stay in front of you. And so you can only motor along at whatever, the three, four miles an hour, you know, that this guy can walk. And this guy's, like, waving the red flags. Why is this guy waving the red flags? To warn everybody that a car is coming, right? Um, why, why was the explanation that he needs to warn, you know, people that a car is coming? Well, because the car might scare the horses, right? So, like, you know, if the car comes along, it's making noise, it scares the horses, the, you know, the horses, you know, whatever, you know, that are m- most of what's on the road at that time. You know, they freak out or, you know, by- bystanders freak out. People get hurt. Like, this would be really bad. Um, and, and so, so literally it's like, okay, that, that was how the car got rolled out. The, the most advanced form of this law that I, I've been able to find, um, uh, [laughs] went a step further. Um, it said basically, if you're driving along and you actually see a horse coming at you, you see somebody on a horse coming at you in the direction, you have to pull over [laughs] to the side of the road. You have to disassemble the car. You have to take it apart.
- SSSteph Smith
What?
- MAMarc Andreessen
Right? You and your mechanic would take the car apart, and you have to hide the parts of the car so that the horse can't see them.
- SSSteph Smith
Oh, my.
- MAMarc Andreessen
Right? 'Cause the horse might get scared, right? Get scared by the appearance of the car. And then when the horse goes by, you can then reassemble your car, right, a- a- and keep going, right? And of course you look back today and you're just like, "Okay, this is, like, incredibly comical. Like, how could they ever do this?" And then of course you, you... Exactly your point, like social networking, you think of exactly the technology today, and you're like, "Oh, yeah. You know, they're putting in place laws that, you know, 100 years from now, you know, the laws that are being put in place now on a lot of modern technology topics are gonna look just as silly as the red flag laws." But since nobody ever learns anything, [laughs] you know, history will-
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs]
- MAMarc Andreessen
... history will repeat.
- SSSteph Smith
[upbeat music]
- 5:59 – 9:58
Balaji Srinivasan (The Network State)
- SSSteph Smith
Next we have Balaji Srinivasan, one of the most prominent blue flame thinkers of our generation. And in this clip, Balaji discusses the topic of a cloud continent, how we're already living a large portion of our lives there, and what it might mean for someone to fully migrate to the internet frontier.
- SPSpeaker
[upbeat music] You can think of the internet as basically like giving rise to a new continent
- SPSpeaker
Okay, imagine an Atlantis that just arose out of the middle of the ocean, and people were just taking commuter flights there back and forth each day, okay? So you'd spend eight hours in Atlantis and 16 hours at home. That's really what the internet is. You know how I can prove that?
- SSSteph Smith
Well, we're in it right now.
- SPSpeaker
Well, right, exactly. Like one way of thinking about it is ask themselves what percentage of their time they spend, their waking hours, do they spend looking at a screen of some kind, okay? Whether it's a laptop, mobile phone, tablet, uh, you know, their smartwatch, something like that, right? What percentage of that time is that for you, Steph?
- SSSteph Smith
I unfortunately have to say it's probably like 14 hours [laughs] a day, but I'm, I'm probably an outlier.
- SPSpeaker
Something like that.
- SSSteph Smith
Uh, I'd say probably the average person though, right? It's, it's a third of their day, maybe eight hours.
- SPSpeaker
That's right. So what that means... A- and that's up from basically zero in 1991.
- SSSteph Smith
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
Right? So, you know, this, this Atlantis, this cloud continent, right? So just to extend the metaphor, we're taking these commuter planes up to the cloud continent 14 hours a day and coming back, and we're only spending two hours of our waking lives, in your case, on the land, and 14 hours in the cloud, right? For other people, it might only, only be a few h- like three or four hours, but like, that's amazing. Billions of people have migrated huge chunks of their lives to this cloud continent, okay? When I say billions, I mean like three-something billion just on Facebook, right? And you add all the people with smartphones and so on. So let's say it's on the order of three, four billion people in the world. Half the people of the earth have, are now spending half their lives in this cloud continent, half their waking hours, okay? Up from nothing in 1990-something. When we think about that, that is actually a different way of visualizing the whole thing, and you realize the internet is actually on par with the discovery of the Americas for the Europeans, right? Yes, of course, there were people in the Americas before the Europeans got there. Uh, I talk about this in the book actually, that like if you go and look at the Bantu expansion or the Mongols sweeping across the world, there's, there's essentially no ethnic group that has ever had some location since time immemorial. They just killed the previous folks and kinda took over their territory or whatever, right? So leaving that whole part of things aside, from the perspective of the Europeans, like quote, "The discovery of the New World," was this, you know, huge thing. You know, s- similar to like the folks who, uh, went over the Bering Strait. Their discovery of the Americas was this huge thing. It was this new frontier, right? Which is obviously thousands of years earlier. This internet frontier where we've migrated to will over time give rise to new countries just like the Americas did, right? The, the Americas, the people came there, and they didn't think of themselves as American or Brazilian or Mexican or Canadian or something like that. Nowadays, North and South America have, they're all, you know, slogged into the same grid as like the old world, right? But initially, they thought of themselves as English or French, or you know, they were colonists, they were settlers, right? They didn't identify with the new land as primary and the old world as secondary, right? They didn't think of themselves as a Polish American or English American, right? They thought of themselves just English. And that's similar to folks who spend all of this time in this cloud continent but have not made the flip, right? You're spending the majority of your time in the cloud continent, but you're not thinking of yourself as a cloud person-
- SSSteph Smith
Yet
- SPSpeaker
... first yet.
- SSSteph Smith
Yet is the key word. I think-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Yet
- SSSteph Smith
... I think one-
- SPSpeaker
That's a
- 9:58 – 15:45
Neal Stephenson (Lamina1)
- SPSpeaker
key word.
- SSSteph Smith
Our next clip is from one of the original pioneers of speculative fiction, no more so than his foreshadowing novel of Snow Crash, a groundbreaking piece of literature that imagined the metaverse, avatars, and AI-powered assistants long before their existence. Not to mention his countless other books like Cryptonomicon, touching on digital currencies in this case, again, long before the masses. If you haven't already guessed, I'm talking Neal Stephenson. And in this clip, Neal discusses whether or not the metaverse, the term he coined 30 years ago, is reliant on AR or VR. It's really important that you're bringing up the engineering side of this, because it's not just how we want these worlds to look, but it also how they align with our engineering capabilities. And of course, one way that these games are advancing is through augmented and virtual reality, or at least some of them are venturing into these new worlds. I'd love to hear your take on the importance of that, whether these metaverses do need to be in, quote-unquote, "3D," or whether actually many of them can survive and continue to thrive in the two-dimensional world that many people are participating in, because that really is the world that many of us are 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 three d- third dimension, they feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, they, they stop 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"?
- SPSpeaker
We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, 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. Um, 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, a flat window into a three-dimensional world. Um, and 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 3D world through it, and you're running around in that world."
- NSNeal Stephenson
I'm not sure if I would've understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. Um, but now, you know, fast-forward 30 years, the, the w- 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, 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 WASD keys on their keyboard plus a mouse in order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian technology, and yet the human brain is so adaptable that even, you know, as clumsy as that is and as, as antiquated as that is, um, WASD is a perfectly, uh, useful way of navigating around in 3D spaces. I'm gonna talk about VR. AR is a whole different thing, but let me just talk about VR for a sec. You know, early VR, just because of the limitations on processing power and so on, had high latency and, and other, um, kind of, uh, quality issues. And, uh, it was, I think, pretty widely believed, even as recently as maybe 10 years ago, that, um, as latency got, got reduced, a- as the quality of the experience improved, that we'd see a decrease in the tendency of, of users to get motion sickness. Um, and I think that there was a decrease, but it didn't go to zero. It went to maybe, uh, the last I've heard is, like, maybe 5, 10% state-of-the-art quality VR are gonna experience some, uh, some symptoms. And in fact, I was playing a 2D video game just the other day where my friends and I turned on a new feature, and we all had to stop 'cause we were getting, we were getting motion sickness. So imagine if you were trying to popularize television in the 1950s, and you said, "We've got these great programs. We've got I Love Lucy. We've got The Ed Sullivan Show, you know, entertainment for the whole family. Uh, 5 to 10% of you are gonna end up throwing up into a wastebasket, you know, after half an hour of watching this." Um, well, th- that's a really high bar to commercial acceptance, uh, of entertainment technology. For AR, it's just a different thing. I mean, by its nature, when you're in an AR experience, it is or it should be somehow tied to the environment you're sitting in, 'cause if it's not, it's just VR. It's just kind of bad VR. You know, one of the most fascinating things I ever did was working, trying to make content at Magic Leap, where, um, everything that we built had to, um, be aware of, in some sense, the, what was in the physical environment and be reactive to it. Um, so it's been an incredible, uh, thing to work on. But because of that, it's, I think it's kinda different from what most people talk about when they talk about the metaverse.
- 15:45 – 21:19
Karen Cheng (Karen X Cheng)
- SSSteph Smith
[upbeat music] Speaking of the metaverse, next up is Karen Cheng, a wildly popular content creator who is reshaping the creator landscape through her use and exploration of AI and augmented reality. You'll truly have to go to her accounts to see what I'm talking about, but in this segment, we ask Karen about the interplay between artists and these new tools and whether, in fact, the artist is losing relevance in this equation. Karen, I think, makes the perfect analogy to Peter Pan, highlighting the democratizing force of these new technologies. [upbeat music] The maybe more interesting question is how fungible was Karen in that process? And I don't want it to dismiss you-
- KCKaren Cheng
Yes, how replaceable am I? Completely-
- SSSteph Smith
But if you gave average Joe the same project and the same tool-
- KCKaren Cheng
Right
- SSSteph Smith
... do you think they would come up with anything comparable?
- KCKaren Cheng
I think a lot of people would've been able to make a really good Cosmo cover. Um, I think those people would have been... The people who would've done it best are people who have a good artistic eye, have the, kind of the patience and the motivation to keep going and keep refining on the prompt, and who can, like, describe what they see in their head. And so a lot of these people are not necessarily traditional artists. You know, I think a lot of people could have made a really, really good result. I... There's actually a, an example that I have that we can show up, that we can show on screen. I, a while ago, wanted to expand The Girl with a Pearl Earring. So you may have seen one thing that you can do, uh, that was actually just announced, is you can expand paintings in DALL-E. Um, and so you can basically, like, take a famous painting and then imagine what was all around it. So you can take, like, the Mona Lisa and imagine, like, where was she? You can take The Girl with the Pearl Earring and imagine, like, everything that was around her. And so I made a video a while back where I imagined her, like, in a, like, library, and she was holding a book, and I was like, "I want her to be, like, an educated woman," you know? Um, and so I made that. Um, and then I actually, um, am working with a project, uh, with OpenAI actually right now. It's one that they commissioned. Uh, it will... It's not out yet, but it will probably be out by the time this podcast releases. So if you go on my Instagram, uh, on karenxcheng, you'll be able to go and see this filter. We made this Instagram filter where we expanded these famous paintings, and, um, you can actually go inside through them and see these famous paintings. And I looked at my Girl with a Pearl Earring, and I was like, "This can be done better." And so I hired August Kamp, who is, um, the person who taught me about this method, and she is... She's, has spent way more time in DALL-E than I have. She's so artistic and talented. And then when she showed me... I hired her to do this Pearl Earring, and when she showed me hers- I was just, like, moved to tears almost. Like, jaw drop. I was like, "That is what you made?" And so I felt like she was irreplaceable in this. I mean, I'm sure I, I could have hired 10 different artists to do this pearl earring and gotten 10 very different results. And what I like about this m- example is that everyone is starting with the same source image. And so it, it almost establishes, like, a little bit of, like, a control, you know, for it. And so, um, I think this is the perfect case study for, like, hey, different humans get very different results with AI.
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah. It's, it's a tool, as you said. But the reason I asked if you were fungible is because I just ... I really wonder how this progresses in terms of we know it's gonna be somewhat of a democratizing force because now a bunch of people who, like, couldn't paint or couldn't do Photoshop in certain ways, like, can now do it and create all of this art or, or, or these outputs. But I do wonder then, does that make a lot of people really successful or a lot of people really capable, or does it still surface the very, very best to the top, right? Where, where there's a different filter and now the filter is prompt engineering versus painting or drawing or singing or whatever it might have been in the past. Um, so do you think that's still the case where you're still gonna see these, like, outliers who are just so much better than the rest, or do you think it'll be more of a level playing field than what we were seeing before?
- KCKaren Cheng
Okay, so I think that, um, what this is gonna do, what AI art is gonna do, is it's going to significantly lower the barrier to entry to become an artist. So the, to be an artist right now, you have to have a lot of time, um, a lot of training, um, sometimes the monetary or financial need- means to be able to do that, or the willingness to be, like, a starving artist to do it, or it's a hobby on the side. Um, but there are kinda some ... There's definitely a barrier to being an artist. And, and now it's like everyone can do it, and it's almost like ... I almost liken these image synthesizers like DALL-E or Midjourney to, like, a Peter Pan, but instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it takes the artistic skill of artists, and it's like gives it to everyone. Like, here you go. You know? And so I do think that a lot more people are gonna be empowered to be artistic or to be artists because they didn't necessarily have the patience to go, like, learn oil painting. But now ... But they actually do have the talent to be able to describe what's in their imagination and continue to refine until they get the result
- 21:19 – 29:02
Steve Wozniak (Privateer)
- KCKaren Cheng
they want.
- SSSteph Smith
[upbeat music] In the next two clips, we talk to the team at Privateer, an ambitious company with a mission of improving the sustainability of space. And in the first clip, we talk to Steve Wozniak. You might recognize him as one of the co-founders of Apple and one of the most impactful engineers and inventors of our time. Here, Steve discusses the difference between the inventor, the engineer, and the visionary, and how he envisions them all contributing to our future. The ability for these technologies to be exponential, right? What we see today from Privateer might not be what it is in 5 years or 50 years. And I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday, and he told me this story about you from the very, very early days where when you were younger, you basically told your dad, "Hey, Dad, I wanna have a computer someday." And he said, 'cause at this time, this is true, he said, "You're crazy. Computers cost as much as a house." And you told him, "Well, Dad, [laughs] I'll live in an apartment." And you seemed to really, really just want a computer at that time. Um, to your point earlier, starting Apple was not about building one of the biggest businesses in the world. It was wanting a computer and wanting other people to have that. I'm curious just to know from a personal perspective, what did you see back then? Was it truly just, like, a personal need for this device? Or I, I wanna, you know, dig into that early Woz brain and, and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days.
- SWSteve Wozniak
A lot of great things come personally, and I learned even-- I taught, uh, middle school and elementary school for eight years straight full time.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- SWSteve Wozniak
Full time, like every hour of the day up to seven days a week. No press allowed, so it's not a big story. But I learned that it was less important that you're speaking facts and knowledge from your mouth. Knowledge was less important than the motivation of my students to learn. Had to m- find ways to make it fun, to make it understandable, to make it, um, you know, like stories that, that tell what's i- in their head. And that's when I decided, you know what? Wanting something is even more important. And I go back. I wanted a computer. It was in my heart. And I didn't know if I'd ever, ever get it. I didn't know if designing computers would ever be a job for engineers 'cause we were back in the analog days, you know, smart math stuff. And but I kept it in me, and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- SWSteve Wozniak
And turned out that the point in time. Luck is-- Sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success, and the point in time that I was gonna build that computer, no matter what it was worth, turned out to be worth a ton. And, you know, and then a lot of times when people are successful in technology, I've seen them look off into space 'cause we almost all come from science backgrounds. And even when we y- when Apple went public around 1980, um, our president, Mike Scott, maybe '81 or 2, um, started a little company with some people. I even f- I funded into that. He's a friend. And actually, we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from somewhere. So I don't know. There were a bunch of rocket engineers around saying it is possible to do with, let's say, money. Now, governments have all the resources, you know, but they're stale in their approaches because of it. Here's what we can do very successfully, very stably. We know we'll get there if we put enough money in and test enough. And private industry works so differently. I've only been in private, and I just love having ideas and thinking about them and, you know, thinking different and the creativity that comes about when you think, "My gosh, I could do something that they haven't done before." Or maybe the resources are cheaper. The sorts of huge computing devices are cheaper to make and maybe certain types of motors, and I can do something that hasn't been done before, sensors that didn't ex- exist before. And let's-- You gotta always shoot for the top being, you know, one of the leaders in the world, and that's just how we think. So a lot of times when I think of government versus private, I also come down to types of people, which is very important. And you have an inventor who could be given a job, and they've gone through all the, the right-- they have the right skill sets, and they've gone through the right university, you know, um, majors and PhDs. And, and, uh, and they're an engineer, and they can design what you assign them. But then there's the inventor The inventor goes along, thinks, "Oh my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do, and would it work? And maybe it hasn't been done before, and can I make a different- make a difference in the world?" And, uh, the inventor wants to run into a laboratory, hook up some demos real quick, try to get some sort of prototype to show that the idea's g- is right. And that's the sort of person I am. It's in your personality. You don't change it. You don't just say, "Tomorrow I'm gonna be an inventor. Today I'm an engineer." You're usually one or the other. So, um, it's- that's, that's another advantage of Alex, you know, putting together Privateer is we're looking for the inventor types, you know?
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah, definitely. I mean, another word sometimes people use for inventor is visionary. And I'm curious, in the early days when you were just out of passion creating these computers, could you see the path to today? Of course, you, you can't picture everything with so many advancements since those early days. But, like-
- SWSteve Wozniak
Mm-hmm
- SSSteph Smith
... how far along were you actually envisioning? And I'm asking this partially because-
- SWSteve Wozniak
Sure
- SSSteph Smith
... even if we apply this to space, a lot of the things that people talk about in the realm of space also sound kind of like science fiction, right? They probably won't be eventually, but I'm trying to understand also how you, how far along you see, or the extrapolation that maybe goes on in your brain when you're originally talking about, yes, a computer with 200 transistors, and now we're talking billions and, and, and the applications that have kind of sprung from that.
- SWSteve Wozniak
Yeah. I myself, I was really a great engineer in a certain field, and I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett-Packard without even having a college degree yet. And then you have, you talk about visionary. Vision, seeing the future, uh, that's different than invention, though. Inventor really wants to actually go in and create something today that didn't exist, and not have a vision that's 50 years out or 10 years out.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- SWSteve Wozniak
Because that's science fiction a lot, and everybody can talk about it and say later on, "See, I proposed it-
- SSSteph Smith
[laughs] Yeah
- SWSteve Wozniak
... but it wasn't really possible to do with money." And the engineer says, "Feet on the ground. What can I actually do and build and deliver to people?" When we started Apple, you know, we had a great product that was gonna be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. But we had such a- we had a great lead and we were comfortable and we could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold a song costs... You know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars.
- SSSteph Smith
Wow.
- SWSteve Wozniak
A good fraction of a million dollars. Do you think we saw it today, where you have a device in your hand with a thousand songs on it even? Um, no. S- Steve Jobs was very instrumental in always taking us, do what we can do today. Try to do something a little more tomorrow, a little more. And we- you can have a lot of failures, too, if you'll have one great product bringing in the, the revenues. But the whole idea was we'll move towards the future and we'll be a part of it, and we'll be in with it. And after all, you look back at it, it was kind of invisible the steps we took, but they all led to today. And then there was some, um, you know, some of that invention stuff we got to. Steve Jobs' Apple II was really the iPod music. Music. And, uh, and that was the first time, oh my gosh, up till then our company valuation was the same as the old Apple II days. And then all of a sudden we sold it to everyone in the world and our sales doubled and our profits doubled, and the board gave Steve billions and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. And then the iPhone was even better, and it was based on the iPod, not the reverse. Not a phone and we'll include an iPod. More like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it. And so it's hard to say that you really see the future more than a year ahead when you're working a year ahead on your projects.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
- SWSteve Wozniak
Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead 'cause I was working on it. If I looked two years ahead and made some guesses, oh my gosh, other aspects, other technologies and all came out of- from outer space. And people's desire, which way they wanted to go, was different. It's very hard to predict even two years ahead successfully the way I worked. Nowadays we got huge, big companies, so it's kind of like, you know, anything they work on is gonna be successful. It's not, it's not as much a, it's n- not as much of a gamble. But, you know, real, real inventors like to gamble, like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagined.
- 29:02 – 34:55
Dr. Moriba Jah & Alex Fielding (Privateer)
- SSSteph Smith
Our second clip with the Privateer team is with the other two co-founders, Chief Scientist Dr. Moriba Jah and CEO Alex Fielding. Here, they talk about the problem of space pollution, but also the impact that space has here on Earth and the challenge of space governance, an issue that's becoming more and more important as lower Earth orbit becomes more crowded but also more vital. We, as humans, have started to pollute air, land, the ocean, and now it sounds like we're doing the same with space. But for some reason, it seems like most people know about the pollution in air, ocean, land. Why don't we know more about the pollution happening in space?
- MJDr. Moriba Jah
Well, I think that, uh, you know, most people, they just aren't aware of how many satellites we have launched, the fact that most of the stuff that we launch just doesn't come back or it takes a really, really long time to come back if it's in a sufficiently lower orbit. Also, people just haven't had a place to just go online and just kind of see the stuff. And, you know, now that we at Privateer have, have rolled out Wayfinder, we're just, like, a click away from, uh, people seeing all these dots, uh, you know, all around the Earth.
- SSSteph Smith
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, uh, I guess, devastating or maybe... Let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?
- MJDr. Moriba Jah
My career started at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Maui in 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the, uh, telescopes on top of Mount Haleakalā. And all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1,200 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 that 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.
- SSSteph Smith
Alex, I wanna 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.
- AFAlex Fielding
So we're, 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 Moriba 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 gonna make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Um, hope you make it." Like, that would be-
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah
- AFAlex Fielding
... but that's kind of what's going on with spaceflight. 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.
- SSSteph Smith
And I wanna get to how we solve the problem, but I also wanna speak a little bit to what is at stake here. So you're talking about thousands of things that we can monitor, but potentially millions that we aren't able to monitor. How often does this stuff actually collide? And then also, how often does that impact us on Earth, whether it be things actually coming down to Earth or impacting the satellites or infrastructure that we use on Earth up there in space?
- AFAlex Fielding
I mean, there, there's a lot of collisions, right? And there are some that we actually can see, and we can clearly identify that was caused by debris or, or even in the case of a satellite hitting an inactive satellite or vice versa or, you know, two objects in near Earth space colliding. It happens a lot more than we would like to think, and there's also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't just openly talk about our, our problems in the space community the way that we would in other academic, uh, communities or places where we're more data-driven. And some of that actually surrounds liability and risk. A- as an example, many insurance policies in space on the riders exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying that people do it. I'm probably implying it, but if your insurance policy said, "We don't cover things hitting your car windshield that are rocks," then whatever cracked your car windshield is probably not a rock. Um, [laughs] so these are, these are challenges we're also working around, which is the evolution of space policy and the Space Act and treaties evolving. The- these things were based in maritime law. Uh, and, and I guess that kind of made sense for the time because we needed a framework for how we interoperate in space, but that is actually creating a challenge because we don't have even the, the simplest notions of, like, right of way. If you're in space, you're gonna come very close to colliding with someone else's object, whether it's dead or alive. Who's, who's got the right of way? Well, I mean, obviously, if it's dead, you better move. But if you're both active, who's got the right of way? These are very simple constructs on the ground. You wouldn't get in your car and not know that. But in space, we're operating in the blind. We, we don't have these rules fully defined as a community, and yet we keep launching more and more things without solving those.
- 34:55 – 39:30
Chris Power (Hadrian)
- SSSteph Smith
Speaking of space, next up is Chris Power, founder and CEO of Hadrian, an advanced manufacturing company making precision components. Hadrian is also building the next generation of factories to accelerate the pace of American manufacturing. And in this clip, Chris goes into why the American advanced manufacturing industry is so fragile and the repercussions that could occur if we don't start taking action to fix it. I've actually heard you use the term dangerous when you, when you speak to the point that we're at i- in, in terms of this, this pipeline and this particular space of advanced manufacturing. And so, you know, if someone's listening, they might be like, "Okay, a bunch of people are retiring. Some people are, are not very keen on the idea of us continuing to pursue space." But what would you say, you know, to, to the average person? Like, what's at stake here? What are we gonna lose if, if these people retire, and we don't have these things documented?
- SPSpeaker
Unless we solve this problem, I think the country and, you know, our way of life is, is at, es- existential risk. And the analogy I give to people is if you're living in a small town or something like that, you know, we've built up 200 layers of abstractions in society so that, like, you can be an artist or you can be a painter or, like, you know, you can be in finance or in crypto or, you know, making video games or whatever it happens to be. And the reality of the world is that, you know, 200 years ago, you know, we were killing each other over food and, like, it's a, it's a miracle in the first place that we're here and that, you know, society's relatively stable and, like, the roads get paved. People forget because they grow up in America that it's so successful that, like, you know, they don't have to worry about having a bulletproof car. Otherwise, if you have more than, like, $100,000 net worth, someone in a gang might try and steal your daughter, which for the rest of the world is, like, a reality, right? Um, but because, you know, America is so isolated culturally, you know, most Americans' view of geopolitics is Russia bad. You don't learn those lessons, and as a younger person, you don't realize that, you know, unless we, quote-unquote, "keep the, keep the roads paved," like, this can all fall over, you know, very, very quickly. So if you run the scenario of saying, "Okay, r- right now, basically, we are successful because, you know, we are the world's police," and whether we should play that role or not is, is obviously up for debate. But the reality is is that- We are fine culturally because everyone understands that if you fuck with America, we will, you know, put a missile over your head and you're dead. Um, or if we go into a great power conflict, we have enough logistics and infrastructure to go and win that conflict or at least be scary enough that that conflict never exists in the first place. And the analogy I like to tell people is, you know, bar fights happen when both people mispredict their ability to win the fight. And bar fights don't happen for three, you know, two reasons. One is there's two UFC fighters, you know, staring down each other, and they both know the cost of a conflict, and both the other person is scary, so that fight never happens. Or there's a bunch of morons, but there's a bouncer and, like, he's big and scary enough that, like, the conflict never happens in the first place. Um, but that construct of a bar fight relies on impressions and kind of social trade-offs that like, hey, enough people have seen their friend getting beaten up by a bouncer, so I'm probably not gonna even test that assumption that this is a real thing. Now, the reality, of course, is that most police officers and most bouncers, you know, are probably incompetent, can probably get taken out by someone relatively competent, competent as a civilian. But, you know, we have enough, uh, social construct around the concept that that is a really dumb idea that no one wants to take the risk. And it's what I describe it in defense land is, it's a lethality mirage. And a lethality mirage is basically, you know, everyone else's impression of you is that you're a ten out of ten lethal, so they're absolutely not, not gonna fuck with you. And then maybe you lose one small conflict, and someone goes, "Well, hold on. Like, maybe these guys aren't so scary as we thought they were." Um, and in reality, I think we're about a, a three out of ten. And the real danger comes when, you know, a, a great power competitor finds out before you find out that you're actually a three out of ten. So the problem with everyone thinking advanced manufacturing is in a really good place is that we don't go fix the problem. You know, 'cause culturally, everyone thinks it's fine. You know, the roads are getting paved, fighter jets get made. Y- you know, if we go into a conflict, we're fine. In reality, we're probably so far away from doing that, that if we have one conflict with China where we expend most of our ballistics inventory, we might not be able to remake it for, like, five years, and we're basically standing around, you know, with our hands tied behind our backs.
- SSSteph Smith
And finally,
- 39:30 – 45:18
Ryan Petersen (Flexport)
- SSSteph Smith
we have Ryan Petersen, founder and co-CEO of Flexport, the full-service global logistics and freight forwarding platform worth eight billion dollars after its latest round of funding. Now, Ryan has a bird's eye view of the global freight industry and understands the complexity of the supply chain better than almost anyone. So in our final clip, he breaks down the massive impact that e-commerce has had on the supply chain and the need for companies to adapt to customers' changing behavior.
- SPSpeaker
What have you seen as the impact really of e-commerce and the internet on, on the supply chain and on how it works?
- RPRyan Petersen
Yeah. Well, I think you wanna st- start with the, with the customers, with all of us, and the internet has really put us, us, you and me and everybody else out there in charge-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... in a way that we'd never seen before. Um, that the world... You know, in the, in the era of mass media, companies only would run a television ad for whatever product they were selling, and then they would just kind of pump that down your throat, and they only needed to have a limited number of SKUs, whatever was on television, basically. Customers didn't have a lot of choice. They could buy this, you know, the Energizer or the Duracell, and there were two choices for what battery, and they happened to be in the stores, and you, uh, and so you, the brands were in control. Those who could afford mass media were in control. Now, with the internet, there's just like a million choices. You have every kind of possible brand of battery that's out there. A battery is probably a weird case, but still, for e- for every product category, there's a million choices. Everybody's unique. You can get the thing that matches your own personal taste. Um, you are in charge as well in that they better have that product now. You're not willing to wait a week. Like in the Sears catalog era-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... you could order, and you'd get it in three weeks. Well, you're gonna go out of business if you can't deliver. You know, it's becoming two-hour delivery, like if you can't deliver two hours. Um, and so that is a very different supply chain, and what's happened is companies that haven't been able to run a supply chain that's that responsive, that can have many, a wider assortment of choices, because we're all unique and we want our choices and, and, and have it sort of edge cached, to use an internet analogy, like a CDN.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- RPRyan Petersen
Like you wanna have these goods like close to the customer so that it can get there really, really fast. The old world, you could have one distribution center in the middle of the United States and distribute out to your store network from there. Uh, but it didn't have to be like super responsive to customer demand. Customer demand was pretty predictable, kind of always bought the same number of these batteries or whatever product-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... uh, and, and it was, it didn't have to be very agile. The modern world, all of a sudden, there's this proliferation of brands, and it all has to be stored close to the edges. So cust- so brands need to have multiple fulfillment centers. Uh, you need about five fulfillment centers to get two-day delivery nationwide, and you need probably to do s- next day, it's more like 16 fulfillment centers.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- RPRyan Petersen
And you wanna do same day, well, you need one in a- almost every zip code, right? Uh, if you wanna have two-hour delivery. So that's a really, really different configuration of supply chain. And now, um, you want to be able to get to that world where you're doing same day or next day delivery, you now need to load balance your inventory. 'Cause if you put too much inventory out there and it doesn't sell, you're gonna go bankrupt, right?
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- RPRyan Petersen
You're sitting on all this working capital, all this inventory that's not earning a return. Too little, and you lose the customer, and they'll never come back, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- RPRyan Petersen
They buy your competitor's brand. And, and so that's the fundamental problem. And these logistics teams don't even really, at, at, at the typical brand, don't even really know that that's the problem they're s- solving.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- RPRyan Petersen
They're, they're just still used to a world where all they care about is the price of freight.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- RPRyan Petersen
Uh, and they wanna buy the cheapest rate, and that's what they think their job is. When their job has become, "How do I ensure a customer experience? How do I, uh, enable our sales and marketing to have the product in stock?" Uh, so that they can win those customers, help be a growth engine and a customer experience engine. And then how do they empower their CFO-
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... to not sit on too much inventory? Um, and so it's a really different proposition, and frankly, most of the companies, it, it, that, that we grew up with, these iconic brands, have been going bankrupt left and right. If you Google retail apocalypse [laughs] and just look-
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... like the number of companies that have failed that are iconic brands that we grew up with, it's really sad actually. Um, and I, I don't think it has to be that way. So one of our... We kind of have dual purpose here. One is help the new age of brands-
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm
- RPRyan Petersen
... rise up and not need to hire this big logistics supply chain team who just pushes paper and-
- SSSteph Smith
Yeah
- RPRyan Petersen
... you know, just all they care about is the price of freight, but actually is empowered to solve these problems without hiring a big team, 'cause you don't need it anymore. You kind of outsource that to the cloud.
- SSSteph Smith
Mm-hmm.
Episode duration: 45:18
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Transcript of episode cPuP3Ld_8uw
