Tech Bros Try To Make Mining Sexy - Week in Tech

0:12Speaker 1:When I think about San Francisco residents, the first thing that pops into my mind, I'm sorry to say, Reid, isn't necessarily hot. But one entrepreneur has recently tried to change that by circulating San Francisco's hot list. Have you been following this?

0:27Speaker 2:Yeah, I did see that.

0:29Speaker 1:Anyone you know made it onto the.

0:32Speaker 2:Oh, all my friends. Yeah, we're all... I'm on it, obviously. I mean, yeah. No, sorry. I haven't even looked, to be totally honest. I lived through Hot or Not. I'm that old, so... I don't... And FaceSmash, you know, which was Mark Zuckerberg's first startup. Yeah, I don't need to look.

0:53Speaker 1:The founder behind the company that compiled the list had a very, you know, comprehensive description. It's hot to be funny. It's hot to be smart. It's hot to be ambitious. It's hot to be kind. And yes, it's hot to be hot. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Veloshian, and this is The Week in Tech, where I'm joined by the world's most plugged-in reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now. Today, we're joined by our regular panelist, Rita Brigotti, tech editor for Semaphore, and by Tech Stuff first-timer, Margot McColl, a contributing writer at Vanity Fair.

1:32Speaker 1:Thank you both for joining.

1:33Speaker 2:Great to see you all.

1:34Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.

1:35Speaker 1:Do you two know each other?

1:36Speaker 2:We have never met. Are you in New York?

1:40Speaker 1:No, I'm in D.C., actually.

1:42Speaker 2:Oh, you're in D.C.? Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm in the Bay Area, so, you know. But I do get to D.C. often. We should get a coffee.

1:49Speaker 3:I've been resisting living in the Bay Area my whole career. So you let me know when you're in D.C.

1:56Speaker 1:Reid, it's been a busy week, and I was hoping you could catch us up on a few of the big headlines and what's driving them. Let's start with Apple and the annual fall event, the first one led by new CEO John Ternus. How did it go down?

2:09Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, pretty straightforward, right? It's a folding iPhone, as we've sort of been expecting now for about a decade. you know, since Samsung first came out with it. I think it's, look, this is sort of the pattern now is, you know, Apple sort of sees the market, they watch what Samsung is doing, and then they eventually incorporate these features. Now we've got a folding iPhone. I think it didn't answer any of the big questions, though, for Apple, right?

2:35Speaker 2:Which is, how are they going to survive in the AI era, right? And, you know, there's people who are bullish on Apple, people who are bearish on Apple. I think the big question for this new CEO, though, is, How does Apple continue to defend its turf when you have AI that's able to create software basically for free on the fly that kind of makes these walled gardens that all these companies have erected over the last couple of decades to avoid any competition kind of go away?

3:07Speaker 2:And that's going to be Apple's big problem, I think.

3:11Speaker 1:It's going to be harder than making a folding phone.

3:13Speaker 2:A lot, a lot more difficult. A lot more complicated.

3:17Speaker 1:The last product magic I experienced from Apple was the AirPods. They're genuinely cool. And I got some janky fake AirPods from Amazon, and then I was like, I should buy the real ones again. They are really so much better. They are. And the live translation stuff, the noise cancelling, that's a great product. I was not so excited seeing that folding phone. Margot, what did you think?

3:36Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know if I really care about the folding phone. I don't know the extent to which it's supposed to replace the iPad. But I've talked to a few Apple execs about John Ternus as a guy. He's the hardware guy. That's his specialty, is making these really competent products. That's what people told me. He's not necessarily the visionary model, but he's someone that is very patient and that can make the best possible version of that product.

4:06Speaker 3:Us joking here about how Apple's been making a folding phone forever because Samsung already has one and other places already have one. That's kind of what he's good at is like being really patient and making the best version of something.

4:18Speaker 2:Apple makes great hardware and they're going to have a great hardware business for a long time. The problem is hardware is not actually that great of a business. And the thing that Apple's secret sauce on the financial side has been its ability to charge these huge upcharge is to have these great margins on their hardware that's the that's the business and the reason they're able to do that is because of the software because you people buy into the apple ecosystem.

4:46Speaker 1:I know this is your i know this is your your case read but i'm not 100 sure i agree with you because it's just like i used to be an android guy and then finally in like 2014 i got an iphone i was like sure the software is better but just it's such a more pleasant experience interact with the hardware i think and that's the same with the with the headphones right it's like these are just like a much more pleasurable hardware interaction than whatever the Me Too product is. So I agree with you. Obviously, the software in the walled garden and stuff is really important to the business model. But do you not think there's something defensive about high margin, great, sexy hardware?

5:19Speaker 2:I don't think you do. I don't think you do disagree with me. I think we're both saying the same exact thing, which is like, I love the hardware too.

5:25Speaker 1:I love the AirPods.

5:27Speaker 2:Even before the AirPods, their headphones, the wired ones, were the best headphones you could get. And I would try all the cheap ones, and they would always break. And they make really good hardware. I'm just saying, as a business, it's going to be hard for them to make a lot of money on that. Because a lot of people are not just buying because of the hardware they're buying, because they don't want to be the blue bubble, because they have iPhoto devices. albums that they share with their family. And, you know, these things keep people locked in. That's what allows that. It's the lock-in. It's the customer lock-in.

6:02Speaker 1:Dyson makes great, everyone loves the Airblade, but Dyson's not a trillion dollar company.

6:06Speaker 2:Yeah, somebody could come along and they could make better hardware, a better phone. In fact, there are better phones. Probably Huawei has the best phones on the market. People don't switch to the phones because they're locked in. And that's what I'm saying. We both agree. But what made Apple go from a hardware company worth $ 300 billion to a company worth $ 3 trillion is not the hardware. It's the lock-in. It's the ecosystem that they built around the hardware.

6:34Speaker 3:Well, I'm curious what you think, because I don't know if Apple is going to really lead in AI ever. I don't really think that's what they're trying to do. I always think about the App Store tax. Is it not kind of enough for them to take a slice out of every time you're using these AI apps, plus all the businesses that are going to be spawned based on these AI apps? They make so much money from that. Will that not be enough coupled with the great hardware?

6:58Speaker 2:Yeah, they make money on the cut they take of purchases that happen in the App Store, right? But what if I'm using my ChatGPT app and it's doing all these purchases for me outside of the App Store? Does Apple still make that money? I mean.

7:19Speaker 1:Probably not.

7:20Speaker 2:Or it's doing my messaging for me, you know?

7:22Speaker 1:Martha, I'm curious... In your conversations with Apple execs, I mean, did you get into, was there any succession drama or did Tim Cook earn the right to basically choose exactly who he wanted with no resistance?

7:33Speaker 3:Reid, I'm curious if you've heard different. To me, it felt like everyone I talked to was like, John's always been kind of teed up. I mean, they've been having him do various presentations. They've definitely been like parading him out as like a public figure for a while. I also talked to people that talked about how you know, when Johnny Ive left, like it was like the product team and the design team were like the cool kids in Apple. And then when Johnny Ive left, the design team faltered. And then John Ternus's team became the most important.

8:00Speaker 3:So I think people inside Apple weren't too shocked.

8:04Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. I just I also think like Apple has a real talent problem at the at the high end. Like it's not it's just they have to recruit from within because they built this.

8:15Speaker 1:But that's what people would have said when Tim Cook, what an uninspiring choice, what, you know, disaster. No one can follow Steve Jobs. And he took the company to the stratosphere.

8:22Speaker 3:Yeah.

8:23Speaker 2:I mean, Tim, I think everybody can, no one can argue with Tim Cook's success, right? Amazingly successful CEO, you know, really built their China operation, really defended their turf really well. I'm just saying like that is a tough, it's a tough act to follow, but also just it's going to be really hard for them to I'm not even talking about making visionary products. It's not a question of making visionary products. It's just like it's going to be a completely different universe now. This isn't Apple changing. This is like the outside world changing now. And Apple has to adapt to it, if that makes sense.

9:06Speaker 1:More viral than the new flip phone was Jacob Coxon's X-Post. What does she say?

9:16Speaker 2:Yeah, AI is going to kill us all. Or there's a 10% chance.

9:21Speaker 3:I love the one in 10.

9:23Speaker 2:Which is a very... 10% is a very good possibility that we're all going to die. I actually tweeted about this. I'm like, well, if you're working for a company that you think is 10% chance is going to kill all humanity, you should resign. That is... I don't necessarily... I haven't seen... Anything that tells me that there's a 10% chance that large language models are going to kill all of humanity.

9:50Speaker 1:Just to clarify, this was Jacob Coxon, who was, I think, an anthropic employee in his 20s, right? Who quit based on the existential risk to humanity and went viral.

9:59Speaker 3:Yes.

10:00Speaker 2:He's worked at OpenAI, went to Anthropic because Anthropic was the good guys. And then he realized that they're also irresponsible and hurtling toward the end of humanity. And if you actually think that large language models are on a path to take over humanity and kill us all, you should not work on that.

10:22Speaker 1:Well, you should be the CEO.

10:23Speaker 3:He should get promoted.

10:27Speaker 1:Yeah.

10:28Speaker 2:The counter argument to what I'm saying is, well, but I'm a good guy. I'm going to go work at this company and I'm going to find a way to build this technology safely. There is no There is no big breakthrough. There have been no advances in understanding the neural networks that underpin these large language models. We don't know what the so-called neurons are doing, these vast databases of matrix multiplication. We can't figure out why the math leads to the outcomes of these models. This is the field of interpretability. Tiny little breakthroughs, but we're not anywhere near near understanding them. So this idea that you could somehow steer it and make it safe, if you if you think it's going down this path or destroying humanity is ludicrous, you should just resign. Like no one should work on a technology they think is going to kill humanity, or even if there's a 1% chance or a point 001% chance, like, don't build it. I mean, I agree. I agree with his position morally, I don't agree with it. I haven't seen the evidence. personally, that he's right, that this is so dangerous. But I don't know. What do you think, Margo?

11:45Speaker 3:I mean, they all talk about it like it's the Manhattan Project, right? I always think about when Sam Altman brought the employees to go see Oppenheimer, as if Oppenheimer is like, this was good. Oppenheimer was really happy with his decision to develop the nuclear bomb.

11:59Speaker 2:Yeah.

11:59Speaker 3:But I always think of there was a Vanity Fair piece about Anthropic where the reporter basically like was getting a tour of the Anthropic offices and the employees were like, we don't wear sunscreen because AI is going to cure cancer. And he left his phone. I know he left his phone recording, you know, by accident, air quotes, went to the bathroom, came back, listened to it. And the employees were like, oh, do you think he bought it? Like there is an element of like these guys. I think like to picture themselves living in like a sci-fi novel and yeah, there's like a LARPing element of it that I find so funny.

12:34Speaker 2:Yeah.

12:35Speaker 1:Reed, what about you? I mean, does, does it like, do people in your like group chats and your life on the West coast, like do people take this seriously or is it just like a tidal wave of kind of, you know, same, same.

12:47Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I, I, I talked to these people, the effective altruists who think that we're all going to die. I, yeah. I mean, when I, when I, you know, when I'm thinking, when I'm writing about this, I talk to them. I am asked the, we're all going to die people, what they think. And I, and I bounce my views off of them. And I, I actually take what these people say at face value. And then I, and then I think about it, right? Like I, I, there's no reason to like dismiss this as like doomerism or something, right?

13:17Speaker 2:Like we should, we should take these arguments and we should dissect them and try to figure out what's, you know, where the truth is, where the risk is. I just don't, I think a lot of this stuff is just so, it's still so theoretical. Um, like the arguments that, that, that people like Coxon are making is that, well, if you look at the trajectory of this technology, it's getting a lot more powerful. And so if you just, you just extrapolate out, like, you know, two or three, 10 years from now, it will just be so powerful that we'll take over humanity. But if you kind of like, if you kind of like apply that same argument to say, like, you know, deep blue beating Gary Kasparov in chess, right?

13:58Speaker 2:You know, that happened, you know, 40 something years ago, like AI should have killed killed us all decades ago. And so I think sometimes, like, you can have a very mathematical, kind of scientific mind almost, and then and then sort of come to, I think, the wrong conclusion, which is like, this is imminent. I think they talk about the Manhattan Project, like they're building a you know, a nuclear bomb right now. They're not building a nuclear bomb right now, in my view, they're, they're physicists in the 1920s, you know, in the 19 teens, and they're making physics breakthroughs on our understanding of the way the physical world works. And one day that could lead to someone creating a nuclear bomb. But we're just not there yet.

14:45Speaker 2:Like this is this is a much earlier phase in the in the trajectory of this technology.

14:50Speaker 3:I understand what you're saying about the AI itself not being a nuclear bomb, but I do think there's follow-on effects. I remember I met with this young founder who was backed by Peter Thiel, and he was buying up anthrax and all of these neurotoxins that are shockingly easy to get. And I think you've already had... I'm just saying this because the guy that quit cited bioweapons as his big thing, right? And I don't think you need to reach AGI for...

15:20Speaker 3:AI to help you build a bioweapon. You know what I mean? I think that that's probably, if not already capable of it, I think that's pretty close.

15:30Speaker 2:Well, that's totally true. But then is having the AGI is going to kill all humanity in five years, is that sucking oxygen out of the room and away from the actual problems that we do need to deal with? Like, I mean, bioterrorism is one. I think a much more pressing issue that could kill far more many people is the security issue, right? The cybersecurity issue. I think people are not paying enough attention to the fact that we have critical infrastructure that's running on Windows XP and needs to be updated and needs to be patched and has That has been true for decades, for a decade.

16:11Speaker 1:I mean, look at what Stuxnet was able to basically destroy, nuclear power plants from the inside or nuclear reactors from the inside in Iran. If you're right about the trend, and it seems like from all the stories recently, towards it being much easier to do cyber attacks and then turning this against infrastructure. I mean, that's impressive.

16:31Speaker 2:I think we need to have a huge national effort, probably international effort, to harden the to completely change the way the internet works to deal with this threat. We probably should have been doing that anyway. A lot of the problems that we're facing because of AI, let's not even call it AI, let's just call it software automation. These problems are things that we should have already fixed and now the timeline is accelerating. Things like income inequality, right?

17:02Speaker 2:Like The fact that AI is not going to take away all of our jobs, it's probably going to create more jobs. That's not the issue. The issue is even today, people work full-time jobs like here in the Bay Area and don't have enough to get by. So people have jobs. Unemployment's really low and people can't get by.

17:21Speaker 3:Sam Allman says we're going to have universal basic income. So don't you worry.

17:26Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the path to universal basic income? Like a revolution in between now and then?

17:32Speaker 1:Well, maybe solving the great breakthroughs of science, as you alluded to, Reid.

17:37Speaker 2:We have a fantastic opportunity here to solve a lot of problems, like to make great breakthroughs in science. The problem is, If we don't fix these like structural issues in society, then we don't get to have those, you know, we don't get to have the nice things. That's the issue, I think.

17:54Speaker 3:Dare I say we should nationalize AI?

17:57Speaker 2:We probably, I think that ship has sailed. It would have been better. We voted on this as a country to basically say, oh, this whole like government is the center of like technology innovation and it's sort of part of this military industrial complex. We don't like that. Let's have the private sector do it all for us. And I, I don't, I think, I think, you know, I don't know. I think there's any going back, like at least not anytime soon, but yeah, it would have been better.

18:24Speaker 1:Maybe it would have been better or, or maybe it wouldn't have happened.

18:27Speaker 3:Right.

18:28Speaker 1:I mean, it's, it's always, you know, counterfactuals.

18:30Speaker 3:I mean, Sam Altman wouldn't have woken up one day and hit publish on chat GBT and now kids use it for everyday homework. You know what I mean? Like, I think that it would have been a much slower rollout and wouldn't that have been nice?

18:42Speaker 1:I do want to ask you both about science and tech, though, because there was a big story this week that OpenAI claimed to have solved one of the millennium math problems in just 88 hours. But then there was some controversy that, A, there may have been some kind of private OpenAI chats that were read along the way. And B, one of the researchers behind this breakthrough works for Anthropic and OpenAI are trying not to credit him as a result. Is that a fair summary of what happened?

19:07Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a fair summary. open AI was got super competitive. I feel like Margo, like this is like, to me, it's like, this is where like academia meets like the world of journalism. It's like, Oh, I hear some, some other publications trying to get a scoop. Like I'm going to try to get it first. You know, I like this happened to me in the wall street journal yesterday, actually, you know, this little scoop mini scoop. I don't know. You tell me if you disagree. I think the real question is like, well, okay, but what does this mean?

19:37Speaker 2:The fact that AI can now solve these big problems in math, what effect is that going to have on science on, you know, in the real world and applications?

19:47Speaker 1:I have, I have absolutely no idea. I had, I had, I had Karina Hong who, who founded Axiom Math. I'm not sure if you've come across her, but she's one of the, like, you know, under, under 30 or maybe even under 25, like a unicorn founders. And she was basically saying that like the, the reward of like verifiable, like solving the greatest problems of mathematics in terms of like verifiable proof. can unlock a new wave of computing, which has totally uncontemplated economic and scientific and other benefits.

20:18Speaker 1:I found it, if I'm being very honest, a little hard to follow.

20:21Speaker 2:I asked ChatGPT, and it told me that this was huge because it's going to have all these implications in quantum computing and nuclear fusion and all these. It's going to help advance all these areas. And I still cannot tell you why that is the case. But I think that's what's exciting about it.

20:42Speaker 3:Who cares?

20:43Speaker 2:This happens all the time in academia, arguing about credit. It's like, okay, but how's the world going to change, right? That's what we should focus on.

20:53Speaker 1:Well, OpenAI get the million dollars from the Clay Foundation who support the millennium math problem.

20:58Speaker 3:I love that OpenAI is getting a little reward for it. They need more money.

21:01Speaker 2:They better donate that.

21:05Speaker 1:Last of the kind of headline roundup, and Margot, you know, as a Vanity Fair contributing writer, I'm curious for your take on Silicon Valley taking over the silver screen. There is a Sam Altman movie, which premiered recently at a festival, being likened to the social network. There's an Elon doc by Alex Gibney that he hates. There's a Nathan Field documentary about Elizabeth Holmes coming. Tell me about all these projects.

21:32Speaker 3:Yeah, well, the Nathan Fielder, it's what I'm most excited for, which is that he interviewed Elizabeth Holmes, the Toronto's founder that lied about all these blood tests. And it's like three hours. He's kept it secret forever. And he basically followed her around for like her last free 30 days before she went to prison for I don't know how long, actually.

21:51Speaker 2:But.

21:53Speaker 3:He's so interesting. If you've seen the rehearsal, if you've seen his other shows, like he gets really weird. Like it's going to be so weird. And I don't know. I've been like racking my brain trying to figure out why she agreed to do this. It's like, it's like not really going to like tell her story really in any coherent way. I don't think.

22:12Speaker 1:It's like, do you remember when Ali G, Sasha Baron Cohen first came along and did like Trump and Rudy Giuliani. And then obviously he did Borat and, And part of the joke was that the people weren't in on it. But it's kind of an interesting meta thing where she knows exactly who Nathan Fielder is, but she still doesn't. It's kind of... She just could have.

22:29Speaker 3:Given this access to anyone. And I like the idea because I'm obsessed with Nathan Fielder. I think women love Nathan Fielder. And maybe she just wanted to hang out with him, which I relate to.

22:43Speaker 1:Reid, have you been following the Elon Alex Gibney drama? And how's Sam Altman feeling about his biopic?

22:48Speaker 2:Yeah. I, the, the Gibney, uh, not, not as much, but the Altman thing for sure. I watched the, I watched the preview. Um, yeah, I did, I did actually participate in the Gibney documentary once. I'm a big fan of his, so I'll be interested in, uh, in seeing that. But, but I think, I don't know, the Altman one, I wrote a piece about this and I just think it's, it looks from the preview, like a huge missed opportunity to me. Like I'd be interested in Margo's view on this, but like, It just looks like this sort of caricature of him to try to make him look like a supervillain.

23:20Speaker 2:And he's walking through his, like, I don't think, I actually asked someone at OpenAI if Sam Altman's bunker actually looks like that. Because, like, he's got mood lighting around his, like, automatic weapons and stuff. And, like, come on.

23:34Speaker 3:It, like, looks kind of like a club.

23:35Speaker 2:I've been to some of these bunkers before. And, like, well, I've been, okay, I've been to one bunker.

23:41Speaker 1:Okay, tell me about, I've been to a bunker, too. Tell me about your bunker.

23:44Speaker 2:Yeah. I was like, look, I read about your bunker. Can you please take me to show your bunker? And I want to see it. And I went down and I was like, this looks like a den in Minnesota. I don't see any guns.

23:57Speaker 1:There's no canned food.

23:59Speaker 2:I bet you Altman's bunker is super boring looking. I could be wrong. I've done no reporting on this other than asking one person at opening eye. But that aside, I'm like... the social network was great. It was great. This drama between Zuckerberg and, you know, and Winklevii and Eduardo and all this stuff. But like, this is like Altman versus Musk. Like that is the founder story, right?

24:25Speaker 3:Yeah, true. Having it be about him, them pushing him out, like, I don't know. Yeah.

24:29Speaker 2:And it's like, it's like the whole preview was like, we're going to launch this thing called ChatGPT and it's going to bring down entire industries and governments and all this stuff. And it's like, no, that was like an accident. They're like, maybe we should release our chat bot and just see what happens.

24:45Speaker 3:It definitely overestimates how much of a mastermind these guys are.

24:49Speaker 2:Always. Totally. It's like, it's like reality is actually more interesting than like, let's see if we can turn this guy into a bond villain or something in my view, but that's just a preview. So I could be, I could be wrong.

25:02Speaker 1:I was in Toronto in, um, albania about two years ago and uh the dictator uh communist dictator envir hoxha has built the largest underground bunker in the world it had a hall of deputies and then like it was a kind of nested thing where he assumed that more and more people would die as like food ran out and then you just got to like his bedroom and uh And of course, I think it was completed one day before he died, as these things often are. And I'm just thinking, it's funny that the fantasies of bunkers are shared by the dying communist dictators of the Cold War and today's Silicon Valley overlords.

25:42Speaker 3:That's beautiful. Isn't Zuckerberg building a four-story one, I think, in Hawaii?

25:45Speaker 2:Yeah. I just think it's funny that these people think that somehow they're the ones who are going to end up in the last fancy bedroom in the bunker. No, some security guard who's really good with weapons is just going to take your bunker from you as soon as society ends. I'm sorry, do you.

26:04Speaker 3:Remember the Paul Graham quote about Sam Altman where he was like, if he went to an island of cannibals, he would emerge as king of the cannibals?

26:11Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's not true. He's going to rock that bunker. No, no, no. They're missing the point. The point is like, the, the world that we built benefits people with like mathematical skills and like intellect. Right. And like, they're talking about a world where we go back to like, just benefits whoever's stronger. Like, you're not sorry. Like, yeah, I know Zuckerberg's ripped, but like, you know, he's, he's not going to be the strongest guy. So it's, it's over for like, as soon as society crumbles, like none of these tech bros are going to last for like a week. It's like, it's over.

26:43Speaker 1:This is the perfect pivot. I can just read my ad break through. I don't need to edit it live. When we come back, why tech bros are abandoning the screen for a more rugged future. Stay with us. Welcome back. Margot, you wrote a piece of Vanity Fair this summer titled Silicon Valley's Empire State of Minds. What's it about? Who is Turner Caldwell? And how did you end up in the National Gallery of Art with him?

27:27Speaker 3:Yeah, Turner Caldwell, he was 33 when I wrote it. Stanford grad, you know, kind of really typical Silicon Valley resume guy. And he's founded Mariana Minerals, which has a ton of money that's raised another giant round from Andreessen Horowitz. And they are buying up mines and retrofitting them with, you know, AI equipment, AI-ifying it. And he's part of a broader push from Silicon Valley who has realized that actually building all these data centers is going to take, you know, rocks and materials that we have let China become the monopoly on developing these minerals that we need.

28:04Speaker 3:And so they are sending these young men, often in their 20s and 30s, and they're going to Utah and they're going to Kentucky and they're going to Africa and they're returning to the mines.

28:17Speaker 1:I mean, they're buying defunct mothballed mines or they're starting new mines or they're buying operating mines, but putting in a better AI control room. What's the thesis here?

28:30Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's a bunch of companies that are doing different things. Turner in particular right now is buying up old mines in the US and restarting them. I think at some point he'll want to create new mines, but it's a lot easier from obviously like a regulatory perspective to like restart old mines. But, you know, there's one called Whetstone that's buying up ocean rights. They can do deep sea mining. There's one called Cobalt Metals who's run by this really, you know, like.

28:58Speaker 3:Rugged cowboy guy that likes to paint himself that way. And they're using AI to find new minerals in the Congo. The end goal for a lot of these companies is to vertically integrate their mines, to buy, to own the mine, to find the materials, and to do it all themselves.

29:16Speaker 2:Mining is a great job, by the way. I know there's the whole coal mine stuff, but it's actually a great job. I remember the Wall Street Journal article wrote this story years ago about how in Australia, these mining companies were paying people well into the six figures to go work in these mines in the middle of Australia. And they had like so many applications from people.

29:40Speaker 1:Well i think mine is a great job in in a well-regulated you know australia slash united states environment obviously i've got dear friend of mine nicholas niokas wrote a book called the elements of power which is largely centered in the in the congolese mining industry where i think it's it's definitely not a fun job but But I mean, to your point, Reid, one of the interesting details in your story, Margot, is that the US produces about 200 mining engineers every year, whereas China graduates, China produces several thousand.

30:10Speaker 3:Yeah. When I started reporting this piece, I didn't know whether I was going to take, you know, a tech angle to it of like, okay, well, can AI really make mining that much more efficient? And what I think surprised me the most is that the biggest problem mining really has right now is it's a labor problem. China... has a huge population and also an authoritarian government. So they have been buying up mines in Africa and they just, they just send their people. They have so many people.

30:35Speaker 3:We can just send them to the mines. Um, the U S does not have a, a labor pool that, that wants to go to the mines.

30:42Speaker 2:Well, they want to go to mines in Australia. Tell you that much.

30:46Speaker 3:Yeah. I will say when I talked to cobalt metals, they're like, people want to go to Zambia. They've won in Sweden. They're like, we send people to Sweden.

30:52Speaker 2:I bet if they were paying the right salary, like people would go.

30:55Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, they're portraying it as this like, what I find funny is that most of the labor at these mines is like they need old mining talent, people that know how to run a mine. And then like 20 to 30% is like they need to convince like Stanford grads that like their future is in Utah, which I think is like so interesting. And the way they do it is they're like, you know, AI is going to replace a lot of these companies that you're at. You think that software company you're going to go to, you know, right out of school at Stanford is going to exist in five, 10 years?

31:24Speaker 2:Like, no.

31:26Speaker 3:But the mines, the mines will be there.

31:29Speaker 1:Is this primarily a story about copper in data centers and cobalt in lithium ion batteries? When we talk about mining, are we talking about copper and cobalt mining?

31:38Speaker 3:For Turner, yes. There's a plethora of other critical minerals that, honestly, I would need a degree in geology to really tell you in depth about. But copper is a huge one. It is really necessary for the wiring in data centers. And then also, as we build these data centers, we have to build new energy sources. And, you know, if we're going to build new nuclear plants, that takes a lot of specialized materials that right now we have to buy from China.

32:07Speaker 2:I was talking with an executive at a big company involved in data centers and about bottlenecks. And he's like, everything's a bottleneck. Like the whole world is a bottleneck. Like we can't get we can't get anything. It's like from the minerals to glass for optics, like everything is we're short of everything. And so my big question is, like, well, this is like, at what point is that are we going to start seeing like, just jobs everywhere, right? Like, like a massive boom, and like a big economic boom for everyone, right? Because if everything is a bottleneck, that's got to create tons of jobs, right? Like, at some point, we're going to see that. And I think this mining thing is like, is maybe one example, or just the tip of the iceberg.

32:52Speaker 3:Reid, you know what you just summarized? The American dynamism thesis for Andreessen Horowitz.

32:56Speaker 2:Yeah, it is kind of.

32:57Speaker 3:It's a great advertisement.

32:59Speaker 2:But it's happening. It's happening now. Why are we not seeing... I guess there's just a delay, right?

33:06Speaker 3:Well, so you see... And I cover tech more from a cultural perspective. And what I love is you see a lot of these companies that are getting investment from Andreessen Horowitz, which... By the way, they became famous for software eats the world. And now they realize we need to go back to the physical world. But these companies, they do deals with states. They say we're going to bring, you know, 2000 jobs. And then they throw these like big, sexy parties in like random places in the South. Like Adrian, which is like an AI defense manufacturer, like they manufacture parts using automation. And they opened a big factory that had gone out of business in Alabama. And they had Lynyrd Skynyrd there. And through reporting the story, I got invited to, you know, Uranium Enrichment Party in Tennessee. The mine opening in Utah. And they try to make them these like sexy things.

33:57Speaker 2:I love that.

33:58Speaker 1:I'm curious. I want to ask you more about that part of it. Before that, I mean, on the financing side, like, And Reid, I want you to reflect on this because it seems like we're in such a crazy moment where, to your point, venture capital and recent software is the world. How can venture investors who typically had a 10-year horizon and wanted one or two 100x returns to return the portfolio, how could venture capital possibly be the right financing model for mining?

34:30Speaker 3:I totally agree. And that is something that I ask people. So I was like, how is venture capital? Like the amount of money they need, the amount of money that's even wasted just trying to find new mining locations is really immense. No one told me this. Like, this is kind of my theory, which is that like, you know, if Andreessen Horowitz invests 50 million in a company and the company operates a mine and whatever, even if that company fails, part of me is like, maybe they just need...

34:57Speaker 3:to have first access to those minerals for the next five years. And maybe that's worth it for them.

35:03Speaker 1:Yeah, but bringing these mines, bringing mothballed mines back online, like, I mean, look at what's going on in Venezuela. It's like, it's all very well to say, oh, we've got the largest proven reserves in the world of crude oil, and we're going to be hundreds of billions of dollars. But the patience required to actually extract resources from the physical world, the geopolitical issues, the legal issues, I mean, just To me, it speaks of an industry of people who have got a little bit high on their own supply in terms of their ability to actually deliver value from these investments to themselves and their LPs. I mean, it just doesn't seem, it seems like really hard to believe for me.

35:37Speaker 3:I totally agree.

35:38Speaker 2:I think to your question about like, how does this make sense? It's like, well, one thing that's happened since I moved out to the Bay Area here, when I got out here 10, just over 10 years ago, it was like a big venture fund was like $ 300 million, right? And now like the Andreessen Horowitz, I think across all of their funds is like $ 100 billion. So that's an insane amount of venture capital to deploy. And so they actually need to find some really high dollar investments. There just aren't enough good software investments in the Bay Area to, they would have to invest in like every company and there'd be no room for anyone else. So- Yeah, it's a lot easier. It's one reason why like a lot of venture capitalists have actually left these big funds and gone and started their own funds with their own money because you can make such a bigger percentage return on your capital with a smaller amount of money to invest in venture. So I think that's where the economics are.

36:48Speaker 2:Whether or not it's a good investment long term, I mean, who knows? I mean, I personally, I think it's It's great. I think venture capitalists, the problem with the last 10 years that I saw was that VCs weren't making big, bold bets, which is the whole point of VC. They shouldn't be investing in an online sock retailer. They should be making investments on science and technology that are risky. And I want to see more VCs invest in failed companies because otherwise they're not taking enough risk.

37:21Speaker 3:I would also say, too, that now we're cool with the Gulf again, which is where a lot of these companies will then get money.

37:28Speaker 2:We are very cool with the Gulf.

37:30Speaker 3:Yeah, we're fine. We're fine with it. So they'll just go to the southern world funds.

37:33Speaker 1:And it'll work out. Well, I mean, they're having their own problems right now, to say the least. I mean, we'll see what happens with their ability to export their petrochemicals in the next year or so with the Iran conflict. But that's sort of by the by. I think I want to to sort of close, Margot, by asking about the kind of cultural elements of this story. Like, we joked before the break about, like, about tech bros being, you know, shot before they can get into their bunkers by their much more physically competent bodyguards. How much of the, like, Old West, Yellowstone, like, you know, cowboy mining fantasy, like, how powerful and present is that in this story?

38:18Speaker 3:Oh, my God. So much. I will say this is a phrase that I think I've used in two pieces and gotten away with. And I need to stop soon because someone's going to notice is like generational ennui. Like I, I think there is a sense amongst younger people that they are just so screwed. Like there's been a lot of talk about how computer science majors, like, is that really a promise? Is that really going to deliver you to, you know, a great job anymore? And I talked to one founder that left his job in wall street to found one of these mining companies. And He talked about, he's like, there's bragging rights because everyone there is joking about how their jobs are going to be eaten alive by AI. They're seeing it, right? Like he's like, I have friends at consultant firms. Accenture is just counting how many times you use AI and they're judging you by that.

39:02Speaker 3:And he's like, there's a bragging rights to it when you tell them that like, I'm in the desert right now. I'm, you know, in the Congo. And I think that's also like a big part of the defense tech boom too, is like there is like a cultural clout in it. I think there's a desire for it to be a bomb to a generation that feels like the world has, um, totally screwed them over.

39:25Speaker 1:So this is, this is in, cell revolution but uh funded by vc is all you're saying.

39:33Speaker 3:All the stanford gods are going to be you know in kentucky in the congo that's what.

39:37Speaker 1:I'm saying it was the other piece about generational and we your trad wife piece.

39:41Speaker 3:Yeah yeah it was thanks for reading and don't tell people don't tell.

39:45Speaker 1:My editor that i read any any final thoughts on this one.

39:50Speaker 2:I think there's a, there's a, uh, the more, the more the world becomes automated by software, um, and the more our lives are forced online, I think the more we crave things that are tactile, that are analog, that are real. I think that's why people flock to go see, um, you know, to see the Odyssey on 70 millimeter, right? You could get tickets, you could get tickets to go see the IMAX laser, And I, I probably couldn't even tell the difference between the laser and the 70 millimeter projection, but people wanted the 70 millimeter. Right. And I, I think that's, that's one example, but you know, I think like it's why people still buy record players. There's just a, and I think the mining thing and wanting to be out there doing something real and building something, I think that that's, that's beyond that. That doesn't make you an incel.

40:41Speaker 2:I think that's like, you're just human. Like this is, this is like what we are biologically programmed for. And like, and I think people reject, they're rejecting like the, the sort of artificial, you know, influencer, social media world that has been like foisted on us by not just the tech companies, but by like, Just a lot of people who dove into that.

41:05Speaker 1:To be fair, I was a bit triggered by the grandiosity of those company names. I mean, Hadrian, the Roman emperor keeping the barbarians on the other side of the wall. Mariana, the deepest part of the ocean. It's just always, I find it a bit like... At.

41:21Speaker 2:Least it's not a Lord of the Rings.

41:22Speaker 1:That gives me ennui.

41:23Speaker 3:Yeah, whenever I see a defense company that's not Lord of the Rings, I'm like, it's a small win for the culture.

41:31Speaker 1:That's all we have time for. Margot, thanks for joining us for the first time. I hope it won't be the last.

41:34Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been fun.

41:36Speaker 1:And Reid, thank you always. Absolutely.

41:38Speaker 2:Good to meet you, Margot.

41:55Speaker 1:For Tech Stuff, I'm Oz Veloshian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis. It was executive produced by me and Julia Nutter for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Inslee mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.