YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Jurvetson

lines on the record: 199
first: 2018-05-31
most recent: 2018-05-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's because the number of idea pairings is growing as a to the n factor, it's called Reid's law, with the number of ideas on the planet. And once you break down the barriers between formally discrete academic disciplines and strip all that vernacular away, there are independent ways of communicating with each other that are so isolating. And you see the common patterns like, wait a second, that's just like a information theory I saw there on the microbial design fronts, like that same problems have all these rich array of new ideas is a sort of meta reason where you can't really quantify how strong this would be. We'll probably see more innovation than ever before. And it's not just because we all will see more innovation than ever before. It's because this combinatorial explosion of idea pairings is happening globally. And oh, by the way, it's about to explode when the next 4 billion people come online. We go from 2 to 6 billion people online because of satellite broadband that SpaceX and others are developing. That's all coming in the next five years. Like, holy shit, we're going to have a just explosion idea possibilities and innovation across the planet.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so that pairing, I think, harkens back to one other thought that might bring this whole thing full circle, which is every great idea is a recombination of prior ideas. This is a really powerful and simple idea that was popularized in three different books at the same time, which I think is meta-ironic, that their argument at the same time as every good idea happens around the same time. And the reason I think that's interesting is you can think in history, Edison, and Tesla and Marconi, it's like the time was ripe given the breakthroughs that had just happened in electricity and magnetism to think about AC induction motors and radio and everything else that got invented by all those same people all within months of each other. Today, writ large, we have many more ideas. We have the internet allowing us to cross pollinate ideas like never before. These two things that are unique that you pollinate together, the calligraphy and the computer design for jobs or what have you, the number of possible pairings is growing combinatorially. And I think that's why we have accelerating change technology. That's why Moore's law exists over such a long time frame. It's not because of the semiconductor industry.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of wisdom there because it's that pairing. That's, I think, why most scientific breakthroughs are interdisciplinary. There are someone outside of the field of chemistry working with someone maybe in the field to come with a breakthrough, not someone at the core of, again, in academic discipline. And this is why universities are such areas of foment of innovation is because they have all the disciplines under one physical campus. But if you just had a chemistry department or just a chemistry college, it wouldn't make world breaking changes, right? The people who figured out the structure of DNA were like an ornithologist and a physicist, not chemists, right? Not crystallographers. Well, actually, Rosalind Parks needs to get credit. Let's give a shout out to her. So she's the traditionalist in that regard. But more and more people think about Elon, not domain expert entering a new domain. It's the cross-pollination, right? Bringing, let's say, software design modalities to the aerospace industry.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find that helpful. Yeah, because everyone does have some element to that question, and they also have something they've done that back to that early question when I was entering venture capital, how am I different from every other venture capitalist who's trying to do this job? There's something about your personal background. It could be a language skill. It could be, wow, you had to take care of an aging grandmother in your youth, and so you have a sympathy and empathy for what the agent are going through that others lack. Like that actually could be superhero strength if you want to be an entrepreneur for this aging demographic of baby boomers. Not everyone, in fact, very few entrepreneurs think about the aged, for example.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About your career as a pursuit of passion, thinking about what you're uniquely good at that no one else in your random walkthrough life may have done, and to keep that in mind as you hopefully infuse with a bit of technical open-mindedness and creativity and childlike mind an exploration of what you want to do that there's just like, it's no better time to be entering the world and trying to make a difference. I try to encourage them a lot to think entrepreneurially, to think about being change agents for the world that everything that history books we've written about is some new entrant entering a field they didn't know much about prior and encouraging them that this is what increasingly defines the world we live in.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm trying to remember what it was. I was trying to, well, here's the advice I got that really helped think about when you were their age. And the more time I spend thinking about what life was like with me as a senior, because I went to that same school, it all sort of clicked into place. What do I want to do with my life? What's going on in the world? And sort of weaving what I was learning from a capital and all the amazing entrepreneurs that I was seeing to convey to them like, wow, you are entering the most exciting period in human history. And I shared a little bit about things we spoke about on this podcast around things going on in synthetic biology, things going on in AI and what have you. Each of these areas is so rich with opportunity. And I gave him some general advice about just thinking.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can actually give you show notes. I managed to keep a copy, and someone even translated it in Spanish. Oh, amazing. Yeah, great.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny you should ask once for my high school, and it was the most terrifying thing I've ever done. Like, like, I love public speaking. I did debate back in high school. And when I'm speaking to an audience that's somewhat similar to the audiences I've spoken to before, check if it's on subjects I've spoken about before, check. This is my power alley. I don't mind that. Oh my God, trying to be relevant to a bunch of 18-year-olds. Wow, it was back in Dallas. Yeah. But I did that a few years back.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would not say I want to say, but if someone actually wants to get into it, it's actually remarkably easy to learn. When I said it's weird, the labor market arbitrage is I don't think it takes more than six to eight months to become really a domain expert in this.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I go to conferences a number of times, there's a real dearth of other people doing that same summarization. But I would say that the group of Canada, so everything from Hinton. To Yashu Binjo, to Andrew Eng the leading edge of R&D and such, and they give really good talks. It's just not all of them. Some of them are deeply technical. Some of them are overviews. So I'll try to find for you some examples of talks they gave that are for the average person.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've been reading once in the back of my mind, I'm like, well, was that too technical? But I bet you I can dig some up. Yeah, sure. And it may sound self-serving, but I've tried to give some of those talks.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a tough one. Maybe for your show notes, I can try to come up with some. So, part of the challenge I had is because I started a PhD in this, I didn't seek the generic ones.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me think. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's a good overview. The places, well, I know that Coursera and some of these places are trying, and Sebastian Thrun's Udacity are trying to do deep learning courses and such. And I haven't taken those. I don't know how good they are. I would imagine even.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started my lifelong fascination of the biological metaphors and technology, everything from all that stuff we're talking about earlier about cellular automata and iterative algorithms and evolution is itself an iterative algorithm, the power of evolution, the power of genetic engineering, all this stuff. So he was ahead of his time. He wrote this book last century and it recently got translated the Mandarin. It's just in the current day is one of his probably most popular books in China today, even though he wrote it decades ago because it's actually very relevant today. So that'd be a good starting point, I think. It segues into the technology that either as a practitioner or just you can read about this if you just direct yourself, either simple Google searches or there's the particular book I'd point out just to learn about deep learning, learning about neural networks. The reason I say that is I've never seen a greater demand for a technology and a scarcity of supply, like the salaries being afforded to engineers in this area are out of control.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two things that jump to mind. One is a general purpose overview of what's important, almost like a survey level where if you're just a business executive and you want to make sure you're not blindsided by some development that may be relevant, but not be a practitioner. And then there could be the question of, well, is there something that, let's say you're a former autonomous vehicle driver and now you're looking for the next thing, like what might you want to study to engage in the economy as a practitioner? There are some areas that are more, I think easily approached than another. So on the so first on the overall survey, I think there are some writers who do a good job bringing you with a sort of overview mentality to like, what's really going on in the world, people like Kevin Kelly, and maybe Matt Ridley and maybe and a few others like this going back with Hofstadler and Good Elisha Bach, there's been a variety. But I might highlight, let's say, Kevin Kelly because the single book that's had the most influence”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some way to scale that up, but it just felt like to me there was a definite technology risk there to just, I couldn't see the hand waving arm that says, why is that going to eat a thousand times better? You could. But I don't see why it has to. It might not. Whereas this other thing, growing cells in a fat inherently scales. It's like just have a bigger fat. It's like it's 3D to start with. It's not a 2D layering. There's something about that manufacturing method. I guess that's borne out in things like brewing beer and a variety of fermentation tasks where you kind of understand how to generate metric tons of stuff with a fermentation process.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just the chunk of meat out of the middle, it's just a chunk of meat. So, do you have much bigger challenges with the printed organs that lent itself naturally to a 3D printer kind of approach? And it works wonderfully for some organs. They've been growing kidneys and some of the connective tissue stuff around reconstructive surgery for the face and what have you. But it's slow. It's also a great example of personalized one-to-one market. Like you want to grow cells that are compatible with your body so that they would source your stem cells to grow your organ for you. It's kind of a different approach in a number of ways intuitively from what you want to mass produce for consumption where you can just have who cares where the cow could all be the same cow clone that you're growing the beef from whereas every human implant wants to be immune compatible with what you've got. So the spin out didn't make as much sense to me to say, well, let's try to produce metric tons of meat using that 3D printer, like in any sense of a 3D printer. I'm sure they're going to figure out.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just No, it is a good question. In fact, the first sort of clean meat or alternative meat company that I came across was using, ironically, the reverse sequence, which is it's spun out of a company that was doing organs. They'd printed bladders. There's a kid I met who's 18 years old. He's lived with a grown bladder for many years now. But that was more like a 3D printer. So when you're growing a specific organ that needs to be functional, super important to get a lot of the details right. A chunk of skeletal muscle, you know, if you just take it from the centerpiece versus the end with sinew, there's variation if you want to make it function like a muscle and the connection to your sinews and what have you making.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you could also, a small donor to revive and restore, which is trying to bring back the mammoth and extinct species. So you could go back to have the mammoth editor. That's true.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it like a glucose mixture with amino acids? It's like a serum, like a blood serum. It's kind of like what you find in your blood to make your blood cells live. So it's a variety of stuff that's used for very research purposes, but there's no reason it couldn't. And then the third is just various engineering optimizations on the cells and the mixtures and what combinations of cells. Do you want to try to boost the fat content of each cell or have separate muscle and fat? Do you want to have it all be like one bite does all, or do you want to have two different types?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's three vectors of making it cheaper. Two are like total gimmeys, and one just engineering. The gimmeys are just making a bigger plant. So if you, like you brew beer, if you just have a one liter facility on your desktop at home and you're amortized the cost of you home to make one liter of beer at a time, it's going to be expensive liter of beer, even if the formula is the same as a huge production plant. So scale. The second is cheaper feedstocks. Just feed it something other than the very, very expensive serum they're using now in R&D purposes to minimize variables. They're using pharmaceutical grade inputs to feed the cells, if you will. What?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're still in development because of the cost side at scale. So this company's, so when I mentioned the challenge of the plant-based substitutes is engineering, something that people won't mistake. I mean, the taste as good, that's the key engineering challenge. Here, the whole thing is just cost, because you can make something that's indistinguishable. It just costs too much right now. Right.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that we just look right past today. It's kind of like being a slave owner in America back in the 1700s. The economy depends on it. I don't want to ask questions about how those slave ships, I'm sure slave owners didn't visit slave ships, and in the few that did, we're like, oh my God, we've got to change this, right? You just don't want to look. And once you have the economic alternative that doesn't have any compromises, it's not like, oh, it's not really bacon or it's not really steak. It's the same thing. Just no animal died Then you'll have the moral shift, I think profoundly.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Visit a slaughterhouse for the first time. I won't do that today. I like eating meat so much that I refuse to go visit a slaughterhouse. In fact, of the USDA meat inspectors, 99% of them become vegetarian. They don't start that way. If you see how it's made, you wouldn't eat it. And yet I won't do that. And when I say moral, I think our humanities circle of empathy expands over time. First, it was, you know, family unit and the tribe and the nation state, then maybe global citizens. Now I think the interspecies, if you will, empathy is an inevitable trajectory where I would welcome that. That would just be more thoughtful about other sentient organisms and their”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invested in this company as well in the Series A with us. But then I realized something about myself. I realized for the first time something where my future self will condemn my present self is immoral. Yeah. Right. So I know that 50 years from now, once I'm eating the bacon and steak that is not killed an animal in its production, will I be able to...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can see how we'll get from here to there, the buyers, the largest buyers of meat, would absolutely like to diversify their supply chains so they are not vulnerable to influenza or mad cow or any other disruption to their supply chain. You can see how they're going to want to feather that in. So by the way, Tyson and Cargill, two largest meat companies in America.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The end consequence should be much, much lower. And so to me, this had one of those sort of lightning bolt moments of this is the inevitable future, there's no technical risk that says this couldn't happen. There isn't like we have to invent something that hasn't, there's a lot of system engineering to optimize it, the feedstocks, you know, whatever. It's only the right reactor size. It's going to take some engineering, but it's not going to take breakthrough science. It's the same epiphany that when I first rode an electric car, when I first had an autonomous ride early on with the Google ones, the old Priuses that they had automated. It's like, this is the future. Like you could just see it like a clarion bell ringing in your head. And then a few implications started to hit. Wow, this will transform the world in a lot of ways. The amount of land and resources and real estate plays that relate to meat production today. Not to mention, oh, mad cow disease, influenza, H1N1, all these other things that we don't, those collaterals, the damages of the food industry, we haven't even gotten to that.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And by the way, in the future, you can make it healthier, you can make it all omega-3 rich oils. You could tune things. But let's just start with a simple don't confuse the market with no, it's not Turdukin, it's turkey or it's duck. It's not a blend. But imagine blending is like a simple thing. There's no reason you couldn't do infinite blending like blending a wine to make it just the right mouth feel, just the right whatever, right? So, but in the near term, let's not jump ahead of ourselves. It's just a substitute. And you can do this in small, like a Chinese shipping container kind of thing. So you could put this near the point of consumption. You could have this in urban areas. So you're not shipping meat all around the country. It's growing the steak, you know, sort of to order.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an edible gelatin like thing kind of, you know, it's basically some other food product, like we have collagen and other stuff. You have the scaffoldous things, aerogel. The cells differentiate in the merge together into these long fibers, just like our muscle cells. So what we're formerly discrete standalone cells form into one long multinucleated cell, it twitches, it does everything like a normal muscle cell. It is a muscle cell of that species where I tasted the duck most recently. So it's duck muscle. Over time, you can add the irregularities of sinew and all this. Right now it's just like a perfect cut of duck muscle, you know, the mouthfeel, everything, it's just the same thing.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The plant based approach. A lot of engineering, a lot of effort, a lot of money per product. The other approach, and we've invested in called Memphis Meats and others like that, says let's just make steak. Let's make chicken. Let's make any of these products in not just a substitute, make the exact same thing, but don't grow it in a cow. So it's more of a change in the manufacturing method, quite simply, right? Do you have the cow making the steak or do you have it in a lab? No, how do you make it in the lab? Well, the team came from cardiology and other medical backgrounds. They have people that have done work in stem cell biology and people have worked in the whole synthetic biology area. And it's pretty straightforward to grow cells. You take stem cells, you can induce them to be pluripotent or reduce them to be immortal, basically, and you can just grow an infinite number of these cells that could become anything. They could become skeletal muscle. They could become nerves, they could become skin. And the way you differentiate them into skeletal muscle, which is like our muscles and our arms, is you put them on a scaffold that causes them to differentiate into that kind of thing, a scaffold that is”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That means. Exactly. Exactly. They found a root of soy plant that has a molecular cage that holds an iron atom in the center that's called a porphyrin that's the same molecule kind of structure as we have in hemoglobin that makes your blood red, that makes it turn color when it gets out of your body, that makes your right steak turn red, that makes it taste the way it does, that makes it barbecue the way it does, the way it browns, all those things you put in a plant, right? You can also put it, by the way, you can make chicken or red meat. It's kind of fun. But anyway.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I've tried a lot of people. People have been trying every which way to do a veggie burger. There's big breakthroughs recently by using HEAM and plant-based heme just for this view.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why is this possible? There are two major branches of companies that are trying to solve this. One branch is to replace meat with something that's not meat. And I applaud those efforts. It's a little bit of more of an engineering challenge to get it past the consumer. And each product has its own engineer, each and every product is challenging. You make the duck taste like duck, make the chicken taste like chicken, and have it not just be like sausages and hot dogs, but actually filet if you want to take on the whole core of the market. will make a meaningful impact and it'd be important. It's just going to be slow moving because of how hard it is to do each product and to make it anything passable is challenging. Extremely hard.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of those factors, which by the way, for the listeners who don't know this, about a third of all usable land on Earth goes to meat production. So this is the grain that gets fed to cows and pigs and chickens and the land that those animals live on. So like a third of all usable land, it's astounding, right? It's like one of the biggest water problems.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a great question. So the reason I think it's crazy is I think it's one of the major tech themes or factors that will affect a lot of people's lives over the next 10 to 20 years. And not everyone's fully aware of it yet. And it's an inevitability. So back when we were talking about these inevitable futures like all cars will be electric, all vehicles will be autonomous. This is one of those. We will not slaughter animals to get meat. And the question is, is that 50 years out? Is that 500 years out? But just like we won't burn oil and gas 500 years out, there's like just no way we would do that 500 years out, especially not in small internal combustion engines that we won't slaughter a cow to get a steak. And so the insight occurs when you realize, first, it's a much cheaper and efficient way to grow the product you need without the whole cow, like the hide. You don't need the methane production. You don't need all that inefficiency that was an artifact of biological evolution. You don't need the land use, the water use, the energy use. You can cut all that somewhere between 10 and 100.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopefully, not in the same dish. Hopefully not in the same dish. You never know. It could be organ meat. The whole noster tail.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the only caveat is they say that we're shutting down our product lines, but government, you've got to have another company. So give us $4 billion. We'll build a better one. We can do it. We can build us $4 billion. Like we forgot to innovate for 25 years, but now give us a pile of money. We'll start.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said those prices are not real. We could not compete at those price points, even if we had all Western technology. Like it's game over. Other U.S. competitors said, well, we basically have to shut down our product lines. I mean, like, imagine if some competitive oracle or Microsoft said we're going to come out with something like, oh, yeah, you're right, we better stop selling Windows, right? Or we're just going to not do databases anymore because, oh, yeah, that's better. No company responds with, we're shutting down our entire product line. And we were the monopoly. By the way, we were the monopolist prior, right? We were the thing. Right.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But on the other side, you don't usually know, like when I was in software investing as a primary focus, you don't usually find opportunities to make a hundredfold or a thousand fold cost advantage in a product, but you do in some of these areas because they literally have faced no competitive threat for so long. They don't even know what it's like to compete. Take the aerospace industry. There's a number of Chinese ministers who early on when SpaceX gave their pricing for the Falcon 9.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similarly, going up against regulated utilities with solar cities and sort of distributed solar solution. And yes, they're fighting with every dirty trick you can imagine, right? They're trying every angle, but sometimes there's just such a compelling advantage because there's been no new entry for 25 years. They haven't faced a competitive threat in their institutional lifetime. They really don't know how to behave in response. So you have, on one hand, yes, they'll try to do dashily things, and I don't know what to say other than you just kind of hope that enough of normal democracy will flourish that you can overcome that and not have critical wounds. We'll see.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, frankly, that left a lot of large sectors just plump, like a lot of entrepreneurs were avoiding them like the Blake. So when Elon opened our eyes, it says, you can actually take on what might be perceived to be the most non-market, if you will, non-market factors, not like the best product doesn't necessarily win, like the military industrial complex. You can take that on, head on, and just win with a better product. Hmm, right?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the past, in the 90s, especially when the internet was like, you could just do internet for a while and that was fine, we had the mantra to never invest in a regulated sector. And still to this date, try not to invest in anything that requires any law to get passed in order to be in business. Right. The one exception went all in an autonomous driving. The product is currently illegal, but we know it's going to become legal, right? Fully level five autonomous driving. But without exception recently, in the old school, we not only try to avoid regulated environments, we try to avoid if you had to deal with in any way as a customer or partner with utilities or the government or in any of that sector.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And part of what I tried to show with them is that the immune response of a system is often worse in what kills you, not the pathogen, right? So it's often our own immune system that kills us literally as the method of death. And I said, wait, how long till someone puts a battery on fire? Are you going to keep the laptops and cell phones off the plane? Do you realize the economic impact of that? And they don't even want to hear it. I'm glad that hasn't happened quite yet. But I'm like, that's what the terror cell should be doing to cause the most harm. Like have one Yahoo make a half-ass attempt to light a battery on fire in a plane and now look what it'll do.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I didn't think that's that hard. And then you could go a step further, say, okay, well, what about bombs? You know, maybe the plane falls out of the sky. Your luggage could fly separately in an autonomous thing from the plane itself. You'd have a smaller luggage only plane for the actual cargo part. You could have smaller planes, you know, the whole design space starts to change in terms of what the optimal design is if you're not amortizing a pilot anymore in terms of that operational cost. And you could have multiple flights where there was a single one before. Now there's even less people per plane and more flexibility in your routes. All this unpacks. And I asked them, like, have you even calculated the economic impact of the shoe policy? And they didn't know what I meant. Well, you just take how much time did that just add to the queue of the average traveler times the average salary of the average American and just say that economic deadweight loss like”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least not in vernacular products. And I said, Well, there's no question that we could have autonomous flight by then, 18 years in the future, by year 2020, like autonomous planes, because we already can today, right, by the way. Airbus and Boeing, every one of those planes can land better than the pilot could and take off. Everything but taxiing is easy compared to autonomous driving. Any case, no one else was on that page. And I said, well, wait, do you realize what happened is there's no cockpit? You made that a really nice.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I came to that. I think it was the only tech guy there, 18 years. That's a long time to predict things. We'd invested, by the way, in some airport security technology stuff, but I didn't really talk about any of that. I was like, 18 years, that's going to be perhaps 18 doublings of Moore's Law, which would be 256,000 X compute power. Hmm, what might someone do then that they couldn't do now? Well, autonomous flight. It's like, by this way, this long before autonomous driving or autonomous flight or drones was a thing, like those words didn't exist.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And so the drones thing is peripheral, but how to eliminate the TSA was an epiphany I had back, I think it was around 2004. Maybe earlier, maybe 2003. Post 9 11, TSA's, God, in full effect, doing all kinds of crazy things. I think they had just implemented the shoe thing for the first time. And I met this sort of brainstorming effort with them where they gave us the challenge, how can we rapidly or radically streamline airport security operations to get on the plane sooner? And this was at the time looking out 18 years. I don't know why 18 years, maybe it was 2002, and this would be 2020. Maybe it was 2002. Okay.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a hobby. That's by the way where I first met Planet Labs, it was out in the desert launching rockets. Yeah, as an aside. So occasional good business comes out of it too. But most of all, it's this incredible hobby of making science real. Like when something fails to launch or explodes on the pad or comes back in because the parachute didn't deploy properly, it Just visually exciting. I don't know. I can't really put my finger on why it's not universally exciting. To me, it just feels like something everyone should do a little bit of.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A physical place and saw this SD's rocket kit ready to fly. I'm like, wow, I sort of remember rockets when I was little. I wasn't that into them. I built a couple. And so we did this. And to make a long story short, I found a mentor that could teach me like, you know, you can get really bigger engines and bigger rockets to, you know, to the present day. I've probably launched thousands of rockets. I 3D print these designs to my son and I've been working on this. We go out to the BlackRock Desert every year and launch really big things going well past supersonic speeds routinely, launching large rockets, the rockets he could fit inside”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I did a short TED talk on the joys of rocketry or, yeah, I think it was called the Joys of Rocketry. So ever since my son turned three, we started launching water rockets. And the story there was I just went to a local toy store back when they had them.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT