Chamath Palihapitiya: we got a great show for you today we have app harvest cto and former root ai ceo and founder josh lessing on the show to discuss robotics and farming climate change as an accelerant for sustainable solutions and raising money by my syndicate we were able to invest in root ai in less than a year they got bought by app harvest providing a multiple on our investment in a year amazing and now we have these shares in a public company absolutely fantastic but first before we get to that interview we have a we have a handful of great news stories public education bureaucrats in california virginia are killing excellence in our schools especially in the stem area science technology engineering and math and aws is dealing with bureaucracy issues inside of their company like apple has recently faced and google is just fined half a billion dollars by france due to uh not being able to negotiate with publishers for the rights to indexing their new stories plus i'm going to talk about some products and services that i am interested in right now including a license plate reader stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_03: okay in our first news story i want to talk about killing excellence in public schools we've seen the

Chamath Palihapitiya: story come up a bunch now what does this have to do with this week in startups well we are an industry built on excellence and in some cases people in science and stem uh math doing extremely well and then starting companies but this is an overall story that i think is really important because it goes to the heart of america and what america is about which is a meritocracy a competition of ideas a competition of performance and people striving and what's happening right now in our public school

SPEAKER_05: systems is really tragic we're trying to take competition and excellence and rewards and meritocracy out of the public school system and it is going to be a disaster for this country according to almost any logical person so let's break down this story and talk about it because i think it's super important there are two stories here to cover ones in california ones in virginia and you've probably heard of the california one you might not have heard of the virginia one which i think is actually more interesting both of these are along the lines of addressing inequity not inequality in equity and doing so by lowering public school standards now you remember what my bestie chamot said on the all in podcast and i'm just quoting him when you hear a public official tout the phrase in equity run for the hills in may of 2021 california's department of education drafted a new framework for k-12 math education now according to an article in reason.com which we'll link to in the show notes and i'm quoting here the draft of the framework is hundreds of pages long and covers a wide range of topics but its overriding concern is inequity so here's a quote from the article the department is worried that too many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities which leads some to take calculus by their senior year of high school

SPEAKER_08: while others don't make it past algebra i would be in that latter group shockingly i was an underperformer in school they literally wrote on every report card you know performing below his ability and obviously since then i've corrected that and tried to perform above my ability but i had a rough start but even with my rough start not getting to calculus i never dreamed that the kids who did apply themselves should not get to take calculus california's solution is prohibiting sorting

SPEAKER_10: until high school in other words i want to keep gifted kids in the same class as everyone else until at least ninth grade now if any of you went to school in america who are listening to me public

Chamath Palihapitiya: school which i am a product of the public school system until eighth grade uh when i was getting

SPEAKER_12: kicked out of public school i went to private school because i got too many fights shocking the idea

SPEAKER_10: that people would not be in a track with other kids who are at their performance levels means you're going to have smart kids sitting in class who are going to be super bored and then you're going to have a group of kids who are slowing them down who are going to be feel super guilty about slowing them down this framework is claiming that learning calculus in high school is overrated especially for gifted students this is ridiculous uh obviously learning high-end math and physics and these concepts leads to people having the ability to think in incredible ways and to push the envelope for humanity a lot of the great entrepreneurs i know came from math calculus backgrounds and physics backgrounds not because those things necessarily apply but because that type of thinking allows you to think critically about systems and architectures and how to deploy solutions in the real world let's put

Chamath Palihapitiya: a pin in that for now here are some quotes from the framework and you really got to pay attention here because it's really subtle um and pernicious here's the first quote all students deserve powerful

SPEAKER_05: mathematics okay we agree with that we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents wait what okay we agree first sent first part of the sentence all students deserve powerful mathematics sure

SPEAKER_14: but we are direct we reject the idea of natural gifts and talents do these people have these have these people ever been in a classroom or worked with children before of course there are people with natural

SPEAKER_10: gifts and talents there is such a range in humanity of gifts and talents across human beings that it's

SPEAKER_15: actually what one of the most delightful things about the human species is that some people can sing and others can dance other people can run a four minute mile or five minute miles some are good at

SPEAKER_05: martial arts others are good at mathematics viva la difference we do not need to um accept this idea that there are not natural gifts and talents of course there are natural gifts and talents an important goal of this framework is to replace ideas i'm quoting here of innate mathematics talent and giftedness with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway hold on a second they just said we reject the ideas of natural gifts and talents and then they say with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway okay wait a second if students are on a growth pathway

SPEAKER_14: they're on different parts of that pathway that would mean that there are natural gifts and talents that put them somewhere on that pathway some people might be further along in that pathway i am not going to be dunking a basketball at five eight and a half to the ease at which christoph porzingis at seven three is going to be dunking a basketball and that's okay that's okay and there are some people

SPEAKER_05: who are just great and have the the brain uh chemistry or the aptitude or the motivation to become great at chess whatever it is and people can debate nature and nurture or any number of factors but we're saying in one sentence that there is we're rejecting the idea of natural talents and gifts while saying everybody's on their own growth pathway another quote there is no cut off determining when one child is gifted or another is not it's completely wrong of course there's a cut off you you you can look at performance and you can say at this age this person is in this percentile of math lich i have children when we go to school for their yearly or you know every six months and we check

Chamath Palihapitiya: in on how they're progressing they literally have designed if your child is doing math at this level or has a vocabulary at this level or spelling at this level or penmanship at this level they are in this

SPEAKER_16: part of the bell curve in terms of you know they're in the top four percent of verbal ability or they're in the bottom third of mathematics this is nuts who's running the california department of education i'm in california uh and i'm in a public school and literally we look at these bell curves and they

SPEAKER_14: tell you where your child is so that you can take do an intervention what what kind of society are we trying to create here one where everybody is the same that's not a good goal we want people to be

SPEAKER_10: different and to flourish and to pursue their natural gifts one of the great things about humanity is that different people can specialize and perform at different levels now in a related

Chamath Palihapitiya: news story in yesterday's wall street journal opinion page uh in an article published by william mcgurn who is a wall street journal editorial board member former chief speechwriter for george w bush the article titled a pta purge of asians america's top public high school shows us what discrimination looks like today for background this is about thomas jefferson high school for science and technology in virginia which is a school for gifted children students uh and they refer to it as tj thomas jefferson high it's america's number one ranked public high school by u.s news and world report so we are ranking the schools but we don't want to rank the students okay at least california does it now in this article

SPEAKER_05: in december 2020 i'm quoting the county school board changed its admission process replacing a rigorous race blind entrance exam with a holistic read subjective formula that included grades but also put caps on the number of students each middle school could send to tj hmm okay a de facto limit on middle schools with high numbers of asian american students in other words they're putting a throttle on this

Chamath Palihapitiya: community uh taking all the slots in this number one school the desired result has been achieved again i'm quoting the percentage of asian americans admitted to tj dropped to 54 this year from 73 last year whites blacks and latinos also their numbers go up so uh again in march a group of concerned parents called the coalition for tj sued claiming the new policy violates equal protection rights guaranteed by the 14th amendment pretty obvious that it does uh based on the color of their skin they are not

SPEAKER_05: uh allowed into the school based on their ethnic origin uh and their ethnicity they're specifically being targeted uh by this pretty obvious um and it's not the first time we've seen this uh anti-asian american or anti-indian approach to education it's very interesting that those two minority groups are getting treated this way and people are not up in arms about it in may they won a victory when a federal judge refused to dismiss their lawsuits everyone knows the policy is not race neutral and that it's designed to affect the racial composition of school judge claude hilton set i mean it could be intellectually dishonest to say it does not of course one of the coalition members running for pta is harry jackson a retired navy officer who's black and whose son is a sophomore at tj high jackson wrote an opinion piece for the washington post in march where he explained his position when i see the effort to water down the admission standards to tj and let's be clear that effort is largely led by

Chamath Palihapitiya: paternalistic white liberals who are determined to help in quotes minority victims at any cost i see it for what it is tacit admission that they don't think black and hispanic students have what it takes to compete on merit and this is i think how a lot of people feel uh that this white liberal movement is trying to lower standards and that maybe the people who they're trying to help don't want their

SPEAKER_05: help more quotes from jackson's piece the student body is notably diverse with 79 coming from a minority background but according to state and local education bureaucrats that last point isn't good enough because as it turns out and i'm quoting here the school's population is made up of the wrong kind

Chamath Palihapitiya: of minorities asian students to be clear again quoting as an african-american father of a tj student i would also like to see more blacks and hispanic students at the school but if those standards are

SPEAKER_10: not making the grade the problem isn't the standards it's more likely the elementary school pipeline is failing to prepare them for the rigors of an environment like tj but rather than address the

SPEAKER_05: very real failures at preparing underprivileged students brad band and his cronies now seek to gut the admission standards to get the racial balance they deem appropriate rob rand is a reference to the fairfax county public school superintendent scott rob rand who led the charge to water down the admission standards for tj in other words we're failing up until eighth grade

Chamath Palihapitiya: to prepare these students to compete for these slots therefore we're going to change the admissions to that school and lower the standards when we should actually be saying let's demand more of our teachers let's demand more of our administrators let's demand more of our education system let's invest more let's have after school programs if we need to let's have tutoring one-on-one sessions

SPEAKER_05: that people could opt into why on earth would we throttle high performers in order to not focus the

SPEAKER_15: blame where it belongs if we are not preparing people early enough let's go there and do some work

SPEAKER_25: there you do not need to lower the standards you know on the back end where where people are taking calculus and going to based on merit the number one public high school and gary tan friend of the

SPEAKER_05: podcast here who is a product of california's advanced math classes and who is an entrepreneur

Chamath Palihapitiya: turned investor and who is asian american he recently tweeted about this article we must improve access by black and latino families to better k-8 school resources to lift achievement by high school

SPEAKER_05: age the answer shouldn't be an unjust shortcut eliminating elite guilt over racial achievement gaps by eliminating the tests that expose them think about that that's a really well put there is a war against testing against merit against excellence it is what cuts down on social mobility without access to advanced math or the sats i would have never escaped my working class childhood we kill the ladder up if we allow ideologues to burn down merit and this is absolutely the case the teachers union and the education bureaucrats are way too powerful and they're setting us down the wrong path and we must stop them and we must keep america competitive because our contemporaries and our competitors in the world the communists in china and other places uh they are not thinking in this insane way that we don't want to have excellence they're thinking how do we have more excellence they're thinking how do we push people harder to achieve more to solve society's problems more to play a bigger role on this planet we call earth now this sounds incredibly hyperbolic but the human species

Chamath Palihapitiya: is at a crossroads the human species is at a crossroads right now the communists in china

SPEAKER_10: are going to win or the west the democracies are going to win and the way we will win is by having

SPEAKER_05: the greatest education system in the world that motivates and drives people to achieve more and more

SPEAKER_10: specifically in the areas of math science engineering this is where technology the future is at stake

SPEAKER_05: and we're literally going to hand it to a bunch of communists in china who absolutely have no problem with putting people on different tracks based on how they perform and we want to remove performance we

SPEAKER_10: need to be doing the opposite we need to be looking at the full stack of education every single grade every single school every single student and saying how do we create a more competitive environment

SPEAKER_15: in education we don't have competition in education we need to have massive competition in education and the parents need to demand it whether it's privileged students or it's underprivileged students and

Chamath Palihapitiya: parents who are fighting here in san francisco against an insane board of education but let's

SPEAKER_05: not damage the next generation by removing standards let's inspire them to achieve and reward them for doing so and give them every chance to live an excellent awesome life with performance and

SPEAKER_14: competition at the core of that they need to perform and compete that's the real world if you're a parent what are we all doing as parents we're preparing our kids to inherit this planet and to compete to make

SPEAKER_05: it better and solve the world's most important problems not to be average does anybody out there aspire to have their child be average or do we aspire for our children to compete and to be excellent we want all of them to be excellent and that's not at the cost of anybody else that's our that's our choice and that's our mission as parents is to to give our kids whatever opportunity they want and to push them to achieve so anyway i'm sorry i'm infuriated by all this that's the end of my rant

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Chamath Palihapitiya: fundrise.com let's go on in the news amazon web services and their new ceo are facing a lot of bureaucratic challenges for some context amazon's web service aws which is amazon's cloud computing platform is at the core of amazon's profits uh just taking a look at the numbers aws amazon's web

SPEAKER_05: services this is not you buying books from them this is their server farm which they rent out to startups and big companies they're on a 54 billion dollar run rate in 2021 this is extraordinary in 2020 aws was only 11.5 percent of amazon's total revenue 45 billion uh for aws and 386 billion in

SPEAKER_15: total for amazon and including amazon web services however aws accounted for 63 percent of amazon's net

SPEAKER_05: income in 2020 in other words it's highly profitable amazon's net income was 21 billion in 2020 aws's was 13.5 so let that sink in this giant business they have of selling books and third-party products and

Chamath Palihapitiya: cables is modestly profitable but aws has a massive ability to print money and that makes total sense one is delivering books at a very low margin in other products and one is providing scalable computing and software platforms that you know have just a tremendous margin built in aws is the top provider of cloud computing services in the world accounting for over 40 percent of worldwide public cloud infrastructure according to gartner aws recently hired adam celipski as ceo to replace andy jassy who is replacing bezos as amazon ceo which is in itself very instructive the former ceo of aws is now

SPEAKER_05: the ceo of all of amazon celipski was a vp of sales and then coo of amazon web services from 2005 to 2016

Chamath Palihapitiya: before leaving to be the ceo of tableau a position he held until 2021 in other words aws won the day at amazon and they're running the show at amazon according to an article published yesterday by the information celipski might be returning to a different company than he left according to the information preventing aws from sliding into the bureaucratic sludge that has mirrored so many large information technology companies is likely to be one of the top challenges for celipski under jassy aws was run as a startup inside of amazon with a frenetic pace of new product and feature releases anybody who's in tech knows that they just kept releasing every possible service as an api and as it's reached this massive scale it's become more difficult to keep up the pace and to limit bureaucracy according to this article the quote although the number of employees is a closely guarded secret more than 75 000 people listed aws as their current employer on linkedin making it roughly the size of cisco systems the 36 year old computer networking giant in other words this is a huge huge group of people working on this greg pearson a long time intel executive joined a job in 2019 as the vp of american sales and according to four anonymous sources that previously worked at aws pearson brought in a culture of much more paperwork filing and administrative work turning off some of the sales people that enjoyed a startup like culture at aws under annie jassy this is typical you know the the bureaucrats come in and they bring their systems from the previous company and the pirates you know and samurai running the previous you know in a previous style are now being replaced with bureaucrats however other employees cited a need for more scalable structure at aws which has resulted in incredible revenue growth over the past few years 2018 25 billion 2019 35 billion they added 10 billion 2020 they add another 10 billion 45 billion and in 2021 they're on that again adding 9 billion 54 billion run rate so every year consistently they're adding 10 billion now as a percentage of revenue obviously adding 10 billion to 25 is a 40 increase and adding 10 to 45 billion is only in the neighborhood of a 20 increase so you know the the percentage is slowing down but the raw number is still a very large number and if the infrastructure is largely staying the same that means the profits are going up in other words they probably if they're adding 10 billion dollars to their run rate and revenue are not adding 10 billion dollars in expense every year they're probably adding a fraction of that and that's the scale uh and the beauty of running a software business or even a cloud business which has some infrastructure cost as it's not fixed cost exactly in that you know when you create a piece of software if you create slack it's largely a fixed cost business isn't it you write the software you have 500 developers writing the software if a thousand companies use it or a million companies use it probably doesn't change the number of engineers you have it might change on the margins how much bandwidth you use but those are de minimis costs in the grand scheme of things so how can companies like apple google amazon and others maintain a strong pace of innovation while still managing tens of millions of uh employees is it even possible well all in episode uh 37 we broke down antonio garcia martinez's substack article bad apple about apple's lack of innovation and crippling bureaucracy here's a two minute clip but he i thought his most salient point was

SPEAKER_45: steve jobs would not have been able to exist in the apple that exists today right he would have gone run

SPEAKER_47: out of apple is what he said he would have been cancelled how much innovation is there really at

David Sacks: apple now that the that the genius who created it is gone and he he ends his article by saying when apple launched the mac computer in 1984 you know they famously ran that super bowl ad that featured a solitary figure flinging a sledgehammer into a big brother-like face spewing propaganda at the huddled ranks of some drab dystopia and then agm says the tech titans nowadays resemble more and more the harangue figure on the screen rather than the colorful rebel going against the established order whether it be hiring policy or free speech silicon valley has to decide whether it becomes what it once vowed to destroy the reality is the great genius who founded apple is long gone it is run by hr people and woke mobs it's run by a supply chain manager exactly and and and so there is no more innovation there they are just a gatekeeper collecting rents and you know freeberg you're right to raise the issue of what's going to create the most innovation but the thing that's going to create the most innovation is letting entrepreneurs create new companies without needing apple's permission

SPEAKER_51: i will tell you something i think that over the next decade because of exactly what you guys said that apple is run by managers who don't want to see loss but aren't driven to gain you're going to end up seeing amazon particular and apple likely as well lose to the likes of shopify and square and stripe shopify square and stripe are all formidable threats to amazon over time and now that bezos is actually going to step out and it is going to be run by a bunch of managers and you have these founders of these three companies still running all three of those businesses and all three of those businesses are going to be incredible competitive threats from different angles on amazon that is where

SPEAKER_53: innovation wins so if you look at freebrokes point shopify square and stripe these are incredible

Chamath Palihapitiya: companies with incredible momentum and is aws going to be able to compete on payments or for e-commerce platforms uh with stripe shopify and square probably not and what if those companies start adding other cloud services you know we're going to be in for a dog fight here and that's one of the great things about our industry it's just a little bit weird for us growing up on google and amazon and facebook and apple to start thinking about another set of companies disrupting them but microsoft and ibm were in fact uh disrupted by google and amazon so it's one of the great things about our industry in terms of founder authority which i talk about a lot now that bezos is out of amazon just this past week you know amazon has lost that founder authority which means things are going to change people are not going to make as many bold bets because they will be thinking about losing their job

SPEAKER_05: when you are the hired gun ceo whether you're sundar or you're tim cook or you know amazon's new ceo

Chamath Palihapitiya: you don't have the founder authority to say i'm going to do this this is my company i named this company i hired the first 10 employees this is mine i have founder shares and everybody is going to have to deal with my decisions even if they're mercurial even if they're quixotic even if they seem insane and bold but apple as sax joked is run by a bunch of hr managers and that might be why let's be honest the best product they've produced at apple yeah in the last 10 years since tim cook's been running it

SPEAKER_08: probably airpods and i'll be honest airpods now i don't know if you've tried pixels uh air buds whatever

SPEAKER_25: they're called the pixel uh version from google they're kind of better in fact they're much better

SPEAKER_08: and they're 99 so i think you know those mean apple's not going to be a great company and not

Chamath Palihapitiya: going to print money but i do think if you're looking at apple for massive innovation and risk taking you're not going to get that when they're run by a supply chain manager literally apple is run by the supply chain manager tim cook now that is not a dig to tim cook tim cook is a lot of the reason why apple was able to hit incredible scale but you know where's their ar glasses where's their new car

SPEAKER_08: you know where where's the new you know incredible product the new imac yeah it's nice and the m1

Chamath Palihapitiya: chip pretty innovative you know the stuff is great but you don't see the bold bets that we would be looking for you're not going to see a cyber truck which now has a million reservations you're not going to see you know an aws launch inside of amazon again i don't think and that's okay you can manage these companies to excellence uh defined as printing money not defined as changing the world with new

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Chamath Palihapitiya: on some big antitrust news in france uh from the ap france's competition regulator fined google 500 million euros almost 600 million u.s dollars on tuesday for failing to negotiate in good faith with french publishers in a dispute over payment for their news the agency threatened fines of another 900 000 euros around a million bucks per day if google doesn't come up with proposals within two months on how it will compensate publishers and news agencies for their content google had 182 billion dollars in revenue in 2020 so you know paying a fine of a million dollars a day is not a big deal what they would more likely do is stop google news inside of france uh this is the second largest antitrust penalty ever in france the largest was an apple fine of 1.1 billion euros where apple was accused of working with wholesale distributors to divide up customers and not compete google's fine is uh the second major one they've received this month in france earlier in july google settled a 270 million dollar fine for favoring its own ad auction platform so um this idea that google is

SPEAKER_08: giving preferential treatment to their ad auction or their yelp competitor you know google local or google

SPEAKER_25: flights or google shopping you know that each country is going to come up with their own concept of what's allowed and i think what you'll see is companies like google just like facebook threatened to

Chamath Palihapitiya: not allow the publishing of news stories from france i'm sorry news stories from australia to their social network and that freaked everybody out in australia you're going to just see these big tech companies just say fine we'll do it your way uh we will no longer index le monde in google news etc i do think

SPEAKER_08: that google news um that scrape publishers article and curate them into a feed that should be a licensed product and i think google should just come up with something fair for this if you're gonna uh show you know a snippet of a news article and increasingly google will use ai to pick the most important

Chamath Palihapitiya: information in that article and then represent it why not just come up with a a fair cpm a cost per thousand views for that as opposed to just taking it and uh supposedly facebook has paid off new york times with some payments for uh their content people don't like to talk about that but that might be

SPEAKER_25: i think an eight figure deal and it might be uh people say why facebook hasn't been treated as difficultly uh by the new york times i don't know if that's actually correct but uh you know i went through this myself running mahalo uh where i created a comprehensive search engine built by humans was kind

Chamath Palihapitiya: of wikipedia plus google search and google just took us out of index google does not play fairly um they have sharp elbows and they will fight um and they'll win in most cases and if they get a speeding ticket like this so be it i mean that's the way they look at it it's a total black box they will not tell you what's happening and rupert murdoch you know from fox kind of got this right he pushed australia and he pushed france and other folks to really pay attention to this because google makes a lot of money selling ads and not giving publishers a cut on google sites and google say well you can just not index us and that's kind of a jerk move we want to be indexed we just don't want you to take the snippet so there should be some middle ground here and google is going to have to really figure out a fair way to mitigate this this is the same stuff that happened in australia where facebook and google were told they need to compensate publishers for news and google is complying they agreed to pay nine entertainment co one of australia's largest publishers more than 30 million in cash annually for use of his news content so uh taking the other side of this is a tech blogger benedict evans who worked at injuries and horowitz for a bit he says the shakedown continues it's hard to see how making tech companies pretend to buy something that has little to no economic value to them is a pal sustainable business model for newspapers if you want a tax and a subsidy be honest and call it that i think it's fine to call it a tax if you want to index that content and it does provide value it just may not provide value directly so benedict is wrong there you know if you're i think that's why google news and google images don't have ads on them the second they put ads on google images or google news those two specific services on google then you would be able to make this very direct connection how much money do google news make how much money do google images make instead what they say is we're just indexing we're just indexing we're not actually publishing the content we're just pointing to it and then you do a google search because you're on their site so they get the revenue through the secondary uh usage of their service in other words it'd be like getting it'd be like me playing a mo a television show for free in a movie theater and then making money off the popcorn right kind of what's happening here somebody is like hey we're playing these movies in the movie theaters but oh we don't get any value from that we gave the tickets away for free but if you look over here you know we are selling the popcorn in the front of the movie theater that's a better analogy for me and so separately in the us google is being sued by 36 states right now alleging that google is favoring its play app store on android and removing other options for app developers to distribute on the platform and then charging what some people consider a high fee of 30 percent which i don't consider that high of a fee because i remembered in the package software days you know you would sell

SPEAKER_08: your chess master game to you know a computer store for 25 and they would sell for 50 so you really were

Chamath Palihapitiya: paying 50 percent in retail or maybe uh you were getting paid even less but this is uh going to be the

SPEAKER_08: trend if you're only allowing uh software onto your platform through an app store like ios or android

Chamath Palihapitiya: i think that's going to be a trigger for this antitrust regulators and there's a very easy way to solve it just allow people to click on a button to allow third-party app stores and then you can say we're not going to support your phone if you allow other rogue apps on here so don't come to us for customer support if you're using your iphone and you start loading apps from some chinese app store or some russian app store has stolen apps in it like that it will become the wild west the second you can put any app store on people's phones it'll become like bit torrent or spam or viruses your

SPEAKER_33: phone will get hacked there'll be nobody reviewing those apps they'll be filled with you know all kinds of phishing scams and data scams turning on your camera maybe um and uploading everything from your

SPEAKER_08: photo album to their servers and then doing ransomware i mean you would have to be a fool to load some rogue app store because once they have your access to your phone they've got everything every photo every location i mean it could get pretty gnarly and that's why spy agencies love love love people having this device in their pockets because once they root it and they get their claws into your

Chamath Palihapitiya: phone they can turn the microphone etc you think that this is me sounding like a crazy conspiracy theorist this is state-of-the-art espionage this is how it all works today you can have the russians the saudis etc hacking high target individuals like jeff bezos's phone with all kinds of software and if you allow other app stores where the apps are not reviewed you are going to get demolished you are going to have all your

SPEAKER_08: data stolen i would never ever do that now do i want the ability to load an app from one of my you know investments you know through test flight or maybe just at least have the option to do that maybe maybe i would want that but you know i have security concerns i kind of like the idea that the app store is throttling the number of apps on my phone and doing some curation because i would like it to be safe and i would like my kids ipads to be safe but people are different some people want you know

Chamath Palihapitiya: their phones to work like their desktop computers where if you want to on your windows machine or your mac to load some piece of software that roots your machine and you know does god knows what maybe uh record your keystrokes you can go do it god bless you but uh that's what will happen and then people

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Chamath Palihapitiya: episode before we get to the interview today just wanted to give a shout out to a product i love um i'm holding it up right here these are anchors magsafe adapters for my iphone 12 as you know the iphone has a magnet on the back boom you put this on here you press this little button and you're now charging your phone this has been a godsend for me that's why i own two of them i've started traveling again i get these two things charged and then when i'm using my phone on an airplane or i'm in an uber uh i just pop this on and i keep my phone at 100 all day long which is just a great feeling it really does um because it attaches to the back of your phone it's it's no big deal you don't have to actually plug it in it's so fast and so easy um it's so great that apple is now releasing one

SPEAKER_05: anchors uh i think will always be better anchor is just this great company that i buy every new product this is how crazy i am about anchors products i go to the amazon anchor store and i look at what's new and i just buy whatever's new they have like a new nano um i think it's a 60 watt charger and i just buy whatever the newest thing they make is i i don't know why i'm so into accessories for electronics but it's my gadget is coming back uh but this magsafe battery pack from apple uh this will be coming july 19th i also have uh from anchor my friends at anchor this stand which you can put your

SPEAKER_15: phone on and on your desk you can be charging and looking at your phone it's quite delightful

SPEAKER_05: and then it comes with a little pad here so i have my pixel buds which also are not mag safe so it's not going to oh actually has a little bit of a magnet it might kind of falls off but this little stand here is also allows you to charge so when you plug it in it's charging here so you can plug in your phone and pixel buds much better than anything from apple in fact just to show you how great these are

SPEAKER_15: when you put these pixel buds which are only 99 bucks in your ear you just twist them in you don't even see them look how flush they are so when you're sleeping listening to this week in startups

SPEAKER_05: and all in you just go to bed and you just lay down and you don't even forget you forget you have these and i wake up with these sometimes uh they obviously turn off uh when you're not using them

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh but pixel buds 99 bucks anchor battery pack no-brainer magsafe i'll i'll try the apple one but i'm kind of loyal to anchor and then this anchor stand they're not paying for this i just thought it would be interesting on this podcast to tell you the products i love you can tell me the products you love on twitter or jason at calacanis.com and maybe i'll promote them here maybe we'll start doing unboxing videos here another product i'm researching that i think is really great is i've been thinking about safety for neighborhoods especially with san francisco where i no longer live but i do have a a property in san francisco that we have our office in right now it's like a live work loft i have i may sell it if i move to austin or miami but i still have it um and one of the things i've been thinking about is private communities and uh what do they call those gated communities i've always wondered about this i've been fascinated as a kid from brooklyn the first time i saw one in new jersey i was like this is crazy like you your community has a gate and they're like yeah are you dumb like have you never been out in the real world i'm like no i haven't

SPEAKER_08: i'm from brooklyn i i thought everybody lived on a block like with you know the houses in row houses next to each other i never knew people had backyards and parking spaces and uh you know this

Chamath Palihapitiya: kind of thing but i i did some research on this and i found there's an api and an open source project for license plate reading because we had a bunch of burglaries uh in the area where i live today and uh the way they found them was it was the same car coming in and doing you know afternoon you know run into people's houses and take their laptop kind of situation don't do that at my house i have a gun uh and security so it would not be a good move but people were doing this in our little community and so i was just thinking like why are we not i wonder if we should be a gated community or you know uh if they ever thought about that and i was thinking about license plates because license plates are public information right and you know they're just they're out there in the public but license plates if you were to know in my community if i lived in you know this community on the north shore of kawaii and there's one road in and one road out or a limited number of roads if you had just a camera there and you had people's license plates you could make a database of every time somebody came in and out and if that license plate hadn't been recognized before it could send an alert that there's a license plate in the community that has never been there before now this is super orwelly and i thought wow this is really interesting i wonder if there's any obvious there's obviously privacy concerns but it's public information and there's an api to do this and then i found this company flock safety.com and they make a device for 2500 a year i got in touch with them i haven't bought it but i was just thought i would share it with you that i've been doing this research because i've been thinking about safety um you know when you have a family you start thinking about that when you have a home you start thinking about that when you see what's happening in san francisco and then i'm also into privacy and i was wondering if this

SPEAKER_05: product existed and it does they've created a camera system with a giant battery in it and a 5g

SPEAKER_15: connection and you can plop it on your property now if your property happens to be near a street and you have a driveway you can put it in your driveway and every car that goes by you can

SPEAKER_05: personally record every single license plate to make a database and know when your neighbors are leaving their house and when they come home as well as every other license plate and then if there was a robbery you could say there was a robbery on our block there was a break in here's every license plate that came in and out not just that day but here's the pattern of every single one for the last year or 10. and then i thought i wonder if you could just upload a video on some regular basis from a nest cam or then i thought well why doesn't nest just add this because nest has an outdoor cam and then i was wondering well if that's the case what if tesla built this into their cameras and when you're driving down the road it records every license plate or if there was an app and you put your phone on your dashboard you could be recording all this and then i just came to this conclusion like wow our privacy is an illusion people are actually doing this in the real world

Chamath Palihapitiya: already and if you go to flock safety's website you will see videos of them catching people based on their license plate this is the world we live in today this is why a lot of criminals are taking their license plates off when they do hit runs in san francisco is because they know the license plate

SPEAKER_05: might tag them but this software also tells you the color of the car and the model and obviously if you're getting the license plate there's no reason you can't take a picture of the person in the driver's seat so i'm going to be interviewing uh the ceo garrett langley later this month uh from flock safety and it's a really interesting company and i'm just curious what you think about this and what questions

Chamath Palihapitiya: you might have for him in terms of privacy and safety and should this be allowed or not i don't have exactly a position on it now um i tend to think our privacy is an illusion and it's already been compromised because if this software is out there and it's an api and there literally is an api provider for this now and there are open source projects people are already doing it and i bet

SPEAKER_05: somebody has an app somewhere that you can put on your old pixel phone and mount it to a wall or your dashboard and just every time you drive up and down the 280 or 405 in la you could be tracking every license plate and know you know who's in what car it's kind of crazy when you think about it

SPEAKER_55: and i'm just curious your opinion on it okay so let's get to the interview all right next up on the

SPEAKER_16: program we're going to talk about robotics and what jobs will be eliminated and how we're going to feed

SPEAKER_10: the world now i was at stanford this morning i was in a class and somebody said hey what jobs are going

SPEAKER_16: to be eliminated they said you know it's interesting cashiers like uh and cars and people driving trucks this is starting to happen already we're starting to see that some jobs which are mind-numbing and horrible like standing on your feet all day and typing in somebody's order that's being replaced

SPEAKER_65: by people ordering on kiosks or on the phone and driving a truck for a living yeah there's i guess

SPEAKER_16: some romance to it in some ways but i think most people would argue that's a really tough job to stay awake for 10 hours a day and drive down the road it's hard it's arduous you got to be away from your

SPEAKER_87: family self-driving trucks are coming when i saw this next company uh which my friend rob may introduced me too and i had invested in rob's company i was like wow this needs to exist in the world why are we not using ai computer vision and all this technology robotics to go in there and just pick raspberries and blueberries and blackberries without people having to be doing backbreaking labor on their knees all day long in the fields picking berries shouldn't this be done with technology well we were lucky enough to invest in a company called root ai and uh we invested in them about a year and a half ago or something like that and then i found out they got acquired it was one of the quickest uh investments to acquisitions we ever had so rude ai got acquired by app harvest and i was going to have the the founder on the program to talk about the investment we made in this company and by that time the company was acquired uh and app harvest acquired root ai for 60 million in april of 2020 just a couple months ago for 50 million dollars and 10 million in cash so instead of having the ceo of root ai on today i am lucky enough to have josh lessing the cto of app harvest on hey josh how are you good afternoon congratulations on the

SPEAKER_91: acquisition we invested last year i think last summer um almost a year so it was uh the end of july uh of

SPEAKER_93: last year so uh we're just coming up on that anniversary now this was incredible we you know

SPEAKER_87: i heard the pitch from you uh and we met through rob may tell me what was the pitch of root ai uh that i heard maybe we could share that with the audience uh and what you were setting up to do here with root ai

SPEAKER_99: you know so at root ai we were set out to transform farming you know right now farming is one of the major sources of pollution in the world it is delivering a product that does not it's not easy to access it's not as nutritious as it should be and frankly as we look at all the challenges that come with climate change the way in which we source our food is just broken right you know if we're getting our food from all over the globe it at a moment's notice that supply chain especially with fresh can break down so what i wanted to do with the business was pivot the world's food supply to a model where every single country had the fundamental infrastructure that it needed to feed its people and that was going to require a bunch of technologies including artificial intelligence robotics

SPEAKER_63: and in greenhouse farming and so i framed it as backbreaking labor in the fields but in fact i was

SPEAKER_33: wrong it's not just about that it's really about hey what if you could have blackberries and raspberries in your backyard being uh farmed indoors and your plan if i remember correctly was to sell the equipment

SPEAKER_16: to farmers you were looking for farmers and you were going to sell them a solution what was that

SPEAKER_103: solution and what was the first iteration of it going to be yeah so you know the the big signature

SPEAKER_99: part of the product roadmap was a robot that was universal right so you know what we've lost isn't access to um you know one bespoke machine we've lost the agility that comes from being able to pick any crop see any crop understand it um and so what what we were building uh and what we continue to build is a robotic system that can care for your crops it you know the current iteration picks uh grape and cherry tomatoes it also picks strawberries it picks cucumbers and it's built on a human body plan because the you know the aha moment is if you ergonomically structure a crop environment to be picked by people and you design the crop genetics to support the same if you could build a robot that has the body plan of a person and by that i mean you know the way in which the linkages of the arm are the same uh the extent of the fingers that you know finger dexterity and frankly robotic a robotic capacity to understand how to be dexterous that we could develop an unbelievably versatile tool that facilitates harvesting a very time sensitive vision critical part of the farm but much more importantly could also start infusing farming with data right farming is an unpredictable form of manufacturing where your most upstream process is highly volatile being able to have a robot there understand what product is being brought in and build every single workflow around that data creates tons of new opportunities

SPEAKER_33: and so that that was the value prop okay so to unpack that a bit humans have evolved as an agricultural society and species for some number of years to pick produce from the vine from the tree and that process of growing is random in its nature even when put inside of a a factory with you know pristine conditions and temperature and water we still don't know where on the vine exactly the tomato is going to grow so it turns out that making an arm that is similar to humans and having a visual system similar to a

SPEAKER_109: humans and then building from that point forward is the optimal way to build a robot that can pick

SPEAKER_31: vegetables and fruits from the vine multiple crops quite specifically right so there is a certain amount

SPEAKER_91: you can accomplish in in the plant genetics itself how the plant structures itself this is not gmo this

SPEAKER_99: is just centuries of breeding and one of the things you breed for is the ability to be you know have the plant be workable by people and you can create infrastructure that ties up vines and trellises uh branches but i mean there's a limit to that as you as you're pointing out so you know the thing that you're tailoring for the harvesting is done by people so making the robot akin to a human's kinematics and general kind of strategy and approach to picking is what allows it to go cross crop and that's you know the fact that we're building a universal harvesting platform that facilitates so many different crop needs is in line with what you need the tool to be truly transformative useful a game changer and you know what we were doing at root and what we continue to do here at app harvest is really push the envelope there and that you know ours is the very first robot to ever go cross crop ever do multiple jobs at the farm and we're working on continuously expanding that that functional envelope

SPEAKER_33: and this is very analogous to a conversation to which i had with the ceo of a dishwashing robot except that they made standard dishes because they didn't want the robot to have to learn

SPEAKER_16: to do all dishes so they said you know what for the first version we're only going to have these very specific plates these very specific bowls with the specific magnets in it to just narrow the scope of

SPEAKER_33: what the dishwashing robot has to do and that was linda pullet from dishcraft robotics that was a great episode i forgot the number of that episode but you can look it up online what you're saying is that was episode 1140 for those people uh who are fans of the pod back in november of 2020 you've built a robot that could literally go into the cherry tomato fields then go into the strawberry bushes uh and the cherries might be growing you know five six feet high and the strawberries might be on the floor whatever it is and the same robot can do this it can pick either um either type without a hardware change it just would be a software change or we'd have to just understand the lay of the land so just quite literally the lay of the land so yeah

SPEAKER_97: so you you slightly uh change the gripper you know in the same sense it's the same theory of operation but

SPEAKER_99: just like you would pose your hand like this for a cucumber and like this for a beefsteak tomato we we change up the gripper in that way but beyond that it's software and uh i would say that there's a bigger you know when you look at these plants you might think that they're they're completely random and they're not truly you know a cucumber a pepper a tomato these are all vine crops with symbol or kind of indeterminate genetics and trellising when you talk about raspberries and strawberries these are bush crops there are anatomical features there that you can identify with an ai kind of parse that environment find a free path to approach the object and then land fingers on the object to orchestrate the pick and so from that perspective you know building the system with the flexibility to really think about uh vine crops all similarly because there are a lot of similarities there and think about bush crops similarly uh i i wouldn't say that the it's so i wouldn't say that it's boundless right like um there are things that facilitate the robot it's uh part of why it's

SPEAKER_91: such a good pairing with with greenhouse farming and that the way in which uh greenhouse farms are laid out is literally the same all over the planet which is confusing at first until you realize

SPEAKER_99: that you're building a massive indoor growing environment you could be you know the one i have uh not too far from where i'm doing this call right now is a 60 acre building uh i've been in 200 acre buildings you know and these whole structures are designed from the ground up to support the

SPEAKER_91: plant's health its biology and the plant has very specific needs so you go to facility after facility and it's all running the same exact arrangement and structuring of the crop so it does create a bit of

SPEAKER_99: a simplification i would say as far as you know the disc graph comparison the fact that we're focusing heavily on these highly sustainable structured uh farms is our version of custom dishes uh but at the same time you know these kinds of farms you know if you're getting a tomato at the grocery store now odds are it's from a greenhouse and they're taking over the world's food supply chain in a lot of major categories so leaning into that environmental structuring is a big deal and this is a good thing for

SPEAKER_33: humanity that we're moving towards greenhouses for our vegetables and our plants uh and you know fruits

SPEAKER_16: because it's more sustainable it'll be higher quality and more nutritious or is this bad and it's

SPEAKER_33: better to have free range bushes everywhere i'm sure there's some hippies somewhere who are like this greenhouse stuff is terrible in reality am i correct in thinking that the greenhouse because it's more controlled and more productive is less on the less impact on the environment oh certainly so

SPEAKER_99: you know it's it's all in how you formulate it but you can get remarkable results uh with greenhouse so we're using 90 less water you know we're producing about 30 times as much produce per square meter in one of these facilities we're not you know we're not using any harsh chemical pesticides or herbicides because since you have this enclosed environment you can actually have good bugs that fight the bad bugs you know you can bring in predatory insects that they kill off the insects that damage your crops and then that way not put chemicals on your crops and so you can even i mean so i travel frequently to the netherlands where a lot of this technology was invented and you know you can pair you know something like royal dutch shell and the you know the carbon dioxide effluent from one of its facilities and then

SPEAKER_91: pipe it into an agricultural corridor and use the plants for carbon sequestration they breathe co2 so why not pair it with the facility take its waste heat and its co2 make it more sustainable and you know

SPEAKER_99: fundamentally speaking besides the fact that it's it makes good nutritious food that can be made you know right now where you know where the farm i'm referring to here right next to this office we're within i i think one day's drive right now of about 70 of the u.s population so we're not trucking and so you know all of these things really increase um you know the kind of just sustainability score that we have here and fundamentally we have to go in this direction there's so much volatility coming in the weather that is scary and it's dangerous you know living in a world where you cannot you know depend upon your food supply is is a pretty spooky one over the course of my life right now i am now getting towards the end of my 30s and over the court and about one-third of the world's arable land just disappeared um not disappeared there are very specific reasons of what we didn't do to prevent it but you know these are farming facilities that don't require arable lands you put them down the grow media is whatever you choose you put it in a bucket you can grow the you know the tomatoes you can grow the strawberries in there um you don't need to have amazing arable lands you can grow this in the middle east you can grow this in china you can grow this in india in the us and people will have food and it's a place that we have to go as a society and i would say one of the things that really excited me about building root is i've always had ambitions of making the things that i work on be meaningful uh to the world around me but often if the thing that you want to build isn't aligned with major financial objectives of of of big corporations you know it's hard to align what's the right thing with what's the profitable thing and in this case that's that's not that's not the case at all right by building a distributed network of fresh you're actually creating a food infrastructure that is the perfect marriage between you know the way in which amazon thinks about order fulfillment the way which walmart thinks about order fulfillment so you're all of a sudden giving the biggest drivers in the restructure restructuring of global commerce the way they would want to get access to food which is put the food facility right next to my fulfillment center and for me the fact that they want that and then all of a sudden we get to make it environmentally sustainable is you know a reason to really you know as an entrepreneur break your pick and and make it happen

SPEAKER_33: there's another example of like show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome if the incentive is wherever you're already shipping produce to restaurants and supermarkets we were

SPEAKER_16: literally putting vegetables and fruits onto trains i believe then taking them to centers and then those centers would put them onto trucks to then bring them to um supermarkets and restaurants etc you're saying hey wherever that depot is for cisco or whatever the the distributor is we'll put our

SPEAKER_99: greenhouse next to it is that what i'm hearing correctly and and that has to be the future of food and it's something that is already starting to to come into the foreground and it's just a fundamentally better solution you end up getting first of all more shelf life out of the product right

SPEAKER_33: if i don't have much more do you get because is it like a week for like something like strawberries or tomatoes what is the time between when it gets picked and i eat it today and then how does that

SPEAKER_99: change when you're doing it yeah sure so i mean a good personal example is i was reviewing the the technology landscape of a produce company that did conventional and i traveled to one of their farms in mexico and and and pick some crops and i have to say that in the field that strawberry was quite good and then i made sure to get the exact same crop when i made it back you know our offices in boston eight days later it hit boston uh the product was not nearly in the same condition some of it was damaged rotted uh not particularly flavorable in those eight days all of that transit mattered and one of the other really disappointing things about our current food supply the status quo that we're trying to replace here is you know you design it when you breed plants you design it for trucking you're not designing it for nutrition you're not designing it for flavor like those are factors but they're not like the dominant factor and in a world where healthy food is medicine it's what really you know i i focus on things i i worry about housing i worry about food and i worry about medicine and in a world where i can get you a sustainable farm that produces you know fresh that you want to eat that's a big deal so yeah so capturing eight days back is a big deal in quality designing what you're also saying is the design

SPEAKER_109: designing designing for it to not get ripe for eight days am i correct in my guess

SPEAKER_97: to make it to survive that transit is really depriving the food of its quality i mean the way

SPEAKER_91: in which you used to get tomatoes is you'd harvest them let's say down in you'd harvest these outdoor

SPEAKER_99: beefsteak tomatoes you'd harvest them when they're practically still fully green uh you would gas them with ethylene to force ripening as on its way to market and the end result is not a product you want to

SPEAKER_63: feed to your kids and we that was a miracle at the time because we could then get tomatoes anytime we wanted

SPEAKER_33: and we could have abundance and so the motivation wasn't completely bad at the time it was suboptimal now we can actually grow these the proper way and and either get additional shelf light out out of them or more nutrition but you've been working on grips i believe you were at mit is that right working on the grips or someone um so so i was in mit but

SPEAKER_99: my gripper work started in at harvard a long long time ago in a galaxy far away that was like the 2013

SPEAKER_33: time period you were working on these grippers or something so i have a question for you is it the gripper technology that was the gating factor or was it the ai and computer visualization to understand hey that's a strawberry that's worth picking or was it the ai piece to like get in there and operate around the you know leaves and stems or was it the gripper what was the gating factor on this technology

SPEAKER_99: getting to market yeah so so it's definitely the ai piece so uh so leaving harvard i built out another robotics company and that is a robotics company that is really really focused on the you know the mechanical engineering and materials of the gripper for and that was in a case where you know kind of the amazon problem uh variable size weight shape needs to get into a box infinite number of skews uh for for root it was the exact inverse problem which is you know these a tomato is a delicate object but like it's not like one tomato is going to be the size of a grape and then one next to it's a basketball right like it is reasonably regular uh you need to have a lot of experience in how to grip and and that's something i've built over a long career in doing this but um you know really the new challenge was the artificial intelligence and until recently it just wasn't doable you know both the you know the massive advances in convolutional neural networks and their applications to computer vision that was

SPEAKER_144: enabling the fact explain that for a second unpack that what does that mean in plain english to a neophyte

SPEAKER_99: so you know the modern world of computer vision can really is really robust in that you know you're

SPEAKER_91: creating these training data sets you're taking photographs of an environment you are annotating you're circling the objects of interest let's say you're looking for cars you're circling images of cars and you're feeding those images where a human said where the cars are into a complex statistical model that

SPEAKER_99: teaches itself what are the fundamental attributes of cars and if you put you know unincluded images of cars it's just you know easy to see whole car uh it will find whole cars if you add to that data set semi-obstructed views of cars it'll get good and it'll start to understand how to also find semi-obstructed versions of cars you know if you take a look at some of the older versions of of computer vision where it's really kind of top-down creation of the different filters that found objects uh they just would easily break down in practice in complex environments so they were really good at you know if i needed to pick an object off of a conveyor and put it in a box and it was a well singulated object it had nothing else around it it was up and it was up against a simple background it was a white conveyor um you know you could and maybe it had a logo on it where you had the ability to look for the lettering you you could take that previous generation of computer vision and make it work on that application but you throw a pile of those objects into a bin and it's many different objects and suddenly the environment is hyper complex and and those those vision algorithms the older ones would fall apart uh the modern generation of computer vision that everyone's talking about is able to take on highly complex real world applications and it's quite remarkable i would say that the another major thing that has changed is being able to have computers that you can use at the edge so when you're in a farming environment um you know you're first of all usually far away from from wi-fi you're far away from the it's not like you're gonna plug into a wall jack right um you're often surrounded by plants which have a way you know all the water content in those plants also have a way of blocking signals so the concept of like i'm going to take an image at the robot i'm going to pass it to a computer in the cloud and i'm going to run a model that is not for the most part a tractable solution for real-time artificial intelligence required for picking the fact that i can buy a system on module computers with chips designed for running these models and they barely consume any electricity super important for a mobile platform and i can just buy these things they're cheap and i can put them into my robotics platform like that's a complete game changer it's the reason why you're seeing um it's one of the reasons why you're seeing autonomous driving become a ever more

SPEAKER_33: practical application of artificial intelligence that is the reason why we're seeing a lot of hardware being put at the edge of computer platforms we had a company on the program that was building cameras for checkout lists um you know shopping and they put there are people making cameras with graphic cards in them or putting you know racks in the back of uh the stores so that they can do that computing computer vision in real time and that all comes from gaming correct like if the gaming cards had not

SPEAKER_63: been 60 frames 120 frames per second and that increasing crazy resolution we would have never

SPEAKER_149: had these nvidia cards or whatever cards to be able to do this correct it's funny um because where i started

SPEAKER_99: to experience those graphics cards was early in my career when at a point in life where i was very misguided and i wanted to be an academic and um you know there's a lot of i was doing a lot of spectroscopy and uh protein biophysics and all of a sudden uh there were a couple of really brilliant groups that realized you could start running a lot of hardcore physics on um you know playstations and and that and then you started like you know slapping together a bunch of playstations you had a supercomputer and it was earth-shattering and that was in my old field a million years ago uh but you know that that same kind of aha moment that it's a fundamentally different kind of chip in the way it it it runs these calculations in there um and the kinds of math that you do for for artificial intelligence is really well mapped to those chipsets it's it just makes everything move bleeding fast

SPEAKER_33: and now you have the economic um incentive of cryptocurrency and bitcoin and hash i is that

SPEAKER_149: compounding at another level that people are buying all these cards to do that i mean i love the fact

SPEAKER_99: that people are doing all of these custom uh custom chip projects and that we're getting ever more specific kinds of chips for running you know different parts uh you know different kinds of you know important calculations that you would find on a robot but yeah the other applications you're talking about as well um being able to run that all at the edge uh with very very little data passed along like a sparse amount of metadata passed along to the cloud or passed along to a user uh it just it allows you to put these uh put these algorithms in places where they touch the real world

SPEAKER_147: and solve dramatically more interesting problems or at least more interesting to me

SPEAKER_33: yeah i mean if you look at the m1 which i'm on a mac mini m1 which is like the super cheap computer it and then i have the m1 macbook um you know laptop and it's amazing they literally made a chip designed to run a browser essentially they were like how can we run a hundred browser tabs without

SPEAKER_16: your machine crashing without slowing it down and without burning the battery out it seems like that was

SPEAKER_149: apple's number one you know criteria is how long did your battery last and now the battery lasts on some of these laptops two days or 25 like more than you could ever need 20 hours of battery life all because

SPEAKER_33: they're doing these the number of components is going down and the functionality and the specificness

SPEAKER_89: is going up i think that's why tesla did their own you know circuit board as well for their self-driving program as opposed to just slapping nvidia's in there correct yeah and it's becoming dramatically more

SPEAKER_99: attainable to to actually make these custom chip sets so you know i mean it's it's a combination of different things right i had a background in robotic dexterity for food which is a weird specialization but you know here i am um you know the the convolutional neural networks that were coming out for computer vision that were remarkable these chipsets the ability to use cloud resources to train your models and just so much uh just you know back-end infrastructure for deploying all of this you know it just it makes it faster to innovate and it's the reason why you're seeing you know applications of artificial intelligence in the real world all the time by in the real world i mean like if it's a robot driving by you on a street that's in the real world and the thought of you know you know people talk about software software in the world and all of these efficiencies that have been garnered from software but they've lived in realms where the entire workflow was digital fintech sure um online you know you know many aspects of online commerce up to the point where you have to do the order fulfillment sure the idea that you can push this technology out into physical environments and do physical work is just mind blowing when you think about the the possibilities and to be living at in this moment in time is remarkable and for me you know i have a particular dream right like if going back to the theme of it's shelter it's medicine it's food if i can be part of a project where what the world gets is a building that infinitely pumps out food and it's easy to use and it is reliable we've solved one of the biggest

SPEAKER_33: problems that humans have ever had we're on the cusp of massive um abundance when it comes to food aren't

SPEAKER_16: we i mean the cost savings from having robots pick this from it being in a factory that doesn't have to deal with weather doesn't have to deal with bugs and we don't have to travel from mexico to boston to get your strawberries i mean this is is it going to make of if you had to guess 10 years from now adjusting

SPEAKER_33: for inflation and everything how much cheaper will food be or more abundant is it is it going to be a dramatic lowering of cost or just higher margins for people who sell the food or it's going to stay sideways

SPEAKER_99: so as far as lowering your costs i'm not sure if i'm able to to fully wrap my head around that in the sense that um you know i think one of the major issues that we have now is lack of access you know the the ability to distribute food production and be able to make it accessible to different communities is one of our massive challenges and you know we're looking at a huge increase in the global population over the next 30 years so demand is going up and then as many societies are becoming uh have better infrastructure people are becoming more more affluent by affluent i mean some crazy form of wealth i mean like being able to be able to build a good life for their families our diets are becoming more complex our calorie counts are going up so you know the amount of food that we need to produce it's access right um you know where we sell our we could sell our product for more here at the company but but we don't it's a matter of principle um you know so we're keeping what we make accessible uh but you know for me it's really just expanding supply and protecting that supply against the changes that that are coming and you know we're really spearheading this mission you know kind of look around and i think not enough people know that our food supply is you know tragically under serviced by technology they're things that people who have engineering and science degrees

SPEAKER_136: could commit themselves to and make meaningful change and we we really want to be the ones who lead

SPEAKER_109: the charge well it's not only is it under not only have we under applied technology to this specific

SPEAKER_33: problem and category um we don't have the redundancy and the resiliency in the supply chain we only have 30 days worth of food and i believe you know freeberg mentioned that statistic on an all in podcast recently david freeberg my friend that the world lives on a 30 day food supply i don't know how exactly accurate that is but i would think for vegetables it might even be and fruits it might even be less like our we might be living on two weeks or three weeks supply of fruits and vegetables in which case if we have hurricanes rainfall extreme weather you know a pandemic and let's say the pandemic was really you know ebola like god forbid and people died from going to work we we sent frontline workers we sent people into the fields to pick food they they weren't given the option to stop working if it was truly you know a deadly pandemic you know 30 40 of people who got the disease died and people just said i'm not showing up for work i'm not bringing food to your house i'm not instant carding i'm not door dashing screw it i'm staying home we would have had a total breakdown of society now if we had redundant food supply in every city it would be a lot different am i correct

David Friedberg: exactly uh not to be completely sappy here but i have a kid and a big part of of kicking off root

SPEAKER_99: and a big part of this acquisition had to do with thinking about what is the world she's about to receive you know i you know it's a term you'll hear go around water wars right you know the idea

SPEAKER_91: that we are going to fight over these resources well before they run out the second that people start

SPEAKER_99: to fully understand how fragile our ecosystem ecosystem is i don't mean environmental ecosystem i just mean the infrastructure yeah our infrastructure is um when people start to piece that together because they see disruption it's not going to be a good world that we live in and so you know it could get ugly this business yeah and so you know one of the so i so jonathan who's the the ceo

SPEAKER_91: here is actually i met him just at the founding of root and he shares the same vision he wants to you know he wants to improve the environment he wants to create sustainability in our food supply and he

SPEAKER_99: wants to bring jobs and wealth back to communities which is what we're doing here in kentucky right now and all of this can be accomplished with this tech stack and it has everything to do with building a better society and the acquisition here allowed us to really pull in the entire product roadmap which is more than just robotics it's artificial intelligence to minimize how much you know energy we use and inputs we use to grow the same amount of food it is you know it's understanding how all of the processes in a farm work the human processes the robotic processes the growing processes and using enterprise ml to deliver more food at you know with less waste it has to do with you know all sorts of different innovations that we can do in the supply chain as well to make sure that the goods that we move are more effective and you know being able to to work with a company that that was very well capitalized had dedicated group of investors that were looking to do something massive global scale agricultural technology products you know that was an ability for us at root to really leap forward uh by over a decade in in our development timeline where i don't think time's our friend right now

SPEAKER_33: it's really interesting we we had this conversation on the last episode of all in where i was just saying like you know we sometimes the solutions are right there and they're just not implemented or implemented at scale and i was saying like why don't we just put a nuclear these new nuclear reactors the small ones near the ocean up and down the california coastline uh with desalinization plants and then you've got the energy for the desal without and i know desal and there is an economic there's an environmental impact to everything nuclear has an environmental impact and of course

SPEAKER_16: desalinization does but global warming is having a colossal impact on the entire planet to your point about we're screwing up our farmland so if we implemented just a three-part plan here nuclear desalinization and what you're doing with factory i don't call factory farming but farming organic farming inside of

SPEAKER_91: factories is that the way to refer to it i i like to think of it as organics farming inside of large robots you know these buildings are like 60 acre robots themselves yeah if we just did those three

SPEAKER_33: things we could really change the redundancy resiliency and the effectiveness of um our supply our

SPEAKER_10: infrastructure here in the united states and all that technology exists right now we just don't have the leadership and the will to implement it and it's up to entrepreneurs to make it so affordable and

SPEAKER_33: undeniable that society says okay fine fine you've made it so obvious now and so cheap and affordable fine we'll do it but we don't have we shouldn't be struggling with this it's like the mrna stuff like we had mrna for 20 years we just didn't have the will to put it to work it's incredibly frustrating that society is throttling the technological advancement and let's face it if they if the govern if our government gave your company a billion dollars to go deploy this across the united states

SPEAKER_16: you would have no problem building and what does it cost to build one of these robotic forms like 10

SPEAKER_152: million dollars 25 million dollars so a bit more than that so they they are considerable pieces of

SPEAKER_99: infrastructure but at the end of the day it's it's not it's one of these 60 acre you know you could probably do for you know between a million and two million dollars an acre uh for some of these facilities depending upon how you want to do the math so a hundred million dollars and what does that

SPEAKER_123: feed how many people does that feed i mean it feeds cities you know that's that's what's important

SPEAKER_91: about this and you know we've had incredible support here in the local community both at the you know

SPEAKER_99: the community level and the government level and so the goal for the company is to make 12 of these farms

SPEAKER_91: by 2025 which to me is the real mvp you know we're going to be making leafy greens we're going to be

SPEAKER_99: making strawberries we're making tomatoes we're going to be making you know all sorts of crops you can grow in a greenhouse and we're plunking it down right in the middle of 70 of the us population and demonstrating what a fundamentally different food supply looks like and i'm also proud to say and this is rarely ever comes from the mouth of a roboticist we're actually doing this in a way that expands jobs you know considering that we're importing well considering that we're importing a lot

SPEAKER_91: of this food from abroad these are jobs that are already left and we're bringing them back here ah and the other cool thing is you know you talk to any farmer importing jobs we're re-importing jobs and and also you talk to any farmer and the work on the farm is never over you know you could be in one of these facilities and when you have a million plants and the outcomes on the farm go up the more

SPEAKER_99: you can individualize care you know the fact that a robot is doing one job it means you actually can make time for another job and it massively increases the performance the crop the sustainability the infrastructure so you know the company stood up a a massive uh growing environment in the middle of a pandemic and employed a community and that you know being you're saying you know it takes entrepreneurs to

SPEAKER_116: do this work when others won't and then build a community and a movement around that success

SPEAKER_33: it's really crazy too because if you think about what this sort of um large-scale agriculture i don't know if there's a term for a large-scale

SPEAKER_16: agriculture what did it get us it got us dwarf wheat it got us soybeans and corn and corn syrup

SPEAKER_33: like if you wanted to scale agriculture it meant narrowing the big ag right is i think the term big agriculture big ag got us like a very narrow set of scaled calories corn soybeans wheat turns out these are not great for humans it turns out leafy greens and the green stuff and the vegetables and the berries they're better for you but they don't scale as gracefully but now with ai now with training the

SPEAKER_08: datasets now with robotics we can have a better uh everybody could have a better set of calories is

SPEAKER_97: that correct too exactly you know if you look at you know like a lot a lot of the row crop right

SPEAKER_99: these are crops that were automated when you think about a tractor that that means it's mechanical automation i mean these days they do fuse it with with digital innovations but that's automation uh no one has been able to to automate some of the most important crops for your diet and you know that that's

SPEAKER_33: something that we fundamentally need to change leafy greens is that on the menu or is that just something that's you know we've already got a robotic solution for that because are they leafy greens picked

SPEAKER_99: or are they just cut uh so so you can cut them and we're building out automated leafy green facilities and it's really nice because normally you know you're shipping this in from arizona california uh

SPEAKER_91: mexico which you know if you live in washington dc is a little bit of hike and for leafy you know those are very very perishable crops and at the same time they're also crops that when grown outdoors you have recalls right you have recalls around right dangerous bacteria and the idea that you could grow things in a way where you're not putting anyone in jeopardy which is is a real thing that we have

SPEAKER_93: to contend with now that's a game changer as well yeah you guys don't get the arugula like we have

SPEAKER_195: out here man oh god the baby arugula here i get this watermelon salad at the greek joint by me

SPEAKER_196: oh my that is something i you know watermelon arugula salad with feta oh yeah i mean the further

SPEAKER_99: you get from where your food is grown the the quality just goes off of a cliff and so as someone who's a bit of a foodie uh myself and i've traveled the world you know in every kind of a food product you can imagine i mean there's also just the fact that it's it's nicer to be enjoying what you eat and

SPEAKER_93: and being able to make wildly good products not a luxury they're a freaking human right and that's

SPEAKER_08: that's part of the goal beautiful it's beautiful if every think about it like if poor kids you know

SPEAKER_33: who don't have a lot of money are right now eating like factory farmed meat on you know bread and and that's their diet cheese bread meat and they could be having a beautiful arugula salad with great tomatoes some berries in their greek yogurt i mean it's all about greek food anyway but you could have this could be so much better um oh by the way just for folks who were wondering the the company was standard cognition jordan fisher was on episode 977 doing the automated checkout using computer vision at the edge uh and then uh leela jana uh tragically uh from samosaurus who passed away was doing training of data sets uh with people across the planet including in africa and and people training the data sets but when you train the data sets do you use like some outsource people to look at cameras and

SPEAKER_16: just circle the strawberries and say pick this one pick that one how do you know which strawberry

SPEAKER_99: to pick so yeah color what um so in the case of strawberries it's it's color it's also morphology so for example morphology mean so you don't get to see this at the grocery store but when a bee

SPEAKER_91: income does an incomplete job of pollinating a flower you end up getting these massive like empty cavities in the strawberry the strawberry looks uh very very unusual and so you know it's it's morphology it's color and ultimately what it really should be is bricks you know that is the sugar content of the strawberry we're not talking about a snickers bar here we're still talking about a healthy product but you know if you could start moving you know what your standards are you know picking to a flavor

SPEAKER_99: profile getting that perfect acid balance and sugar load uh you know strawberries should be candy these should be things that your kids are you know pulling out of the refrigerator because you know they're looking forward to it and that is something that you can achieve with this kind of

SPEAKER_33: technology well i'm looking at strawberry morphology right now you got the uh oblate you got the gybos you got the gybos conic conic short wedge long wedge neckered long conic what's the right shape what's the right morphology for the most delicious strawberry in your mind i mean there is

SPEAKER_99: there that's this important thing is they're they're all delicious um you know what's the most delicious is it the conic i feel like the conic so i i personally love any really tiny strawberry one that really had you know that's one of the better ways to get a high sugar content in the berry um they're often um much much harder to bring to market in a way that's economical because i've just when when the very tiny they spoil quick and they spoil quick and there's also like just how um how much effort it takes to harvest them but when i see those on a grocery store shelf yes i run for

SPEAKER_91: them yeah i mean and they're frankly they're harder to find a lot of things are harder to find uh in

SPEAKER_99: the united states like when we when i go to a grocery store in many places around the world um it is an experience but in the united states i think we're just awakening to the fact that our grocery store shelves could have much much better variety you know you mentioned as a related to a lot of row crop agriculture that you know figuring out how to in an economical way deliver deliver food meant delivering a small number of foods and there wasn't a lot of diversity in what we are eating you know using robotic systems that allows you to achieve scale in a variety of different crops in a way that's economical also means that we can start driving a diversity of what we see in the grocery store which also just heightens the food experience wow

SPEAKER_33: so the idea being that you could have five different types of strawberries and you could pick all of those and have them sorted by different sizes if i like the small ones great if i wanted the giant ones because i wanted to dip them in chocolate i could do that amazing opportunity to increase the diversity listen thanks for letting me invest in the company i'm still a shareholder and uh you know i'm really excited to uh send these shares to the syndicate.com it's the quickest turnaround we ever had i'm under a year and i i don't want to say exactly the multiple but a multiple our investment on one year um but for me as the lead i am going to get those shares and i'm holding them because i want to see where you take this um i'm really really excited and uh you know it was for me personally very meaningful to be able to make this investment and i couldn't be more happy that you found a partner to help scale it and really make the entire um you know infrastructure of our food and our ag better for our daughters and all kids out there i mean i think it's really not to again to be sentimental but you know it's like really nice to work on projects like this as an investor and um or com.com for meditation and well-being or blockable for housing you mentioned your passion for housing too like we could solve these problems we could solve food we could solve you know mental

SPEAKER_109: health and we can solve housing these are not beyond our reach they're they're actually all the pieces

SPEAKER_99: are there we we just have to implement this you have to flip the script you have to be excited when you hear these problems when you realize that you have a relevant skill set that can change the world it should be energizing and so right now i'm massively expanding uh the technical team i'm looking for you know i'm not looking for mercenaries i'm looking for missionaries i'm looking at you know if you are a

SPEAKER_91: scientist or engineer typically it means you're an optimist you wanted to dedicate your mind to making the world a better place through the things that you built and so right now i'm on a mission to hire up as many people that wanted to have an opportunity to apply their skills for good we're ultimately figuring out whether or not a cell phone has just the right you know surface coating and rounded edge and

SPEAKER_99: that the app ecosystem for parking your car i mean these all are great and all but the their relevance

SPEAKER_91: disappears unless we get the basics down which is in this case making sure that we have great food and that we're passing along a world that that everyone wants to live in and here it is folks app

SPEAKER_16: harvest.com careers tons of jobs from a greenhouse operation specialist growers people ops packing the

David Friedberg: vegetables if you are you know if you if you can write code if you can build robots if data scientists

SPEAKER_33: machine learning cloud architecture scrum manager so many great gigs embedded you got to do hardware you got to do software you got to do everything well we're hiring for everything across the board this is a great place for you to make a positive impact on the world go to app harvest dot com slash careers stop trying to make the facebook ads 0.07 percent more clickable to trick people into clicking

SPEAKER_99: on some i heard a great quote uh from one of my investors and he lamented the fact that the greatest minds of his generation spent their lives figuring out how to get people to click on a banner ad like all of the algorithms that go into that and and we can do it differently so that's that's the opportunity

SPEAKER_33: that's what we need to get back to here is this optimism that we can solve the world's biggest problems and create abundance for everybody housing blockable food app harvest mental health calm there are so many opportunities space exploration spacex sustainable energy like let's solve these

SPEAKER_109: worlds problems stop with the goddamn ad network clicking quit facebook quit instagram get the hell out

SPEAKER_33: of there take the bag get all those rsu's and go work for app harvest right now that's my message all right listen thanks for letting me invest in the company and uh continued success and uh hey maybe we could uh in a year from now when you get a couple more of these up and running we could do a little check-in would that be okay that'd be fantastic check-in pod all right great awesome listen continued success again thanks for letting me invest and letting our syndicate invest if you want to invest in interesting companies go to the syndicate.com and apply as an accredited investor and i'm teaching angel university to find great companies like this to invest in i i don't want to say exactly what we did but we may have tripled our money in a year doing something really great for the world and i'm holding my shares because i want to i think this could go 10 100 x from here i'm going long continue your success and we'll see you all next time bye bye