My First Million
00:17:24 · Shaan Puri, Sam Parr
Because to manufacture at scale with absolute precision, a Lego block that's gonna perfectly fit into every other Lego block. It can't be off even by, like, the smallest amount. Or, like, when they were doing the Tesla cars, he would famously... Like, there's a meeting where he had a a Hot Wheels car, and he's like, hearing all the problems of their assembly line. He's like, well, why don't we do it like this? You know, they just inject the whole bottom thing as one mold. It's not 200 pieces. It's one mold. And they're like, well, Elon, that's a tiny car that's two inches big. He's like, yeah. But what if we just made it bigger? And they built their own custom, like, molding thing for the bottom of cars, and they actually pulled it off, and it radically simplified their assembly process. And now... And then they got ahead of all the other car manufacturers. They're the only ones that did it for, like, seven years because they owned all the machines that were the only... They built the only machines that could do it at that size. And so being great at toy manufacturing actually translates really well to manufacturing other things. [00:18:21] S1: Are you... Is that your presentation? Are you done, or is there more? Because I wanna I wanna I wanna talk to you about it, [00:18:26] S0: but I don't wanna, played off the stage? Oh, yeah. No. No. No. No. [00:18:29] S1: I wanna ask you about it, but I don't wanna, like, derail it.
00:18:31 · Shaan Puri
[00:18:31] S0: Let me just give you... Okay. I'm just gonna say the other ones. I'm not even gonna explain them. Alright. New materials. I don't even fully understand this. I would need to go hang out with some crazy people, because this is like when you hear it, and it's crazy talk. But there's people in San Francisco, they're trying to literally do alchemy. They're like, oh, made gold. We figured out we can literally make gold out of this other material. Or they're literally trying to just invent new materials. So actual material science is happening. I find that to be interesting but way above my pay grade. FSD for everything. So full self driving everything. So I don't think people understand. Like, self driving cars are definitely here. Like, I I get in my Tesla every day. I push the button. It drives 90 something... 95% of all the miles. The only time I take over is basically in parking lots where I wanna pick my spot, and I don't like the spot it's gonna pick for So it's crazy how self driving works, but they're now applying that to everything. So forklifts inside of warehouses, machines that go clean windows at the top of skyscrapers. So it's basically, like, the machines that will fix the world. Like, how do you go get the barnacles off the ship? How do you go, you know, maintain bridges that are not being maintained today? And so people are building the machines that will go automatically go maintain our world, our living world that today, like, takes a lot of human effort to go maintain. Weather and oceans. We had Will O'Brien on, and he was talking about, like, basically ocean tech. So the way that space and space tech has gotten super hot with SpaceX and others, ocean tech is, you know, right around the corner for the same thing. And the last one is human body hardware. So this is Neuralink. This is basically... It's AI in the world of things, but the things are us. And, you know, I have a friend, Tyler, who's been working for years on this thing called Atom Limbs, and he...
00:20:11 · Shaan Puri
Basically, you know, he's like, you know, somebody goes to war, they fight for our country, they lose their arm or their leg, they're given this really shitty prosthetic, like, stiff piece of plastic, this piece of junk, where the technology is actually out there now where you can put a robotic arm onto your arm that you can use your mind to say, pick that up, and it'll pick it up. It's kind of a shame that we just haven't done the engineering to bring the cost down for people who come back from wars or have like, you know, tragedies where they lose a limb. We can actually give them a really superior limb if we just do the do the hard work and engineering to actually bring the cost down where it's affordable, and let people know that this exists, and you don't have to have a prosthetics dump. And I think that's really inspiring to me.
00:20:54 · Sam Parr
[00:20:54] S1: This is awesome. I feel very optimistic because I've been like trying to figure out, I read a lot of history because I'm trying to one thing, figure out what makes America so special? Like how did this experiment come to be? It's pretty crazy how like these group of guys like had this opinion on what the world should be, and two fifty years later, it's mostly great. And I was reading books on it, and between like 1880 and like 1970 or so, there was this massive explosion of American growth. And part of it was like our values and ideas, like this idea of individual liberty, equality, private property, capitalism, like that all like combined, and we were the first country that was founded with that collective group of principles. We were the first one that really had that. But one of the reasons why America became so special was in like the 1890s, 1880s or so, Rockefeller discovered oil, and then soon after Carnegie started creating steel using iron ore. And we had so many resources in America that basically everyone talks about the gold rush. The bigger rush was out of Duluth, Minnesota, where we had this massive mine that created this stuff called iron ore, which was used to create steel. And we also had huge copper mines and you could put it on a ship based out of Duluth and it could go through the Great Lakes, which is basically the size of an ocean and Great Lakes are huge. And it could get up to New York and get up to all these amazing places really, really fast. So the point where in the 1950s, we were transporting so much iron ore that that was enough to create 50,000,000 cars a year. That's how much we were transporting on the Great Lakes. And then we were growing all this food in the farmlands because of America, because one of America's greatest abilities is to grow tons and tons of food. And so we had all these people and we had 50 states that were tariff free. And so, like, I was reading about, like, the massive resources in America and that we don't get enough credit. I mean, was luck, but we don't get enough credit. Like that's one of the reasons that made us great. And then the 1940s, World War II happened and every place in Europe and a lot of places in North Africa, in Asia were destroyed, but we were good. We were good because A, we were so far away and B, we didn't get destroyed.
00:23:10 · Sam Parr
And so I was thinking, I'm like, it feels like we're gonna go through another one of these things because if you look at the data center creation in America, it's like way beyond most every other country right now. And it feels like we're gonna go through this... Another one of these industrial revolutions simply because of our entrepreneurial spirit, but also the huge amount of resources, including people. We have so many people working on this stuff. And so whenever you talk about this, I'm like, America is gonna go through this massive, massive explosion. I don't know how it's gonna look. I don't know how long it's gonna take, but it seemed very comparable to the industrial revolution.
00:23:51 · Shaan Puri
[00:23:51] S0: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I I was in a group chat yesterday, and I think people have... There's one way to look at it is exactly what you said. That's, I would say, a very optimistic take. I think another group of people feel extremely pessimistic. And, you know, if I boil down, what are they pessimistic about? It's basically the most popular parts of America, like New York, California, are trending towards socialism. So, you know, a hatred of billionaires, a hatred of companies, a hatred of AI, a hatred... You know, like, there's a lot of, like, negativity towards those exact things, those drivers of progress that you just talked about. Right? Capitalism and and, obviously, output of capitalism is that you can build a successful company, and you can become very wealthy, and you can, you know, go compete and build new technologies and all those things. And then you can, you know, take those resources you have and reinvest them in the next... You know, in others. Right? And that self sustains all the progress. And so I think one negative view is have you... You know, are are we losing are we losing what made us great in that way? Another piece of the negativity is, you know, have we hollowed out our ability to actually build things? You know, for so long, we kind of outsourced manufacturing to China. And so now trying to get back and kind of reshor or reskill or re... Reindustrialize is like, sounds good, easy to pump your fist to, really hard to do. Do we actually have the stomach to do it? It's like a big company that hasn't innovated in a very long time. And even if you realize you need to innovate, can you can you actually move such a big ship? Can you culturally, like, get back to that or not? I think that's another one. And then the third one is general skepticism around AI. So either AI is so good that we're all gonna lose our jobs, and people are gonna be out of work, or AI is not as good as it's advertised, and it's a huge bubble, and this is all you know, it's gonna tank the market because everybody's overspending on it. Just sort of like a no win proposition. And so it's funny to hear you say that because several of our friends in a group chat literally had like such a negative view that was so foreign to me, but, you know, I understand where they're coming from.