The Pomp Podcast
00:37:36 · Polina Pompliano, Anthony Pompliano
[00:37:36] S1: like, I'm [00:37:37] S0: not going to the store. I've never gone to an Amazon Go store. Bezos, good luck. Can't see me. But... Yeah. Correct. I walk outside the office, and there's 20 cameras. But, like, hey. Do I wanna live in New York City or not? So it goes back to this idea of there are plenty of things that we should be scared of. By the way, I don't love the surveillance state. I don't love the fact that all of our data is everywhere. I don't love blah blah blah blah blah, whatever. Am I so unhappy, so worried, and so negatively affected by all that that I'm willing to go, like, homestead in Oklahoma and live off the grid? No. So guess what? I am actively making a decision to participate in that. That's on me. That is an individual choice that I am making. [00:38:15] S1: If the kung fu robots come?
00:38:15 · Polina Pompliano, Anthony Pompliano
[00:38:15] S1: If the kung fu robots come? [00:38:17] S0: If I choose to buy a kung fu robot as a bodyguard, which by the way sounds awesome, we'll talk about that later, how much it costs, and whether I should do it. But if I choose to do that and it goes rogue, I have nobody to blame but me. I'm the one who bought it and gave it keys to, you know, our place, or let it come with me to the office or ride in the car. If it turns on and just slaps me, why I let in the car? It's just like I'm a big believer that, people like to worry about things. And when they worry about things, they try to find the craziest, most cockamamie thing ever. So for example, all these people who keep running around saying AI is gonna kill us. Okay. Let's play a game. I am going to assume that you are correct that AI is gonna kill us. And I ask them, how will it happen? I swear to you, the stories that I hear are like, well, see, the AI is gonna hack into this pathogen lab, there's gonna be this [00:39:14] S1: super That's immediately what came to my mind. [00:39:16] S0: Pathogen, whatever. And then they're gonna let it escape. And when it escapes, it's gonna get into the airstream or the jet stream. And then when it does that, it's gonna go all through all the the world. It's gonna kill all humans. And I say, okay. Great. You're fucking crazy. [00:39:31] S1: Why, though? It could happen. [00:39:34] S0: Sure. And I could literally walk on the floor, and the engineer could have made a mistake, and a hole opens, and I fall into the crust of the earth. Like, all kinds of crazy shit
00:39:34 · Anthony Pompliano, Polina Pompliano
[00:39:34] S0: Sure. And I could literally walk on the floor, and the engineer could have made a mistake, and a hole opens, and I fall into the crust of the earth. Like, all kinds of crazy shit [00:39:44] S1: can happen. Maybe the AI discussion, discourse is very different for people with anxiety versus people without anxiety.
00:39:53 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:39:53] S0: Of course. By the way, I also understand that, like, I probably have a better understanding just because we work with this technology. You know, we're we're building a ton of proprietary AI when it comes to sylvia.com, all this stuff. And so, like, I am closer to it than many others. And by the way, I don't make fun of the people who, are worried about this stuff. I don't think that the people who are asking questions are wrong. I don't think that the people who don't want a data center in their backyard that they should be, like, mocked and ridiculed. I don't think that the people who have, concerns, questions that are like, hey. Let's make sure we understand this. I think all of that is very rational in the sense of, yeah. We probably wanna understand this stuff. Yeah. We probably wanna ask these questions. If the AI people are right, they should have good answers for many of these questions. If the people who are building data centers want to build them close to residential areas and the residents have questions or concerns, the data center people should have answers to those questions or concerns. If not, then move it to somewhere else. So, like, you go through all of this and you say to yourself, it's not that the people are wrong or that they shouldn't be asking these questions. It's just that I have done enough work where I'm not worried about those things anymore. But if people are worried, then it's on the companies who are building this stuff to go and educate them, to go and answer their questions. And so if you bring it all back to Anthropic, I love the product. I think the people there are incredibly smart. I think it's an incredible business that they've built. All of that stuff is true. What I don't like is the, like, moralizing. I don't like the, like, we're gonna save humanity, and I don't like the, like, we literally have a cabal of people that are smarter and have, like, deputized ourselves to now make decisions for humane. I don't like any of that stuff. And I think that it's all a big charade and mirage that is really this, like, non altruistic thing that is to accumulate power and money. And so, again, most people would be like, oh, you hate Anthropic. No. I don't at all. Actually, I use Anthropic. I think that it's a fantastic product, but I can separate out the product, the technology, the company from the bullshit.
00:42:03 · Anthony Pompliano, Polina Pompliano
By the way, just so people think that I'm being intellectually honest, let's take another company. I don't know. Let's take, SpaceX. [00:42:10] S1: I knew you were gonna say that.
00:42:12 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:42:12] S0: Well, that... That's like the other end of the spectrum. Right? I think that there is a bunch of stuff that SpaceX does on a day to day basis that is incredible. Reusable rockets, Starlink Internet, all this kind of stuff. There's also... And I think that... Actually, I actually think that Elon would say this himself, that he makes these... Hey. Here's the timeline. What people misunderstand about it, and took me a while to wrap my head around, is he puts out these timelines, but he expects it to be hit 50% of the time. Whereas most people, when they put out a timeline, people expect it to be hit a 100% of the So he probably didn't do a good job of communicating that to people. Right? So, like, there was bullshit associated with the Tesla, the SpaceX, all this kind of stuff because people would hear these crazy things, and it would only get hit half the time or whatever. The same thing's happening here. You can't critique SpaceX or Tesla from a business perspective, at least I don't think you can. Ride in a Tesla. It's it's fucking amazing. Look at Optimus. It's amazing. Look at the reasonable rockets. It's amazing. Look at Claude. Look at Opus. Look at all these... They're they're amazing. But it's just like, I think people have to separate the companies, the products, all this kind of stuff from, like, the bullshit surrounding these companies. And if you can do that, then what's likely to happen is you're a user of Anthropic products. You pay them money most likely. Like, I'm supporting them. I I pay them a subscription every month. And you also probably are deeply looking at, should I buy the IPO? So you're considering being a shareholder, but you still can hate all the bullshit.