The Pomp Podcast
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.
00:43:43 · Polina Pompliano
[00:43:43] S1: Yeah. And I think the beauty of living in America, not to make this patriotic, but it is to... The whole point of, like, a democratic society is that you can love something and ask questions and criticize it in order to make it better.
00:43:59 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:43:59] S0: A 100%. By the way, let's take it to another company. Right? Let's go and look at, for example, Grindr is a great example. Right? I know the CEO, George, there. He's been on the podcast before. And if you think about that business, there are some people who come from the gay community. They buy Grindr stock to support a public company that's supporting gay people. There's other people who say, morally, ethically, whatever, I don't wanna be a shareholder. This is America, dude. You you can choose to allocate your capital how you want, what you want, whatever. Right? But then there's some people who say, like, I'm not gonna take a stance on... I like this. I don't like this. Like, my job is to make money. That's also okay in America. Mhmm. And so it's just like you you kind of extrapolate this out to the AI stuff, and I think that everyone is... It... It's not fun to constantly talk about these are great companies that make a lot of money. How many times can you write that headline? So what you have to do is you have to start to look for the second or third order thing to talk about, and it becomes the, like... You know, some of the companies are giving you lots of fodder. They're giving you a lot to talk about because they keep saying crazy stuff. But, also, I always go back to, Elon when he hosted Saturday Night Live. My favorite part of his entire appearance was in the opening. He was like, I'm trying to, like, settle on Mars. Did you think I'd be normal? Like, we kinda need these people to be a little crazy, a little out there, a little, like, dude, you got a lot of, you know, this, like, kinda mirage bullshit because it also means that they're the same person who go create this technology. And so it's not even that, like, I hold it against them. I don't like it. Mhmm. But, like, I understand that that's what comes with the innovation, the the technology, you know, accelerating.