Dan Ni - Will The Next Tesla Fly? & Mind-Controlled Flamethrowers

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Dan, the founder of the TLDR newsletter, and they discuss some of the most interesting moments from both the TLDR newsletter and the Modern CTO podcast, speculating on whether or not the next Tesla will fly, mind-controlled flamethrowers, ransomware attacks, and more. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Dan at 00:00:38) What's up, Dan?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Hey, how's it going, man?

(Dan at 00:00:38) Dude, it's fantastic. How are you? Good to see you again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) Man, dude, this is gonna be great. I'm so excited. Do you ever get to meet any of your email subscribers in person?

(Dan at 00:00:53) I don't think I've ever met somebody that was just a reader before. I've had some friends say, "Oh, I've heard of TLDR," but I don't think I've met somebody that was like, "Oh, you write TLDR. I'm a reader." I guess I've always been fairly anonymous for writing TLDR. I only recently started putting my last name there because, you know, there's a lot of scary people on the internet, man, and I'm not super attention-seeking on social media and stuff. So I guess it would be hard to know it's me even if you do read TLDR.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) Oh, it is. Trust me. Because I found the newsletter through—I think I was on a social media platform and you have this really cool animated video covering multiple topics, and I subscribed to the newsletter. And then it didn't disappoint at all. The first day I got it, I was like, "That's cool." Second day, I was like, "How is he keeping it up? It's so cool every day. I don't know how he's doing this."

(Dan at 00:01:54) Well, thank you for saying that, first of all. I think I've just kind of built up so many feeds and aggregators over the two and a half years, almost three years, of doing this now, where every time I see a story—usually you see stories on multiple platforms that they're cool. But a lot of times, you see these small stories that are super interesting but aren't really broadly covered. And then I kind of tried to reverse engineer how I would repeatedly find that story. And so over the last few years, I've just gotten so many new sources, and they're all kind of in various feeds and aggregators for me. So yeah, that's kind of how I find stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) I love it. Let's plug it real quick. How do people join the newsletter?

(Dan at 00:02:37) You can go to tldr.tech. That's the domain extension, tldr.tech, and the front page is just a signup page. So yeah, it's just eight links every day on the most interesting stuff in tech, science, programming, and all that good stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) I love it, man. I love it. Yeah. So we actually tried—when I first found it and liked it—we tried to hunt you down and figure out who owned it and figure out how to get them on the show. So it took us months. It wasn't something we worked on full time for months. We didn't hire an investigator to come track you down. But here and there, I would just see one, and every couple weeks I'd be like, "Let's talk to the person who makes this," and I'd send it over to my production team. They're like, "I don't know. There's this half-empty LinkedIn profile. We think it might be this guy. We don't know his last name." But luckily, we did find you, and so I was really, really happy to meet you.

(Dan at 00:03:30) Right. I am the owner of the world's worst LinkedIn. I just got tired of recruiter spam after a while and just nuked everything from my profile. But yeah, I guess this was always just—this was until very recently just a side project for me, because I used to run the SaaS company called Scraper API, which was an API to build web scrapers, essentially. So that was my full-time gig, and TLDR was my side project that I would do for fun at the end of the day. So I actually just went full time on this in March, so pretty recently, and just started launching new stuff. Today, I'm actually doing an AMA, an "ask me anything" style interview on TLDR. So I'll do a lot more of those coming up. And then I'm launching a podcast, as we spoke about, and hopefully learning a lot from this one. And yeah, just doing a lot of that sort of stuff. So yeah, really excited to do this full time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) So how is your podcast gonna be formatted? What are you gonna talk about?

(Dan at 00:04:31) Well, I think in the beginning, there'll be a lot of trial and error, kind of like there was with the newsletter. I think there's a lot of interesting people. I have a list of interesting people that I just kind of find around the internet that I probably want to talk to. There are these guys starting this charter city called Próspera in Latin America, which is just crazy. There are guys that make these smart contact lenses. I think it's called Mojo or something like that. But just these people that pop up in my newsletter that I'm kind of like, "Oh man, that guy's really interesting. I really want to talk to them." So yeah, I'll probably just reach out to a number of them, and hopefully someone will be like, "Okay, let's do it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Absolutely, it'll work for sure. We did that. We use your newsletter as a source for interesting guests. We found Wildtype. They were making salmon. They would take these salmon cells and clone them.

(Dan at 00:05:21) Oh yeah, I remember those guys. Yeah, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:23) Yeah, we did an interview with their founder. He's a brilliant guy. It was really cool, really interesting.

(Dan at 00:05:28) That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of person I'd like to talk to. So yeah, hopefully it'll be good. But I mean, I guess with anything new, you never really know. You always have an idea of how it's gonna go in your head, and then when you actually do it, it's a little bit different. But I think we'll figure it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) Yeah. Let's talk out a couple options just for fun. Alright, so one way—because we actually, when we couldn't find you, we had an unofficial TLDR notes section in our notes where I could tell if some guests are more open to casually talking than others. Right? So when I would find someone who is more on the fun side, I would go to that TLDR and ask them thoughts on these different headlines that are happening.

(Dan at 00:06:11) That's so funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) Yes! That would be like a third or a fourth of the interview.

(Dan at 00:06:19) Oh my god. I know, right? I'm flattered.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) You should be. It's fantastic stuff. So when I heard you were doing your own podcast, it's like, that's gonna be real successful. But I didn't know how it would be—you know, maybe bringing on someone who's doing something just super unique and just having the conversation about what they're doing that's unique. I would totally listen to the eye contact lens person. Or what did you say? A charter city? Tell me about that.

(Dan at 00:06:43) Oh, a charter city. A charter city is essentially a city that is a startup that builds a city as their product. So yeah, it seems insane, which is kind of why I want to talk to these people. Right? There's actually a lot of these—I say a lot—there's like three dudes on Twitter that do this. But there's a whole Charter Cities Institute where they just try to figure out better ways to start cities. So yeah, it's one of these things that a lot of weirdos on Twitter are talking about now, but maybe in five to ten years, it'll be like, you know, crypto was five to ten years ago where it's just "you have internet money" or whatever. And now it's kind of going mainstream. It does kind of—if you think about it, cities are these things that we kind of just take for granted, that they've always been there. But at some point, somebody started New York City, where I am now. Right? And someone started Paris. And they're kind of these immortal beings that just stay around. I was reading this interesting article—I can't remember what it was—talking about how cities are actually more durable than the nations that contain them. So if you think about Istanbul, it used to just be Constantinople, and the country fell, but the city stayed there. And it just is under a new jurisdiction now. Right? So cities are sort of, in a lot of ways, the atomic unit of civilization. So I think this idea that people are now trying to build their own is just super interesting. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe it'll be big. Maybe it'll be nothing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) Yeah. They're decentralized, right? So they're more resilient.

(Dan at 00:08:25) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, they're just much more tangible, right, than a country. A country's borders are kind of artificial or whatever. A city is just a group of people next to each other. So it's kind of a more natural, tangible thing than a state. Right? Where, who knows where the state border of North Dakota and South Dakota is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:49) It's in between them.

(Dan at 00:08:50) It is in between them. I gave a relative location. Alright, so you must be reading for hours a day. Or do you have this down to a pretty efficient process?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:01) Well, yeah. In a lot of ways, TLDR was just an effort to just design my own dream job, which is just surf Twitter and Reddit and Hacker News all day. So yeah, in a lot of ways, I am just reading all day and just kind of going through a lot of these news stories and finding the most interesting ones. But yeah, it doesn't really feel like work in the way that, you know, back when I was running my SaaS company, I would just write blog posts or whatever, and that really is kind of a grind sometimes. Right? There's a lot of stuff that just has to be done. For TLDR, it's just going about my day as if—I would do this on the weekends too, even when there's no issue of TLDR going out. You know?

(Dan at 00:09:42) Yeah. But you have to do it now that you have to do it. Right? It's part of your thing that you're doing. There's some sort of routine around it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:50) That's true. That's true. I guess now that it is my actual full-time job, I don't think there's actually that much of it that I don't enjoy doing. I still just enjoy reading Hacker News every day. I refresh it all the time. Right? It's very instinctive. So yeah, I don't know. I guess not as much has changed as I thought it might, because, you know, you do read about, like, whenever something becomes your full-time job—even these professional athletes, right? It's fun to play basketball, but playing basketball when you have a sprained knee isn't that fun. Right? So there's something where, if you have to do it, it's not that great. But for me, I mean, it's just not that much of a commitment. It just feels like fun.

(Dan at 00:10:38) Yeah. I mean, I didn't mean it like that. I meant structure, because you have to have release dates and times. Right? So you do this daily. It's five days a week, correct?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Yeah. Yeah, it is five days a week. But I think you get into a rhythm and you just kind of get used to doing it. And I have all the templates and stuff set up. So really, I just find the stories, and that's the bulk of the time commitment. The tough times are—you know, sometimes, like recently, we had Memorial Day. Right? And some days, man, it is a slow news day. So those are the days that are kind of tough, and I'm really, really diving deep for some good stories. But in general, I'm somewhat bailed out by the miscellaneous section. So two out of the eight stories are miscellaneous, and you can kind of just dig further into weird stuff for those. Right? I found this cool video of a drone flying into a volcano for that, and that was, I think, my eighth slot. So yeah, stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:41) Yeah. I love that one, by the way. I saw that one.

(Dan at 00:11:43) Yeah. I always love those videos. I can't believe—you know, it's so weird that the two use cases for drones are military applications and people flying them to take pictures and selfies. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:55) Yeah.

(Dan at 00:11:56) It's two very, very different use cases. And it's just kind of funny that those are the two that people have found.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) What are some of the—you see every day you've got cool stories, but you've been doing this a while. Over the past couple months or, you know, recently, what are some of the more interesting stories that have stuck in your mind?

(Dan at 00:12:14) Oh, the most interesting stories that have stuck in my mind. There's a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) I've got some. Do you want me to share my screen?

(Dan at 00:12:22) Oh yeah, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) Yeah. I figured we can cheat here, right? There's no teachers. We can cheat.

(Dan at 00:12:28) Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:30) Because these are some of the ones that we liked.

(Dan at 00:12:33) Oh yeah. The Boring Company tunnel—the Boring Company stuff is all really cool. I love those. Right? You always wonder how those companies run when it's Elon Musk's third side hustle or whatever. What happens there? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:48) Do you think he shows up to The Boring Company stuff, or does he just show up once every couple months and it's like, "Hey, here I am, we're launching stuff"?

(Dan at 00:12:56) Yeah. I think he shows up for the moments that matter. I've heard his interviews on Joe Rogan and such. He's really, really involved, obviously, in Tesla and SpaceX. I think that's where he spends most of his time, bouncing back and forth between those. And then people just approach him all the time and want to put his name on their business, because who wouldn't want to say Elon Musk is my cofounder?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) That's—I mean, that's the only reason we've heard of Boring Company and Neuralink and stuff. Right? It's just like, "Oh, Elon Musk is involved."

(Dan at 00:13:24) Right. Yeah. And he gets really great people too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:27) Oh, definitely. I mean, look at the top three stories you have. OpenAI, also cofounded by Elon Musk, and Tesla, number three. That Roadster is gonna be insane. It's ridiculous. I mean, that guy—thank God for Elon Musk. He's half the stuff I write about in this newsletter. The SpaceX ocean spaceport thing, I think, recently was super interesting too. There was one crazy story about an autonomous drone kill. It was the first one ever—I think it was last year in Libya. The United Nations investigation just confirmed it. So yeah, essentially, this autonomous drone just decided to kill a person without any human intervention, and that was the first time that's ever happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) Really?

(Dan at 00:14:13) Yeah. Which is, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:16) Jesus. Whose drone was it?

(Dan at 00:14:17) I can't remember whose drone it was. I remember it being in Libya. Let me look this up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:23) Maybe we shouldn't say this over recorded microphones, because it's like the drone's cousins—"I belong to nobody. I am my own thing"—it kills me next. Right?

(Dan at 00:14:34) That's true. That's true. I mean, yeah, some of this stuff is just super futuristic. I was actually surprised by, I think one of the things about this newsletter after I started writing it is I'm surprised by how far along science is, because a lot of the stuff you just don't hear about.

(Dan at 00:14:51) You know? I thought all of the lab grown food stuff was way behind where it was. They're just making lab grown caviar now. They're making lab grown wagyu steak. They're doing all this stuff.

(Dan at 00:15:06) So yeah, it's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:08) Yeah. The salmon guy, the Wild Type, he said that, you know, regulation is something that definitely holds it up because they don't know how to classify these things yet. But some countries have actually pushed forward. And so there was one more modern country that actually had the lab grown chicken. I think they call it curated chicken or something more palatable than the word lab grown. Right. But they actually had it in Singapore. You could go to Singapore and actually order this chicken, and it was in some restaurant. And I thought that was really fascinating.

(Dan at 00:15:43) That's awesome. Yeah. I have seen Singapore for a lot of these food startups, actually. So maybe they just have a much more liberal regulation regime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Right? Do you actually think the Tesla's gonna fly? Like, do you think it will? It says fly very briefly. What does that mean?

(Dan at 00:15:59) Well, car companies can always just, I think a lot of car companies design super duper cars for marketing purposes. Right? So I guess I mean, they got a bazillion dollars. Why not? Why not make it fly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:16) That is true. I mean, they've got the rocket company too, and it's called the SpaceX cold air thruster, like add on to get it to do that.

(Dan at 00:16:24) Right. Yeah. Exactly. I don't know if it'll be available for purchase, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just made one. You know? There are those, there are all those guys now. I see this story once every one or two weeks now. Some guy on a jet suit doing stuff. Those Iron Man jet suits are basically working now. If you, if you guys haven't seen these videos or know what I'm talking about, just Google jet man and jet suit or whatever. Oh, yeah.

(Dan at 00:16:54) It literally just looks like Iron Man, and I think it just blows air down and just kind of, you just kind of zoom really fast. And yeah, I had no idea they could make Iron Man suits, but evidently they can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Yeah. I saw, four years ago, four or five years ago, I saw the very first one. It was a military exercise that was videotaped. And then since then, I've just seen upgrade after upgrade. Because what happens if somebody does something like that and they see it's possible, and then private industry comes along with its cash and does, look, we're gonna make these and sell these to people.

(Dan at 00:17:26) Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I can't wait for that. Honestly, it seems so much more fun than the current generation of adrenaline junkie stuff. I would much rather get in an Iron Man suit than bungee jump. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:38) I would definitely do that.

(Dan at 00:17:39) That would be very much fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:41) If you have an Iron Man suit, reach out to the podcast. We wanna be your friend.

(Dan at 00:17:45) Please. And invite me too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Yes. Dan can come along too.

(Dan at 00:17:49) I definitely wanna be in your Iron Man suit. Oh, man. Looking at these stories, mind controlled flamethrower. That was a good one. These brain computer interfaces too are just way ahead of what I thought was possible. I still don't, can't wrap my mind around what is happening there. But evidently, we have very primitive brain machine interfaces that just work now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. I was watching, like five minutes before this interview, I was watching a TED talk, and this guy had these electrodes on an arm. He brought up two participants. Right? Two volunteers. And on this one woman, he put these electrodes and he had her close her arm and close her fist.

(Dan at 00:18:32) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:33) And do that a couple times and it showed it reading out on the iPad. And this is with $30 of materials. It was like a do it yourself kit. Right? So he had her do that and it showed up on the iPad and you could see it and it actually had audio associated with it too. And it was a Raspberry Pi connected to an iPad.

(Dan at 00:18:50) Oh my God.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:51) Then he had the other person come up and he put the electrodes on one of his nerves on the bottom of his arm, and then he had her close her arm and it moved his arm. Like, she was moving his arm with her mind because it was just transferring the neuro signals to his, uh, yeah, man. This is how they get the advanced prosthetics to work with people. They use their own existing brain to control their prosthetics, but he's developed this. He's a neuroscientist that wanted to make it more accessible, so that more people get into it younger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) Like, his whole thing was you have to go to grad school. You have to study brain science for six years, become a PhD or whatever official neuroscientist, and then you get access to equipment to actually start playing around with this type of stuff. Oh my God. What they did, him and his business partner made all of this, took all of that technology and boiled it down with Raspberry Pis and these at home kits that you can do. And he was calling it Backyard Brains or something, but that is so cool to think that we could hang out, we could buy this kit for, I don't know, $30, 50 bucks, and I could control your arm. That would be ridiculous.

(Dan at 00:20:00) When we meet in person, you can control my arm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) Or we could do a mind controlled drone with a mind controlled flamethrower on top of it.

(Dan at 00:20:09) Oh my God. Jesus Christ. Who knows? Who knows what we'll be doing in five, ten years? Yeah.

(Dan at 00:20:15) Actually, you know, that reminds me. You know that, the guy that made Oculus, Palmer Luckey or whatever? I think he runs an AI defense company now that makes drones that kill other drones and stuff like that. But I was reading this interview by him, and he was saying that one of the projects he did when he was a teenager was he tried to make an exoskeleton that would bypass his own nervous system with an electric one to make his reflexes way faster. And I was like, holy crap, man. I was not worrying about that when I was 16 years old. You know? Some people are just way out there smart. So yeah. I don't know. Whoever is coming up with this sort of stuff, congratulations, man. This is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55) There is this guy I talked to. I have him here right here on the notes you can see. I've never done this before, by the way. Showed my notes with a guest. This is the first time.

(Dan at 00:21:03) Oh, perfect. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) So this guy, Grok, or his name is not Grok. His company is called Grok. His name is Jonathan, and he is incredibly brilliant. Worked at one of the big five media companies. They bought his company, then he sold a, you know, he's just one of those incredibly brilliant human beings out there.

(Dan at 00:21:21) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:21) And I was talking to him, and he gave me a test. I asked him for one of his, do you wanna do your intelligence interview test on me? Which I will never do again because I failed so bad. I was like a monkey trying to learn how to eat food for the first time. It was horrible, man. It was horrible. But what they do, alright, so he made these advanced chips, and one chip is equivalent to a truckload of the best processor you could buy today.

(Dan at 00:21:49) What?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:50) Yeah. He's got this super ridiculously advanced technology, and it's just, I was like, hey. I could introduce you to people if you want. He's like, people are lined up out my door. No. He didn't say that. He was very, very nice. He was very nice. He didn't say that. But um, yeah, man. Just to think about what type of competitive advantage would that give you as a cloud hosting company or something?

(Dan at 00:22:11) Oh my God. Yeah. I guess it's like that stuff that Google tries to do with their tensor processing units. Right? But I guess these guys maybe just have a better one or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) Yeah. It's specific for AI too. So, you know, maybe web hosting providers that are providing AI web hosting. But um, yeah, it was just fascinating.

(Dan at 00:22:30) That's awesome. That's awesome. Good for these guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:35) Oh, he, Adam just said he's doing it at Google. He was doing that type of stuff at Google, and then he did this.

(Dan at 00:22:40) Oh, wow. So he left. Wow. Yeah. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:43) We, uh.

(Dan at 00:22:44) Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) Adam pulled some other stuff too. I don't know if we should mention it. We'll decide. We'll talk about it and then they can cut it or not in post production. This guy, Tyler Ward from iGI, he told us a story of a company that had to work with a drug dealer to pay off a ransomware attack in Bitcoin. So this company, this legitimate company got ransomware attacked, and they needed Bitcoin to pay the ransom, but nobody had that much Bitcoin on hand. So they found this drug dealer. Like, somebody, oh my God. Somebody through some relationships knew this drug dealer guy who had a ton of Bitcoin, and they bought the Bitcoin from him to pay off the ransomware attack.

(Dan at 00:23:24) Do you feel like ransomware attacks are getting way worse recently? Like, just in the news, we've had that, the world's biggest slaughterhouse supplier or whatever. They just stopped all our beef production, and then there was that gas pipeline. I wouldn't be surprised if something really huge popped up. Right? Like a city going into blackouts or something because of ransomware. It seems like it's probably just gonna happen at some point. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:51) Yeah. And who knows how long it's been happening and it just started to get picked up as newsworthy. Right?

(Dan at 00:23:57) Right. Right. I kinda wonder how much of this is because you can just move large amounts of money with cryptocurrency now? And like, because before, what would you do before? I guess send Visa gift cards or something. How do you even move that much money in an unreversible way?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) Use a drug dealer.

(Dan at 00:24:17) That's true. Maybe duffel bags of cash, but you can't send that to Russia. So I guess, like, did it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:22) You did it through laundering it. You would have fake businesses set up. You'd transact with those businesses and somehow launder the money, I'm assuming. We could get some people on to talk about it. I'm sure.

(Dan at 00:24:32) Yeah. Yeah. I guess before Monero and Bitcoin, they must have done something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:37) They had to. I mean, illegal things have been happening since the beginning of time.

(Dan at 00:24:42) That's true. That's true. I guess, what illegal money would you want to send to Russia in the 1990s, though? I guess a lot of the torrenting stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) You could send bars of gold and silver. I don't know. You just have to convert the currency.

(Dan at 00:24:58) Seems like a lot of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) It is. But that's what, that's the point. That's their job, man. You think it's easy to be a drug dealer? And a lot of money is a hard job, man.

(Dan at 00:25:08) I guess so. Oh, did you see that, speaking of drug dealers, did you see that Amazon was, I think Amazon was pushing for federal marijuana legalization or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) They want some of that Amazon Prime money. They wanna, oh.

(Dan at 00:25:20) Oh my God. Can you imagine?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Ship it like crazy. It'd be doorstep delivery all twenty four seven. They would have real time. They would make it real time.

(Dan at 00:25:29) Oh my gosh. Imagine. Jesus. Amazon backs federal bill to legalize marijuana and adjust its drug testing policy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) Let's talk about the business perspective part of that. So if I have a drone delivery service company or if I have a delivery service company that has the capacity to use drones, my packages are limited. Right? So I need really valuable things that are light enough to be carried by a drone, and that equals more money for me. Right? Because I don't actually have to deploy a person. I could do doorstep delivery with an autonomous drone. If I was in a city, like New York City, just boom. There's the weed drones. Right?

(Dan at 00:26:03) Oh my God. Jesus Christ. Yeah. They would be a $3 trillion company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) There you go.

(Dan at 00:26:10) These guys are geniuses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) Yep. Because they've got the vending machines, but the downside of the vending machine is you have to walk to it.

(Dan at 00:26:18) That's true. That's true. That's, this is not the audience to be walking. No. I need the deliveries. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) Alright. We'll get off the drug stuff. Look at this. Alright. So Catalog DNA. Have you written about Catalog yet?

(Dan at 00:26:33) I don't know if Catalog in particular, but I've definitely written about storing data and DNA.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) Yeah. This is a company, man. This is like, they're pioneering this thing. It's, I think the ratio is a football stadium filled with servers, like just data storage, like not compute, just data storage.

(Dan at 00:26:55) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:55) Can be condensed down to something that can fit in your hand. Jesus.

(Dan at 00:27:07) How is that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) Listen to the episode.

(Dan at 00:27:11) It blows my mind that, yeah, that this stuff exists. Because it always, your intuition is always that the digitized version is just the best one. Right? The one that works on silicon chips or whatever. But this DNA stuff is just mind blowingly efficient. It's like, remember that old Bill Gates photo of him sitting on this giant stack of paper? And it's like, one floppy disk can hold this much data or whatever. And it's like the reverse of that for DNA. It's just like, something that can fit in my hand can just take out these many servers or whatever. So, yeah, that's, it's always super surprising to me, but I'm happy that somebody's working on it. It seems super cyberpunk and futuristic to just store data and DNA. So I'm all for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) It's really, it's really new right now. So the use case that they have to take it to market is the companies that do it for giant archives of data and they call it, it's like a class of business called write once, read never. They're essentially just like always writing volumes of data, but they never actually go read it out. Um, and that's because they're working on the technologies for this. It's like the problem here is not the technology existing and being able to do it. It's the speed at which you can read and write is pretty slow right now compared to what we're used to.

(Dan at 00:28:33) Oh I see. That makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:35) Yeah. So better machines, faster speeding, faster reading and writing of the data, and then it will just become more ubiquitous. Wow.

(Dan at 00:28:43) Yeah. Quantum computing? Have you been writing about that at all?

(Dan at 00:28:47) Oh, yeah. That stuff just confuses the hell out of me because there's some stuff that I write about that is so deep tech that I can't actually tell what's that important or what's not. You know? But sometimes I do see stuff and I'm like, that sounds like it's a real breakthrough, so I will write about it. But yeah, to be honest, some of the really deep bio stuff, some of the medical stuff, some of the quantum computing stuff, I do have trouble telling.

(Dan at 00:29:18) I'm like, man, Jesus, this is a little bit over my head. You know? Do you ever feel like that? You must, right, at some point?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26) Oh, all the time. And I think you do a really good job editing your newsletter because you don't include over the top—you don't lose my respect, you know, by going off with something that's a complete fairy tale just because you have to decipher what's real or what's close to happening.

(Dan at 00:29:43) Right. I mean, they cure cancer every other week, you know. So you have to be a little suspicious about a lot of this stuff. But yeah, the quantum computing stuff does seem really exciting. And it seems like—Google just recently announced that they're building an AI campus in Santa Barbara or something, right? And they're going to get a quantum computer working by the end of the decade, which seems amazing and awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) Yeah. So I went on a binge for months, like two or three months, trying to wrap my head around quantum computing. You know, we're both software engineers, right? We should be able to understand this, right? You can program a—it's like I might not know quantum physics, but I should be able to do a hello world. Come on now, right?

(Dan at 00:30:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) So I went down this rabbit hole and I invited all of these guests on, like the head of IBM's quantum computing, the head of Honeywell's quantum computing, all these brilliant people to figure out from a full stack or systems developer, where is this maturity of this technology? And so here's the deal. There's several types of quantum computers. They all very much work and you can go right now and get a cloud hosted quantum computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) Where they are useful in the marketplace is for people like scientists that are running quantum algorithms. They need results, they need a quantum computer to actually do this quantum type math, right? I'm not explaining it perfectly, but these research people actually need these quantum machines to run these quantum calculations. And so that's who they're really useful for. Similar to back when computers were the size of a room and you would just calculate some sort of mathematical problem on them. They were just basically really great calculators. And then eventually the programming languages and abstractions that allow us to build business type applications on top of those things emerged later. So I think we're at that point. Quantum computing is really useful for them running their mathematical formulas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Their mathematical formulas are specifically useful for a handful of things. One of them being finding the quickest path between two places, right? And the other one is modeling bio—chemicals, like a chemical or an atom or something like that. Modeling these in a very real way. The modeling stuff we have on our computers is these abstractions, right? But they want to model them in a way with higher resolution is the best way I understood it. And they can do that with these quantum computers. Yeah, I know. And so I was like, that's fascinating. So they're using it for drug discovery, things in chemistry, and then they're using it for the scientist. But it's not something you and I would go write some sort of application for today. If we wrote an application, it would probably be a memory helping system or some sort of utility based type thing, not an end user type thing.

(Dan at 00:32:41) Oh my gosh. So just to be Malek on a quantum computer. That's way above my pay grade.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:46) Yeah. So then I checked out mentally. I was like, that's it. Done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Yeah. I mean, I think it's super cool, but I think I'm five years, ten years away from really diving into that stuff because it just seems super, super early stage right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) Oh, it is. I took—on my quest to understand it, I actually took a course on linear algebra, which is the basic fundamentals if you want to get into quantum programming, right, quantitative. So there was actually this really great YouTube channel that explained it to me like I was a three year old. So I was like, oh, this is pretty easy.

(Dan at 00:33:21) Wait, wait. Which one is it? That Three Blue One Brown guy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) Yep. Yep. That guy.

(Dan at 00:33:26) Oh, yeah. That guy seems awesome. He's teaching math to millions of people. It's actually incredible what subjects people will listen to on YouTube as long as the person teaching it is interesting, you know? People will just learn linear algebra on YouTube if you can present it in a palatable way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) Absolutely. And he and his—whoever his animators are—are fantastic, right? Because what makes it so great is the beautiful animations that follow along, and that's an art of its own.

(Dan at 00:33:58) Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think cutting video to be interesting is just so underappreciated in making you actually want to learn something. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast with that guy. Seems super interesting. And yeah, I think it's just great that there's—I guess YouTube just aggregates the best teacher in any given subject, right? And I guess he's just the best math teacher there is out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) Yeah. And that's great because it's sort of flattened the world, right? Because if you're just really great at it, you can just become the best in the world at home with a $50 camera and an internet connection.

(Dan at 00:34:35) Yeah. Seriously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:37) I mean, look at what I do. It's just a microphone in Zoom.

(Dan at 00:34:41) Yeah. I mean, it's crazy that one person—I guess because before, media companies, so much of it was just a bunch of people working on the distribution, right? And now you just get free distribution over the internet. And so you can kind of outsource everything except for creating the content, which is awesome because it means that very niche podcasts and newsletters and stuff like what we do and even more niche stuff, honestly, can just exist and be a way for someone to make a living.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:14) Yeah. I wouldn't want to be the person working in a factory that's, you know, shipping out textbooks, right? That's not the person I want to be. Those jobs are—they're definitely going away.

(Dan at 00:35:28) Yeah. Yeah. I would probably—probably. They're just going to shut the store. I don't know. Colleges, they make you buy them, right? At least when I was in—I was in college eight, nine years ago now. They just make you buy them, so I don't know. Maybe they'll be around forever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) Is that your dad's job that I had to start that subject?

(Dan at 00:35:48) Oh, no. No. My dad's actually a—my dad is actually a professor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) Oh, is he?

(Dan at 00:35:52) But he doesn't ship textbooks, though.

(Dan at 00:35:54) He doesn't ship textbooks. I just remember having to buy them when I was in college. I was like, man, that's a lot of money for a book that I'm not going to read, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:04) It is, right? You got to do it.

(Dan at 00:36:06) Got to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) You got to do it. Man, this is going to be great. I'm actually really excited for your podcast.

(Dan at 00:36:12) I love podcasts. I listen to them every night when I'm going to bed and when I'm in the gym and stuff. So yeah, I'm a big fan. It just feels like you're hanging out with your friends, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:20) Yeah. So you can listen to me before you go to bed. And then when I wake up in the morning, I got my TLDR, and that's our relationship.

(Dan at 00:36:29) Our long distance relationship. I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:31) It is. It'll work out definitely for sure.

(Dan at 00:36:33) Oh, this is going to work out. We're going to make this work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) We're going to make it work. Oh, man. The first feedback I ever got on iTunes, the first five star rating, I was so pumped up about it, right? It was this person, and it was a comment along the lines of, I found this podcast intentionally so I could fall asleep. And I was like, dot dot dot, boy was I wrong because he thought it would be boring. I was like, well, okay.

(Dan at 00:37:00) Oh my gosh. That's so funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:02) I know. I know. So—

(Dan at 00:37:03) Well, good for him to leave a review. It's tough to get a five star review.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:07) It is. And people on iTunes scam reviews like crazy. Because I know how many listeners I have, and I see how many reviews I have. We don't have a lot of reviews. So if you love it, go leave a review. But some people, like, it'll be week three of their podcast, and they'll have a thousand five star reviews. And I'm like, uh, I don't think so, buddy. I don't know what you ran—a giveaway or something. You did something to get those five star reviews because it just doesn't happen like that naturally.

(Dan at 00:37:33) Yeah. I mean, I guess there must be a cottage industry for this, right? Yeah. I mean, I know there was one for—I remember back in the day on Amazon, there were all these viral launch schemes where they would send you free product or something in exchange for a five star review. So I don't know. Podcasts are already free. So I don't know what you're getting for a five star podcast review, but maybe it's an Amazon gift card or something. Who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:57) Maybe. Do you see Apple just released, in the past couple of weeks, they're doing paid podcast now?

(Dan at 00:38:02) Yeah. But I think they take 30%, and Spotify is taking nothing, right? Or something like that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) I don't know. I don't know. I—

(Dan at 00:38:10) I think Spotify has paid for free, and Apple is launching them, and they take 30%. But I think Apple has more listeners. So I don't know. I don't know if I would ever do a paid one, but yeah, it's good to have the option.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:25) Right. Right. And I mean, I don't think I am going to do a paid one, but it was interesting to see the changes that they're making, and it's also kind of fun to see them competing with Spotify like this. I personally think that Spotify will win. I don't know why. I just have this—they're just so—they're hungrier, and they've got founders, and they're really in it. And Apple's kind of like an older company that's already made it. So—

(Dan at 00:38:49) Right. And I think, yeah, I think Spotify—it's sort of a life and death thing, right? They have to win podcasts because they're an audio company and they're just willing to spend the money, right? Apple's not paying $100 million to Joe Rogan or Gimlet Media or whatever, or the Ringer. Or, I guess, who else did I think Spotify just paid a bunch of money to, Dax Shepard or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) Dax Shepard, Armchair Expert?

(Dan at 00:39:17) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's going Spotify exclusive. But yeah, I think he's going to Spotify too. So I guess they're just willing to throw the money around to win, right? And in the grand scheme of things for a tech company, it's not that much money, right, for companies that are worth $50 billion or something, to spend hundreds of millions to win the podcast space. But if you have—I started listening to a few podcasts on Spotify just because I like listening to Joe Rogan, and that's the only place to find him now, right? So I don't know. I guess Apple kind of was just coasting on the whole podcast thing for a long time, and they were just the de facto lead. But I think by the metrics, Spotify is poised to pass them this year, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) And then they're trying to jump in, right? Have you seen Pandora trying to jump in?

(Dan at 00:40:08) I have. I actually listed my podcast on Pandora, my feed at least. But yeah, what are they doing? Are they trying to get exclusive podcasts?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) I just saw that they released it. So for the longest time, I was trying to get on Pandora, and it was just this page. I mean, this is four years ago. It was just this page where, submit your podcast, and we'll consider it for approval at some point in time. And they never really mentioned podcasts in their app years ago. And then, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago, they started really pushing hard and they rewrote their interface for people to submit podcast and they made it—and then I, you know, submitted it and it got approved and it got on there. But I had applied three or four times, and it wasn't that they said no. It was just it was going into a black hole because it just wasn't important at their business. They probably had an intern on it or something.

(Dan at 00:40:57) Yeah. One of these interesting metrics that I guess a lot of companies or VCs track is just monetization per minute of usage or whatever. And I think just at the very bottom of that is podcasting and gaming, actually, which I think is super interesting. It's like one of these quote unquote bullish VC PCs for the podcast and gaming space in general. It's just that on a per minute basis, like if you think about a movie, right, it's like you're paying $10, 20 bucks for a ticket to go for two hours of entertainment. Whereas two hours of podcast, you'd maybe—I don't know. How much can you get per ad per listener? Maybe a penny or something. So it's just very under monetized relative to a lot of other stuff. And I guess for Spotify especially, they're paying the music labels some huge percent of their revenue based on the plays, right? And the play time. So everything—anytime that you spend listening to a podcast is just a huge win for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) Yeah. It's big revenue because we contacted Pandora just to talk about advertising on podcasts that are on Pandora, right? Because you can do that. And to get pricing to see how much does it cost. Oh, man. I think it's 25 or $30,000 minimums. And I was like—

(Dan at 00:42:18) Holy crap. That's actually insane. Oh, yeah. I guess everyone's kind of realizing now, you know? I think free podcasts are a huge thing in the US, but my understanding is that paid podcasts are really big in China. So maybe that's a thing that'll come over here. I actually do subscribe to—what is it? Dithering? You know, Ben Thompson, the Stratechery guy? Yeah. Yeah. So he has a podcast with the Daring Fireball guy, John Gruber or whatever. And they just do a 15 minute podcast three times a week, and I subscribe to that. And it's just a paid feed. So I guess for specific niches, the paid way does work, you know? They're also paid newsletters now. Like, I just—TLDR? Yeah. Not like TLDR. TLDR will always be free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:10) But you can sponsor it, though. We gotta plug it here. You can sponsor it, though.

(Dan at 00:43:14) You can sponsor it. You can sponsor it. But yeah, I kind of feel like there's—I think it's just like our age group, like the sort of people that didn't grow up with the Internet, but we're still pretty young when the Internet got big. We're just so used to everything being free. Right? Like, even paying for music felt weird in the beginning. So I think it's just like some sort of weird cultural aversion to making stuff paid, for me at least. I feel like people that are both older and younger are just kind of more comfortable with that sort of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:49) Yeah. The younger people grew up paying for every little action you wanted to do in a video game. Like, if you want to score, you have to pay for it. For me, I just had to sit there for hours trying to nail the combination, and that was the only way you could get past it. I couldn't just pay money to get what I wanted.

(Dan at 00:44:04) That's true. That's true. I guess, like, yeah, that whole generation of gaming is just so crazy, like the pay-to-play stuff. But I think my understanding of it is that that economy is almost entirely driven by whales, like super rich people that just pay obscene amounts of money to win these games. And then everyone else just kind of plays for free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:27) Yeah. At one point, I read—and this is probably five or six years ago—I was just curious at all these people making money from gaming. And I read that I think it was like women age 40 to 60 was the largest users of these games. What?

(Dan at 00:44:45) Really? Like Candy Crush or something? Yeah. Like those are games?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:49) At whatever report I read, I remember because I was blown away because I thought it was gonna be kids. Like, I didn't think—I was like, it's definitely gonna be kids. Right. But when it came to like spending money on this stuff, as far as like being the customer, it was like women that they're doing the farming. They're flipping the pancakes, like in the food ninja games or whatever. They're crushing candies. They're doing puzzles. And I was like, that makes sense too, because in reality—I almost feel weird about saying this, but it's true—like, 40-year-old women that are homemakers, are going to have, with their kids leaving the nest, they're going to have a lot of free time on their hands and disposable income. And so gaming seems like, you know, something that's pretty natural there. Right?

(Dan at 00:45:31) That's true. The disposable income part is huge. Like, I feel like, man, I've started paying for a few like apps and stuff, and it just feels weird. But like, if you think about it, like paying $3 for an app for me—I don't know, I really have some weird aversion to it—but like, $3, I'm never gonna miss that. You know? So I actually just paid for this great Hacker News app called Octal. I think it's like $5 or something, and it's just way better than what I was using before. I was just on mobile Safari just surfing this for like two hours a day. And I was like, $5? Really gotta think about that. You know? But yeah, like, I guess, like, yeah. Now that I have money, I gotta start paying for some of this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Dude, paid stuff is so much better. So I don't do ads on anything. Like, if I can pay for something, like I pay for Pandora, for every service, like all the Netflixes or whatever service has the option to, like, we can either bother you with ads or you can watch the content you came here to watch. I will always pay like the $7, $10, $12 a month because I don't like listening—I don't like the sound of ads. Like, I don't like it. I don't like the sound of commercials.

(Dan at 00:46:45) Oh my god. Yeah. Like the YouTube premium was just game-changing. I think like the Spotify free to premium conversion is just some stupid rate, right? It's like 20% or something. It's something really high compared to other premium things. So, yeah, I guess I get that. It's like the auto—it's the autoplay ads that you can't skip, right? Those are the ones that are the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) Worst. Those are the worst. I want skippable. That's why when we do our stuff, like our podcast sponsorships, we don't do any pre-roll ads. We don't do like no pre-roll, mid-roll, or anything.

(Dan at 00:47:20) Do you think they'll have, like, I feel like I've seen a few open source projects that tried to do this, but do you think they'll eventually have ad blockers for audio ads?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31) I think wherever you find ads, you'll find people trying to make ad blockers. Will they be good? I don't know. So I actually moved to a hosting service that allowed me to inject ads into the podcast because I needed that technology because I wanted to do announcements. So, like, if I wanted to put an announcement across 400 episodes, I would have to literally edit and re-upload 400 episodes. But if I move to an ad platform that allows dynamic ad insertion, I can just say, you know, before the episode rolls, put this announcement there. And then I can talk to everybody, like if it's just for a week, and then it comes off. So, like, if you listen to that same episode later, it's not in there. Right?

(Dan at 00:48:14) Wow. That is so smart. But what is that? What platform?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:18) That was called Megaphone. Okay. Yeah. There's a couple—there's two or three that did it, and I think Megaphone's owned by Spotify now. By the way, they just got bought. I think it's by Spotify.

(Dan at 00:48:28) Oh my god. Spotify really making moves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:31) Making huge moves, though. But that's super off topic. Sorry, dude. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. I got to interview him. If you haven't written about what he's doing with Solid, you should check that out. Have you seen what he's doing with Solid pods?

(Dan at 00:48:46) Oh, yeah. The thing is, like, so I think it's admirable to try to—I think he calls it re-decentralizing the web, right, or something like that. But like, there's always this disconnect between the nerds that—and I am one of them—that likes having their own servers and running this stuff, versus everybody. Like, you can't expect the average person to run their own Solid pod, like their own email server and their own whatever server. Right? That just seems too hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:19) Yeah. They have, like, you can get cloud-hosted pods.

(Dan at 00:49:23) Right. But I mean, just like running your own stuff—like, the average person really doesn't wanna do that. Right? We're just gonna have the same thing, like we have like Gmail for email now. It's gonna just be centralized under a slightly different name. Right? So it could work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) So okay. It definitely is gonna work. It is the future. But the way it's gonna roll out is slow, and what's going to happen is similar to how people built really amazing email viewers and composition tools on top of these protocols. They're basically just defining the lower-level infrastructure and protocols for how to do this—like how to dump this data, how to permission this data, and how to consume this data in any type of format so that the medical industry could do it, countries could do it, different organizations can do it. But there's a—it's like a gold rush. There's a whole amazing layer of tools and businesses that are gonna come that are gonna build on top of this. So we're like—I don't even really have a pod. Like it's an ambient pod. Like I don't even—like I have an app that has all my pods in it, and I can just see all my data. I pull up my app and I can see, oh, there's my banking data, there's my healthcare data. And it's like a pod management app. Right? So there's going to be all of these people that build on top of this underlying infrastructure.

(Dan at 00:50:41) Yeah. I guess, like, I always go back because it is really nice to own your own data. Right? But I kind of just—I don't know if the average person has a mental model of where their data is stored now. Like, do you—like, I guess the average person does understand that their data is in the cloud somewhere. Right? And with the pod, it would be with them, like in a cloud that they control. I guess people would understand that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) Yes. The way I explained it to my hairdresser—

(Dan at 00:51:14) Perfect. This is what we need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:15) Because she's always asking me, and I just kind of made it up on the fly after talking to Tim. But I said, okay, you have your banking app. Right? You can access the data by logging into your banking app. That data is stored where? And they're like, it's stored at the bank. Do you have a copy of the data? Nope. You can only get it when you log in to there. Right? What if you had a copy of that data? You know, you would own it. Or like a movie. Right? Like right now, I have, you know, hundreds of dollars worth of movies in my Amazon Prime. Do I own them? Not really. Are they mine? Not really. I own the right to log in to Amazon and stream them. I own the right to download them from Amazon and play them for thirty days before I have to re-download them again, and only certain titles. But the concept of ownership has been so lost in all this. Beautiful improvements—it was amazing. Like, I'm so happy we have all these great things. But the concept of ownership is really lost. Like, is it my photo if it's on Facebook? Like, how do I get my data out of there? And this was the concept of—if we go back to the banking one, it's like, you understand APIs and everything. So imagine that all of the data that's inside of my, you know, let's make up a bank like Regions Bank. Right? It's in Regions Bank right now, but I have a copy of it in my pod, and Regions can read and write to it as long as I allow them to continue to read and write to it. At any point in time, I could cut Regions off and say you can no longer update this. They could do the same thing. They could have permissions on my pod where I can't manipulate the data. Right? And I've agreed to this policy. Right? But at any point in time, if my pod's data's here and I wanted to cut Regions off, I just turn them off. Done. You know? I could reconnect them and it would resync, but I wanna keep my data in sync with what reality is over there to the banking institution. But at least I have my data. I can also bring in other apps here that don't need to be approved by Regions Bank.

(Dan at 00:53:11) So they don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:12) Have to go through this massive process. Third-party developers can just build right on top of this app. And I would love that. What it's going to do is it's going to make—I can't think of how much it would devalue social media platforms like Facebook's—because if all the photos are in my pod and third-party developers can build technology on top of my pod, and Facebook's keeping it up to date, and I'm using them as the interface, and I just say, let's cut Facebook off as the interface and download a third-party app that lets me update my photos inside my pod. And it's just gonna be a really crazy world.

(Dan at 00:53:45) I think that would be super cool. I'm trying to think of how that would get adoption. Like, how could you get adoption for your photo pod over something like Google Photos, which is just the cloud? Because the cloud is just generally cheaper. Right? Like, you have these crazy returns to scale with these giant server farms that Google has.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:07) No. I can have a pod hosted at Google's cloud storage. Like, you don't have to host the pod yourself.

(Dan at 00:54:12) That's true. That's true. Yeah. I buy that. Like, I feel like that would be really cool to be able to have everybody just have their own stuff and then just be able to build services really quickly and get to scale really easily because you already have all these people with pods that you can just plug into.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:29) Yeah. Like, show me your medical data. You can't. It's at every single doctor you've ever been to. You don't have access to it. Like, you'd have to call them up. They'd have to—you'd actually have to sign a form. You call them, sign a form, then they would fax you papers or email you papers. And then you're not getting their EHR records in that format. Like, all of this data you have everywhere all belongs to the company themselves. And so I was curious asking him, like, how does it become widely adopted? And he goes, well, the people that believe that it's our data and that we should own it—that will be the starting force. Right? And then they will build systems and tools to adhere to these protocols that will allow us to have access to data. And then it'll just become more popular and more popular. Governments will embrace it too. They're working with a lot of governments right now. Their business—they have a business behind it too. And so I don't know. I'm excited about the future because I'm glad—I'm glad for the day where I can see and touch and own and do whatever I want with my data.

(Dan at 00:55:36) That would be awesome. I mean, yeah. I really like this idea. I feel like I'm just like—I can't wrap my head around how to get from here to there, but I hope they manage it. You know? Like, if they can get adoption through a bunch of people that are just very ideologically driven towards data sovereignty—like, that's awesome. Right? Yeah. Like, it would be nice to own all your own photos and your own medical info and your own banking info and stuff. And I guess it would be a way easier world to build on top of. So I think that'd be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:13) Yeah. I sleep at night pretty well knowing Tim is on it. I was like, he's on the job. He'll get it done. He created the first Internet. He'll figure out this mess. So—

(Dan at 00:56:22) Yeah. He can figure out the second Internet too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:25) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.