Jiren founder Ted Feldmann is automating diamond drilling rigs to solve the mining labor crisis

Julius was in batch two. We have our next guest here. Let's bring him in. You guys told us you yearn for the minds, so we brought the man himself miner. What's going on? Doing great. How are you, John? Fantastic. What's happening? You're looking great in that suit. Welcome to the show. Thank you.

It's Technology Brothers. You need to need to dress up. You got to dress for sure. And I love the map, too. That's the only market map that I care about personally. This is this is our target market. At least the market map. Uh what what's actually going on with that map? uh what do the different colors represent?

Yeah, this is a a geological map showing kind of the common rock types in uh a given area and you can see the central and uh eastern US are not quite as exciting as the western US and that's where all the minerals are. Interesting. Uh can you give us a brief overview of you and your company just to kick us off?

Yeah, absolutely. So Ted Feldman, founder of Jiren, started the company about a year ago. We are building and operating automated diamond jewelry rigs used in mineral exploration. So I'll start out kind of high level. what how does mineral exploration work and kind of get into what is the actual problem we're solving.

So basically building a mine is in many cases a billion-dollar endeavor, incredibly expensive in order to justify this capex. So you never have a really good understanding of what's actually going on underground.

And so you have this kind of decade long exploration process where you'll start out maybe geologists walking around. They're seeing some interesting rocks. You can do geoysics, look for a magnetic anomaly, a gravity anomaly, or do some seismic surveys.

You can do soil sampling, kind of pick up some uh some kind of tiny holes, see if there's kind of trace elements of what you're looking for. But really, in order to understand what's underground, you got to drill. And the main type of drilling used in neural exploration is called diamond drilling or core drilling.

This is basically where you're collecting cylindrical core samples of the rock anywhere from a few hundred meters to a kilometer or more um underground, generally a few inches wide. You pull it up in 3 m intervals, but really once you collect these core samples, you send them off to the lab.

The lab will tell you exactly what the composition is. You do that every foot or every meter across hundreds of holes. You plug all this data into a 3D model, and then you have a kind of Yeah. 3D model of the the subsurface.

You can visualize where is the mineral deposit, see how large is the resource, what's the grade, the kind of percent of the metal you're looking for within that deposit, and then make a determination on whether it's economic demine or whether you need to collect more data in order to make that determination.

And the problem here, go ahead. Before you go into the next uh segment, can you talk about the value chain? Is there different groups that are doing, you know, the core of like research and then do they sell the rights?

basically say like, "Hey, this is worth spending a billion dollars, but like we're not going to spend a billion dollars. Like, you should do it. " And they sort of like sell access to it effectively. So, so the way this will normally work is you have an exploration company, a junior explorer, junior minor.

They either own the land outright, they have rights to lease the land, or they have some claim on federal land, but they have the rights to to mine in a given area.

and they basically have a hypothesis uh written in geology that there is some valuable deposit underground and they raise capital primarily from public markets.

Many of these companies go public extremely early on on the TSXV or the ASX and they raise capital and spend most of that capital on drilling to actually collect more data.

And so then this constant cycle of raising capital, spending most of it on drilling, analyzing those drill results, updating the geological model until they can either raise enough capital, raise a billion dollars in equity debt to actually build the mine, or what happens more often is sell the mine or sell the deposit to a larger minor that will actually um have the money on the balance sheet in order to develop the asset.

And so you why public markets uh versus private? Is it just because you need to raise so much money? You need to be able to basically effectively market the It sounds like biotech. Like what happens with biotech companies going early earlier out? Yeah.

Are these like typically like penny stocks where they're just trading, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Mining is historically a penny stock in history.

We used to have kind of small exchanges in Denver or Phoenix in the US, but in North America, this is dominated by Vancouver and Toronto where a lot of these exploration companies are based. Canada um has a lot more capital flowing into mining than the United States does today.

And it's really just how it's been done historically. These investors, largely kind of smaller retail investors historically, they want liquidity and they they can't uh can't can't just be called up for a private placement if you're um Joe with 100 bucks to throw into a gold project.

Did you ever speaking of mining, did you ever join a call with a VC early and have them be like, "Sorry, I thought this was like crypto mining crypto mining. " That that has happened a lot. It has happened less now than a year or 18 months ago, which I think is a very promising trend. Got it. That's good.

Uh h how much of the business is kind of just you need to take off-the-shelf technology and just go do the thing uh versus you need to build new technology and and is that more in like the hardware world or the software world or are you just like going and doing the actual exploring like can you concretize what you're Yeah.

So I'll get into what is Jiren actually doing. So we are a drilling contractor. We are building rigs from scratch and uh and operating them for exploration companies. We're starting our first pilot with the Gold Explorer in Nevada in a little over a week. Um we'll be out in the field for that.

We started building this rig about 4 months ago. And so we get paid basically per meter that we drill for our clients. And so we're not taking on the geology risk. Let's just focus on the tech. Yeah. And why are you building the rig yourself?

I imagine that is that just built you're buying different pieces of equipment and then piecing them together. I mean, you've raised money, but not that much. Like, I imagine you're not reinventing the wheel. Plus, it's probably like there's good drills out there. I imagine you don't need to build a new drill. Or do you?

Yeah. So, the initial idea was, let's retrofit a rig that maybe save us a lot of money. And there, this is the avenue I was pursuing for about 6 months. We really had two options. We could buy a Chinese rig for less than 100 grand. We need to add a whole bunch of sensors. I talked to a lot of the operators.

These things fall apart. They are not high quality. So, we rolled that out.

Or you could buy a western rig for half a million bucks and you either need to hack into the firmware and probably void a warranty which uh you do not want to do on a half million dollar piece of equipment or um partner with a manufacturer and figure out um how to actually pull data from it.

We tried that with a couple of manufacturers. They were incredibly slow and all the manufacturers they sort of have their own half-hearted efforts on autonomy and so they didn't seem particularly eager to partner to partner with us and so almost out of necessity we had to design our own.

And now the way this rig operates is fairly similar to every other sort of rig. All all these drill rigs are basically two hydraulic rams pushing what is called the drill head, which is what provides a rotary motion to the drill rods into the ground.

So all drilling is really you have a bunch of pipes that you screw together and then push and twist into the ground. And you have a bit on the end um to make sure you get a a clean cut. And so we the offtheshelf parts that we're buying is the drill head. U that's what grips onto the rods and rotates them.

Um, you have other part called the foot clamp which just clamps down onto the bottom part of the drill string to make it easy to load a new rod in and then ramps to push it into the ground. And then the structure is ours.

And then in order to actually retrieve the core sample from the bottom of the hole, think about it like this. You have your drill bit and then you have um which is a c cylinder. Um, that's what our logo is actually. And then you have drill rods coming up from that.

But inside of that bottom rod, you have another tube called the inner tube. There's a latch on the top of that.

So basically once that inner tube fills up with rock when you've gone down five feet you can grab a tool called the overshot lower it down on a wire line it latches into place you could pull up the inner tube containing the core sample and then that's what you send to the lab to be analyzed.

Uh how how mature is the venturebacked mining market? Like are there market maps that exist and are are there's a few. And and were you were you surprised everybody wants to go to space? Nobody wants to look, you know, beneath our feet and and go down.

Uh, has it been surprising how how little investment has gone into the actual technology side of the industry? It's there's been very little surface area between mining and particularly Silicon Valley historically.

Australia has a bit of a more mature mining technology ecosystem, but not nearly as much capital as we have over here. And so there's been a few um kind of billion dollar multiundred billion dollar mining tech companies over the last decade or so, but just a few.

And like mining overall is a two to3 trillion dollar industry kind of yeah overall market size mining tech is a small portion of that but uh it's a difficult industry to sell into is really why it's difficult to start a tech company here.

Building a mine is incredibly capex intensive and you're basically making a bet on technology early and then utilizing that equipment or software system for a decade plus. And so these companies are riskaverse. They don't want to bet bet the farm on a on a new new technology.

where I think we come in um there's a few other companies with a similar model is as a contractor. So we're just replacing a separate service provider and any sort of innovation that we're creating is done internally.

So we are a more efficient, safer and more cost-effective drilling contractor because of the autonomy that we're building. Uh but it's really no rest to the customer. We get paid just like any other contractor to them. What's been the industry's reaction to the trade war?

China very early uh came out and said that they were restricting access to various rare earths.

is that um you know what's been your read on the situation how are how are US players kind of reacting yeah uh rare are very close to my heart prior to starting Juran I work for MP materials which operates the only rare earths mine in the United States about a year and a half their mind is in California about three hours away from where we are right now in LA um they empty produces about 15% of the global rare earth supply um they refine about half of it domestically right now they announced last week that they're seizing shipments to China so keeping at all domestic.

We're going to Japan um or Korea which they have some offtake with um through Sumattomo. Um it's it's I think it's certainly a tailwind for the western producers but there is fear because we don't have everything in the United States.

Rare earths we would be almost self-sufficient on but we really need to ramp up the the processing.

The problem is that within this group of rare earths um about 15 different elements, you have some rare earths that we have a good chunk of at mountain pass like neodymium and praodymium but then you have heavy rare earths like turbium or dprosium um which we do not have enough of uh epic materials.

It's very heavily weighted towards these light rare earths and there's very little of these heavy rare earths and so we really need to partner with countries like Brazil or Vietnam are the two that I point to for rare earths that are potentially um allies and maybe we'll get closer to them over the next few years.

um we're going to need to import. There are no other uh decent railroads deposits in the United States that we can just spin up production at that we know of. You never know. We could find us as a long history. I see a bunch of gaps in that map in Ohio. We'll find rare earths there.

I'm sure that's that's where we come in is that in order to find a deposit, you got to spend everything. Every suburban neighborhood just drop a Duran miner in the back of my backyard and start finding stuff. What we'll do first is fly planes over to do a some sort of magnetic survey.

The USGS has a pretty cool program called Earth MRI where they're mapping a lot of the country with tighter spacing than they have previously these geohysical surveys, but we need to be doing a lot more on that because that's really the top of funnel that narrows down the uh potentially uh minable sites. Sorry.

Uh c can you talk a little bit more about autonomy? I'm seeing the first prototype rig uh can core 300 meters around 1,000 feet deep 2 and a half inch diameter. Um and these rigs can run unattended for something like 2 to three years. So what is the math on that?

Is the rig moving around or does it just take that long to get a single core sample out? Yeah. So basically I'll tell you kind of how it's done today, what we have now and then where we're going to be in 12 months. So today you have a rigged these things weigh you 10 tons. You're normally track mounted.

basically on tank treads. You have you put them on a truck as close to the side as you can. Then you have a guy with a remote control driving it in the rest of the way. You generally have three operators on a rig. You have the driller.

He's the guy listening to it and looking at a bunch of gauges and he's really sort of interpreting what is the kind of rock that we're going through that through um at that time and from that adjusting RPM, the amount of weight applied to the drill bit, the pressure of the fluid that you're pumping down hole to clear the cutings and keep the bit cool.

She's kind of constantly adjusting these parameters. Then you have another one or two guys called helpers and they're doing a lot of the manual work. They're loading the rods into place because you normally they're using five or 10 foot rods.

They're grabbing the overshot, lowering it down to pull up the inner tube, tapping on the inner tube with a hammer to actually take the core out, putting it in boxes for the customer, tracing the rods, adding additives to the the mud mixture because you got to adjust the viscosity of the fluid that you're pumping down hole.

And so you really have this this sensing problem, this controls problem of adjusting these drilling parameters. Then you have this more so robotics problem of just grabbing the rods, putting them into place, grabbing the core samples, etc.

So on this first rig, we have uh basically the ability to collect a whole bunch of data, but everything that's going on on the rig at any given time, we're going to use that data to build a sort of V1 autopilot system deterministic at the start, move to machine learning.

When we get enough data, there really are not data sets available for this online. And so we've got to got to do a whole lot of drilling before we can actually get to full autonomy. And then we have a rod head. How does it how long does it actually take to drill 1,000 feet deep? Yes.

So a good shift is about 50 feet in a day and so 12 hours 50 feet hole 20 shifts 10 days traditional like you know human operated. So that's like a month basically like a month on one hole. All right. Wow. Yeah. And you're looking at about$undred $100 a foot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a lot. Interesting. Uh how are you?

So really what what what we're trying to do is we're we've built this first rig manually operate at the start.

We'll have some automation in terms of rod handling and kind of a B1 of this drilling parameter adjustment system, but then on the next version which we start building in just a couple months, we'll we kind of add add on to the rod handling system to actually be able to cover the core sample, design our own mud mixer that can dump in the additives separately and then get most of the way there in terms of kind of removing these jobs on site.

And it's really it's it's yes, I think we can save a lot of money because labor is incredibly expensive here, but it's more so about availability. We are in a workforce crisis um in the mining industry right now.

I heard someone say a while ago, we don't have a an autonomy problem in the mining industry, but a labor problem. We just don't have enough people. And so, is Minecraft not providing the pipeline that one would?

No, I think the the problem here is you play Minecraft when you're like 8 to 14 or something uh or or maybe later and then uh then you have this kind of 8year gap between start of high school and finishing college to where you're not involved in the mining industry. We need Minecraft. Okay.

Uh I have to ask, how are you so goated at marketing? You have like one of the most unique sort of like hard tech brands every time.

I I I think like it's very it's very common for people to copy what Anderoll does and it's very hard to do something that feels like new and fresh and like super opinionated and I've loved your out of home ads. Uh and this segment is brought to you by AdQuick. Um but uh you I I think you've been extremely strategic.

I saw this hiring billboard that you had uh that you can't have rocket science without rock science and sort of like placing these strategically in in Hawthorne. Where does that come from? Uh when did you figure out that you had a a knack for this?

Because I'm assuming it's I'm assuming your your team helps, but oftentimes marketing this good typically is is very founder. It's it's we've got an incredible team. U my head of operations has uh um really helped a lot with the marketing. We have a few incredible designers.

um that help us out part-time with all this as well. Hiring is a life lifeblood of any any company, particularly a company with as as bold a vision as what we're trying to accomplish. And so we need to get the word out and have kind of this massive funnel of people that have heard of us.

Some of them will be interested and some of them we are going to want to hire. And so we I think we need need a cool brand for people to hear about us both in kind of the we have the billboard across from SpaceX.

obviously want to pull pull incredible talent from SpaceX, but also like there are very few companies in the mining industry that really care about I think that care about the brand. There are very few that are particularly good about creating a cool brand.

And so like we get like we we get good great engineers in LA reaching out to us because they they like our stuff, but even more so drillers and geologists in the mining industry who are like, you're the only cool company in the mining industry and we've hardly put anything out yet.

Um, and so both kind of in both of those sides, the the engineering and for kind of the mining customer and talent acquisition. Uh, we want to be very intentional about it and there is much more to come.

Once we get this uh first rig in the field in about a week or so, there'll be some really cool videos of us actually drilling and showing some hardware in the field. Love it. Uh, can you talk us through um the path to full autonomy? I imagine it's like a walk crawl or crawl walk run situation.

Is tea operation a big deal here? um as you get towards a fully autonomous autopilot system. Yeah. So it's we need a whole lot of data for this and so it's mainly controlled at the start. You can have a driller there with an iPad or laptop.

Um the infrastructures there, but it's really like a Tesla full self-driving uh sort of system like you build the the software to actually control it. A drill by wire system um is what we're calling it. Um and then you need data. And so we're going to have a driller on site operating it um initially collect this data.

We need them there to actually test the robotic side of this in case anything goes wrong. And uh I think rod handling we should have done over the next few months in the extraction system by the end of the year. There's a bunch of little stuff like how how you going to grease the rocks? We need to figure that out.

Um or d the additives into the um the mud mixer. And so we're we're going about this incrementally. We'll have three guys at the rig initially go down to two then hopefully have one can operate it from a self safe distance and if something goes wrong bring another guy in.

But we're never get to a point where you don't need at least someone on site, at least not over the next five years because you need a flat surface to drill on. So you have guys out there with dozers clearing these drill pads. You need to dig a sump pit to put the the water into after you use it.

Um you need to deliver your consumables, your water, your fuel. You need to pick up the core samples to deliver to your customer, the exploration company. Um and so there's always going to be things to do like you need someone to get the rig there and then maintain it.

But the point is like we don't need someone there listening to the rig and loading rods into place like uh they're better use of their time operating a fleet of rigs. Uh two weeks ago uh it came out that that China was uh limiting rare earth exports. Chimoth uh chimed in.

He said, "This may be a good moment to let everyone know that I control one of, if not the largest rare earth supplies outside of China. at full capacity it could be 25% of what the world needs all located within countries allied with the US and the US itself. A lot of people push back on this.

They said okay what's the company? He said it was in stealth. Uh I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and and say you know it sounds very uh it sounds almost unbelievable that a stealth company could control uh 25% of the world's rare earth uh supplies. Is that is that possible?

Could could there have been some sort of like roll up behind the scenes? What was your reaction to that exchange? Perhaps. I haven't heard anything about Chimat's involvement in any Rare project beyond like he helps back campaign materials five or so years ago. Um I haven't heard anything. Maybe he does. I hope he does.

That would be great. There's some mastermind that uh that yeah, myself and my friends who are analysts uh haven't heard of and so I want him to surprise us, but I haven't heard anything. Sure. Cool. Uh, can you talk about the challenges of putting a sensor a thousand feet underground?

Like I just imagine if there's like dirt and grime and crust and whatever else is down there plus like a diamond tip drill churning everything up like even putting like a thermometer down there is going to be difficult. How are you actually collecting data? Uh, is has does does this exist off the shelf?

Is this something like oil explorers do? I imagine it's mature. So the short answer is we're not collecting any data underground at this point. Everything we are measuring you can measure from the surface just like the human does because the human's listening to everything and collecting that data from above. Got it.

Okay. Not even using vibration. We're not even using vibration right now. So you can measure your your weight on bit basically how much force are you pushing into the ground with your RPM? How fast are you spinning your pressure going into the hole?

Your rate of penetration just how quickly you're moving into the ground. your torque. Um you can do that um through a secondary pressure reading. Um that there are you can put sensors down hole.

There's a whole kind of field of study um within the in the gas industry primarily called MWD or LWD measurement while drilling logging while drilling. You can put sensors down hole. It's something we're going to be looking into.

One of the the things that you'll do when you're doing this sort of drilling, mineral exploration, is you can send on a survey tool that can tell you sort of exact position because your hole you want to drill it straight. It's not always going to go straight. Might de deviate a degree or two every hundred meters.

And if you're trying to hit a 50 foot wide target, 500 ft underground, um it's you might miss. And so making sure you know exactly where the um tip of the drill is at all times is paramount. So you can lower a tool down either every run or every 50 meters, really whenever you want.

Um and that'll tell you your exact position, basically a gyro probe. And so if we can integrate that into our core barrel down the hole, that would be cool. Not doing that yet. um or or doing some sort of EM survey or XRF to scan the core um or the sides of the walls as you're actually drilling. That'd be great.

We're not doing it yet. It's going to be done soon. Are cave-ins a problem? Like as you dig down, you you get, you know, you have a 2-in hole that you're digging and then if you pull up the rods to send something else down and then all of a sudden it collapses on itself. That seems like a problem.

You're you're thinking like a driller. That is a huge problem in this space. Basically what you do as you're drilling through the first call it 100 ft of uh kind of unconsolidated sediment or looser rock through the surface. What you'll do is you'll drive casing.

And so casing is basically a wider diameter pipe that you'll drill down with and then drill through that hole. And that basically prevents that there's some sort of collapse near the surface.

It goes around the casing and maybe your casing gets stuck, but at least it's not around your drill string and that continue drilling through that.

The problem is what if you don't try the casing deep enough or there's some sort of fracture downhole um like 500 feet down or whatever that does collapse in and you'll basically what you try doing then is try a whole bunch of different RPMs pull up with maximum force but sometimes you get stuck there's really two options you could try to if try to guess where the uh caven is actually tools to cut the steel above that and just recover everything above that you lose some some steel in the ground oh well you're out 10 20 grand at least um or you can of say you're stuck but you can actually drill drill through it.

There are tools that they can literally drill through your previous tools that were down hole at a smaller diameter and so you get some steel in the steel in the inner tube which is pretty cool to see. Um let you continue the hole. You don't have to abandon it.

You're decreasing the diameter, not as valuable data and you are still going to lose some equipment and so you basically don't want to don't want to push it too hard to uh to avoid uh risking your cave. Uh, last question on my side.

Just curious, how has the uh have have I I'm assuming throughout history the the sort of drill bits, diamond drill bits were just actual diamonds that people pulled out of the earth and then at some point they were lab grown or were they always? What what's the history there? Yeah.

So, the way these drits work is you have a it's primarily iron the soft iron matrix with diamond particles or impregnated into it. And so, you can like kind of see I I should have brought a drill bit over here to show youall. That would have been cool. Um you can see these tiny diamond particles.

It looks like glitter um on it. And then as it as it cuts the diamonds, the hardest material on earth, but they do wear. They dull. And so the bits are designed such that as the diamonds dull, the iron wears at approximately the same rate to reveal new sharp diamonds. Very cool. Very cool. Last question for me.

Armageddon. In the plot of Armageddon, they say it's too hard to teach drilling to an astronaut. They got to teach going to space to the drillers, to the miners. uh realistic or unrealistic based on what you know about how complex mining is uh is.

Would you have trained the drillers to go to space or would you have trained the astronauts to drill? I think we're doing both here. We are uh we're teaching uh SpaceXers how to drill and uh drillers how to how to participate in a high functional high functioning engineering organization.

And so I think you got to do both. Um they've been trying to trying to build build a large organization and manufacture thousands of these rigs over the next five six years. Become a leading drilling contractor. Yeah, they really didn't bring any space uh any astronauts on that trip. It's all drillers.

No, that movie I don't think that's realistic. Okay. Uh anyway, this is a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for I'm very excited for you and the team. Uh it's been awesome watching uh you guys uh over the last few months and uh congratulations on all the progress in the new round. We're excited to be on.

Just a quick message for everyone. We are hiring jobs. Brilliant engineers. Please apply or reach out to me. Thank you all for having me. Beautiful. Have a great rest of your day. Talk soon. Talk soon. Bye. Cheers. Uh let's go back to the timeline. Duran did run a great out ofome ad uh brought to you by Adqu.

Uh there's also news on the timeline about a series A that was announced by Artisan, apparently a white cominator company. Uh they announced their series A with a massive billboard. Uh, and if we can pull this billboard up, it's the previous slide, I believe.

Uh, Selene is just commenting on it, but uh, Tee says, "What's going on here? " And so, it's the two founders there. And are those the actual founders? I thought they were those are the founders. Those are the founders.

The founders are Jasper Carmichael Jack and um, his co-founder Sam Stallings, a former IBM product manager. But the way they're looking at each other in this photo makes me look like they're in love or something. Maybe they're married, but uh I don't know.

We we often look at each other like that uh longingly and fondly during uh during photo shoots, so it's understandable. Uh but very funny to put out a billboard about your series A, but with your own face on it. With your own face on it.

But I guess you know there's no information about what the company have the whole team there presumably or are those the AI SDRs because I think this representative yeah I thought these were just two AI employees. Those are the founders. Those are the founders. They're stoked. Yeah.

I uh this you know every once in a while the timeline starts talking about taste. Yeah. This is a very specific kind of taste. I mean also look founder that they absolutely jacked. The guy's diced. We love it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Jasper. Guy is looking looking peel. Activate gold retrunch.

Y Cominator Day One Ventures HubSpot Ventures Oliver Jung Fellows Fund participated as well. They closed a $12 million round in September and now they got a $25 million series A. Uh they're they're running a marketing campaign, Stop Hiring Humans. very viral. They I I think genius. They get it. I think they get it.

They're think they're playing 5D chess. Yep. Yep. They're going to frustrate a lot of people. And this they knew this billboard would go viral. Seline post about Yeah. Look at this. Seline, CEO of Loyal says, "I cannot believe a startup bought a billboard on the 101 to advertise there.

" Dot dot dot series A and 671 likes. Um and so yeah, out of home advertising consistently underrated. We've said this. Go to adquick. com. Out ofome advertising made easy. Uh and go yeah and measurable and go go viral.

Uh as long as you can come up with something that's uh going to infuriate enough people on the timeline will get attention. Andrew McCallip says, "I think company towns are going to make a comeback. " We've been exploring this. We've been exploring a town. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this.

So I think if I think if things go really really well for TVPN what we're doing here in Los Angeles people a lot of people say oh why are you building in Los Angeles like you should be in Silicon Valley and I think that we could potentially make Los Angeles like the Silicon Valley of media like a Silicon Valley of television almost and and we could create a whole boom and I think in I think in a number of years you could see you know some massive media companies entire film and television kind of it's totally possible right it's totally possible And I think it could all start right here.

And so what I would say to folks is like let's check back in 5 or 10 years, see the market cap of all the media companies that are built in Los Angeles. And you know, maybe it's in the hundreds of billions if we add it all up. I it could it could become possible. It could become possible.

Uh yeah, we are I think John's on to something here. Yeah, we are in a company town. Los Angeles. I call it the Silicon Valley of news. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean it it actually is very uh I think the experience of living in Los Angeles has become uh worse as the entertainment industry has struggled. Right. Yeah.

Um there there's you know the the number of restaurants that can be supported has just gone down. Yeah. Um and the interesting thing about this post is is that he's saying specifically company towns. So there's obviously industry towns. You know New York is a finance hub. Uh, Silicon Valley is a tech hub.

LA is a media hub. Miami is like a NFT hub. But, uh, doing this for Foster City. They are. Remember? Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. They left SF. They went to Foster City. They were like, "We're going to focus. It's nicer to live here.

" Meta and Facebook were kind of doing that in PaloAlto to some degree. They were like building housing for employees and stuff. Uh, but I think I think what he's getting at is that things like Starbase where a company can't just be the hub of a main city.

So they go somewhere really bizarre and offgrid and then the infrastructure builds up about around that. We were talking about like the Stargate facility like if $500 billion really does pour into one data center, there's going to be infrastructure around that. Welcome to Abene, Texas. Abalene, Texas is going down.

There's going to be people that are like like yes, it's going to be low headcount because it's just data centers. But like you're talking about so many data centers. There's going to be people that are working on the air conditioning, working on the power. They're going to need an arrowand for sure.

They're definitely going to need an air wand. Um and so yeah, I I was I was talking to a real estate guy. I was like, maybe you should just go to Abalene, Texas, and then just start doing deals because there like the construction is going to be going on for a decade.

There's going to be a lot of people that that settle there after the fact. They're going to need an arrowan. You could sell them the property for the arowan. They're going to need gas stations and all sorts of different There's going to need to be a hardware store, right?

They're going to need hammers, all these different things. So, um it'll be interesting to see um if if this happens. I think it'll be a long long journey to get to new company towns, but um I love that. Uh we have a post from Adam Rosenlum. This is my nomination for the next TBPN AI deep dive.

Live from the forge of finetuning, the MCP monastery, the eye of AGI. Weights are sacred. The context is cash. The vibes are auto reggressive. Tune in now. Uh I messaged Adam. Uh I think he's over at Cal. I said maybe you should write for TBPN. So uh open invite Adam.

you absolutely cooked and we love being live from the eye of AGI. I like it. I like it. We we Yeah, we need to we need to spice up the intros. Keep iterating on them. I think people enjoyed the Institute of Iron, the Palace of Pump, the Hall of Hypertrophy. Uh but there will be more. Uh we're doing a crypto day.

We'll have to come up with some new jingles for that. That'll be fun. Anyway, uh Google co-founder Ser Sergey Brin uh pulled up in downtown Miami in his $450 million founder. No, $450 million 465 ft yacht. That's less than a million dollar a foot. Yeah, at that price it's they're giving these yachts away to be honest.

I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of yachts. It is a lot of yacht and you can't sell a house or a midsize series B company. That's right. Uh Mike Salana says, "I honestly can't figure out why everyone is attacking him for this. Sorry. Yachts are awesome. Pirate wires will absolutely have one in a few years.

Will be laughing there. Champagne in hand before the waving flags when you come for us. Enjoy your bike ride. " One of the greatest posters of all time. He he cooked them. John generational poster for sure. Fantastic. Good friend of the show. Um, uh, yeah, I love it. Uh, beautiful, beautiful yacht. And why not?

I mean, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has generated probably a trillion dollars of value for the economy, right? So, enjoy your little yacht. I get a uh I support big tech. I love big tech. I would take a bullet for big tech. I in theory would take a bullet for big tech. I would scale a castle wall for big tech.

Yeah, I would fight in a trench war. I would dig a tunnel under a castle with a spoon for big tech. I would work years in the mines for big tech. Yes, I would fight a decadesl long trench war. I would enlist in the hundreds war. The hundred years war. We got our next year to uh join us. Welcome to the studio.

How are you doing? We are doing Hey, we got both of you. That's fantastic. What's happening? I'm so happy. Um