Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - AI This Week: NVIDIA’s Record Revenue, Elon’s Data Centers in Space & Gemini 3’s Insane Performance w/ Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #210

Episode Date: November 22, 2025

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends    Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding      Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   Grab dinner with MOONSHOT listeners: https://moonshots.dnnr.io/ _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with Dave: X LinkedIn Connect with Salim: X Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO  Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on November 21th, 2025 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just when you thought NVIDIA couldn't do it again and again, we're now at $57 billion, 62% year-on-year growth. We're in the beginning of a very long-term build-out of the fundamental infrastructure of humanity, which is computing. NVIDIA has just become the central bank for AI, and they're minting their own currency, which is compute, and everybody's got to buy their currency. There's got to be somebody who's going to challenge NVIDIA. The non-incumbents are obvious.

Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as a global AI superpower. That to me looks like we're seeing the re-architecting from the ground up of an entirely new sovereign stack. Since I was a teenager, I've been trying to visualize how the singularity happens, and what does it look like in the last few years before the singularity? And now we're right in the middle of it, and it's just I'm giddy with excitement. Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, guys, what are you doing tonight? Anybody know what they're doing tonight?

I know what I'm doing tonight. What are you doing tonight? I'm watching on Prime Video, the age of disclosure. Alex, you? I'm already well into it. You're okay. That's right. I went live at midnight last night.

Do you guys know what this is? No. So, Salim, it is a tell-all documentary about the fact that we've been covering up alien visitations, spaceships for the last 80 years. So I can't wait to see it. I'm going to drag my kids along with me to watch this thing. I mean, it should be epic. Dave?

Now that you say it, I will. I didn't have plans otherwise. All right. Well, I mean, listen, the fact that at the same. same time that AGI and ASI is coming online, there's all of these, you know, increasing evidence of, I don't know, I just think, is it causation or causality, or just, you know, correlation. Correlation is what I meant, yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, it's definitely tied to human events that trigger, I mean, every sci-fi movie

knows this. When you hit a milestone, it triggers something, and then the aliens reveal. Okay, I'll just comment also. I mean, I mentioned in the last episode, given enough super intelligence, any and all hidden agents become shallow. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you know, Alex, I'm not big on the aliens, but I am very big on intelligences everywhere. I really love your theory on that. But after we discover the nature of intelligence, we're going to find that you can compute with virtually anything. And it's happening all of. over the place. I just can't wait for that breakthrough, which is connected. It's not quite as... I think it would be interesting once in a while to have a couple of dedicated episodes to very specific topics.

Like, one is what's intelligence? Another one could be abundance and what the hell is it and how do you measure it? And really go deep on that topic for a whole episode. Interesting. You know what I was thinking after the last episode, too, is Peter, the future is faster than you think is incredibly timely. And, you know, reprinting that or rewriting it with, you know, there's so much this changed. It's just been a few years.

But that book, it's the one on my backdrop, you know, in the podcast duty in the office. And I just moved it to the front and center now because I really want everybody to flip through it again. But it's really, really prescient. Thanks, buddy. The next book that Stephen Kotler and I have written comes out April 14th. It's called We Are as God's Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. So it's a follow on to the original book, Abundance. Anyway, it's probably the best work we've done, but I agree the future is fast, and you think I'm not sure what the new title would be.

Well, it's fasterer than you think. Oh, no. I'm not going to pull a curse while on this. Hey, that outro today is unbelievable. It was nuts. Creativity is crazy. We'll show it. We'll show it at the end of this episode.

All right. Ask the audience during the episode to rebrand your. books with with video yeah sure or just all of your content you know just take if you want to flatter Peter take any of his books his TV shows you know the from for all mankind take any of that and redo it through SORA and we'll post it all right guys let's jump in our Moonshots episode today here with DB2 AWG Mr. EXO and you know last episode we had so much content we really went deep on hyperscalers and it was a great great pod today we're going to continue on the conversation there's a lot that we didn't get a chance to cover and so we're

covering it today and i'm excited for it let's let's begin we're going to start this episode today with chips and data centers all right uh here we go nVIDia beats earnings and has record revenues So, you know, just when you thought NVIDIA couldn't do it again and again, we're now at $57 billion, 62% year-on-year growth driven by AI compute demand. NVIDIA has announced 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure deals, and Jensen is expecting a $65 billion in revenue next quarter. So quarterly earnings are increasing at an extraordinary rate. Let's dive into this.

So, Dave, do you want to kick it off? Well, yeah, just to set context for where we are, you know, Nvidia was a graphics card company doing polygons for video games. The AI community discovered it's a very good fit for neural networks, and then Nvidia just caught the wave and took off. But they're only about halfway down the journey of redesigning the chips to be perfect for AI. And so they can price up the chips tremendously. And there's another 2 to 10x performance gain in just,

the architecture and design that's still in their future. But every time they roll out an improvement like that is a chance for them to, you know, increase the prices by 50, 60, 70 percent, and the community will buy them no matter what. So that's what you're experiencing right now with NVIDIA. You could argue whether that's sustainable or not. But clearly there's more, you know, headroom in this ridiculously high margins that NVIDIA has. Can I give you what I think the real story is? Invidia has just become the central bank for AI. Right. And they're minting their own currency, which is compute. And everybody's got to buy their currency. I think it's extraordinary. AWG, what are you thinking? Yeah, I think that party can continue as long as revenue generation continues. And I think two things need to happen for revenue generation to continue to justify the trillions of dollars of AI compute CAPEX. And those are automation of the existing service economy and two, creating transformative new markets through the discovery of transformative math, science, engineering, medicine advancements. I think we do those two things. The revenue generation continues.

And the AI compute Nvidia KAPX party can continue indefinitely. Part of the question is, you know, people have thought, is this a bubble? I mean, Nvidia's just driving incredible revenues. Now, for me, Alex, my question is who's going to, there's got to be somebody who's going to challenge Nvidia. There's got to be somebody who's going to start developing systems that are competitive. Any thoughts on that? I think the non-incumbents are obvious.

There are TPUs from Google, powering Gemini, and if you believe the reports eventually lots of other first-class frontier labs as well. You have AMD. You have a whole bunch of ASICs that are specialized on inference time transformer compute. So I think we are moving towards a heterogeneous ecosystem of lots of different architectures, not just Qa. Yeah. Yeah, and I am not buying Nvidia stock.

and I am invested in a company standard kernel, which is building AI that redesigns kernels and soon chips to fit specific AI algorithms. And that's where the Google TPUs, you know, Google has this vertically integrated. We innovate at the algorithm level. We roll out Gemini three two days ago. We immediately start designing the next generation TPU to fit the algorithm change. That's something that Jensen doesn't have quite yet. And unless he invests very, very quickly up the stack, it's a big weakness in the competitive positioning.

Because right now, it's very hard to redesign a chip. But with AI doing the redesign, that cycle time is going to come way, way, way down. And it's not a manufacturing problem, you know, you just have to crank out the mask. It's more of a debugging and simulation problem, which can be solved with AI. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers.

If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I writing a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta-trends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and I'll entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to Demandis.com slash Metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. We've got a couple more stories on VDIA kicking us off here this morning. Let's dive into that. So we've got NVIDIA announces strategic partnership

with Anthropic and Microsoft. So Anthropic just agreed to spend $30 billion on Microsoft Azure Cloud, all powered by NVIDIA's latest chips. In return, Microsoft and NVIDIA are putting up to $15 billion into Anthropic. This isn't a product launch. It's the formation of an AI power block. These alignments we're seeing week on week, right? The deck keeps getting reshuffled.

Anthropic has been, I guess, under-resourism. with compute. And so this is a power move by them. Dave, you want to weigh in or Alex? Well, so I remember very clearly when Microsoft had a $300 billion valuation, became the most valuable company in the world, and we were like, wow, that's huge. So now Anthropics were $300 billion, and a big company is now $3 or $5 trillion. And that was not that long ago. And you'll see that now Anthropic with, you know, they have this $15 billion plus another $30 billion. that's a lot of capability, you know, and you'll see them start to do things. You're like, how are they getting that done?

How are they getting that done? But you really have to back up and look at the magnitude of these dollars. It's incredibly empowering this amount of money. And so, you know, since I was a teenager, I've been trying to visualize how the singularity happens and what does it look like in the last few years before the singularity? And now we're right in the middle of it. And it's just, I'm giddy with excitement. But this is one of the ways it plays out.

If you have true AGI to work with, you can do anything. You can win a Nobel Prize in chemistry like Dennis de Sassavis. You can change. You have unbelievable capability. And if you have the capital to invest in the teams, it's wide, wide open. I'm predicting merger between Anthropic and Microsoft here. This is clearly them kind of diversifying their bets from just open AI. And enterprise is where Microsoft wants to make sure they're really good strong.

And Anthropic is there. So I predict a merger at some point. Interesting. You know, I thought, you know, there are a lot of rumors out there. One of the rumors I heard was the potential of Google acquiring Anthropic. But you're right. This relationship sort of quelch that. You know, there's a close relationship between Demis and Dario.

And Daria. Yeah. Sure. I mean, because they're the, you know, of the. leaders in the field, they're the ones that actually go home at night and play with the algorithms. They write the code themselves. And they're on a different level. So if you look at Jensen and Sam and Elon, they're very much business dealmakers. And they're engineers at heart too, but they're deal makers at heart. They're not going home and tweaking parameter files.

But these two guys are, you know, Dennis and Daria. Which two guys? Oh, yeah. Dennis and Daria. Yeah, for sure. So I think I'd be surprised if Demis is willing, I'm sorry, if Dario is willing to let Anthropic get acquired by Microsoft, unless Google just says, you know, we're not interested at all. But I really doubt that. I think Dario and Demis really want to stay as close friends and work together on this. Yeah, I mean, they're also the two leaders in ethics, you know, they both guys at the core of their absolute bottom of their heart are, are concerned about ethics. And, you know, the other guys might be too, but they're really entrepreneurs. That is so, Dave, that is such an important point.

Right? I mean, I've heard Demis and Dario talk about this is the right thing to do independent of maximizing profit, right? This is what we have to do for humanity. And those conversations, it makes you feel so much safer in the world when you hear that coming from leaders like that. Totally right. And if you don't believe it, read Machines of Loving Grace that Dario took the time to write. It's epic. And then listen to Demis Havas's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. And also the coming wave. best. Yeah. Okay. This is incredibly inspiring. Peter, you identified this in abundance, right? The tech philanthropists. This is the, if you went back 100 years, the richest folks in the world had incredibly extractionary business models. And what's incredible here, starting from Google and so on, these guys all have a deep ethics sense and they all want to give back. And I think that's so inspiring, that feedback loop starts to get really incredible. Yeah. I'll just say one thing.

and I want to turn to you, Alex, here, for your masterful analysis, as always. One of the things, I still feel, despite some criticism, that Google is actually always taking the long view, right? They're always taking the, how do we help humanity, their original motto, don't be evil. I remember those early days at Google with Larry and Sergei, and of course, it then became a real business, massive business. but I still think that underlying current of what can we do to make the world a better place drives a lot of their decisions, especially for Demas. Alex, this alignment, this power block between Nvidia and Microsoft and Anthropic. What are your thoughts?

There are multiple power blocks here. If you look at the larger picture, Anthropic is the last of the four or five frontier labs that doesn't have its own data center and chip arc. architecture play. There are other stories just in the past few days that Anthropic is finally moving into data center space, finally moving into chip architecture design space. So I think going back to the earlier discussion, I think we do move to a heterogeneous future where there are these vertically integrated players like Detroit had the big N largest car companies. I think we're going to have the big N frontier AI companies that are vertically integrated with their own data center design, their own. GPU or equivalent chip compute architecture, their own models, their own applications. It seems like we're moving to this vertically integrated future.

And I think this announcement is more a reflection of Anthropic becoming one of those vertically integrated players. And I think to that end, too, the big tech companies, you know, are now in a position where they could literally take over any industry anytime they want. And the only barrier to them just completely absorb. absorbing the entire world at this point is antitrust law. And so they like these partnerships without acquiring each other because it achieves their goal without triggering antitrust action.

And if you look at all of them, including Google right now and Microsoft a few years ago, they were stopped dead in their tracks by antitrust legislation. And it's torture. When they're, where they're subpoenaing, investigating, you know, they give you the notice that requires you to start saving every document and email. Just that alone is just torture. Really important point, Dave. Salim, you were going to say? Yeah, I mean, look, the whole model here now becomes, I mean, I want to go back to the bubble conversation because I think we're pretty clear here that we're not in a bubble, right? Can we

see that categorically? Yeah, I think it'll be a correction of some type because how much capital is being thrown without regard. But I don't think we're in a bubble. We're aligned revenues and values are going up in parallel. Well, also, I think it's a function of, Suleiman, I think it's a function of revenue generation. If revenue generation continues to scale really quickly, it's not a bubble. If revenue generation fails to scale, looks bubbly.

So I'll make a prediction. I think there'll be a slight correction as these guys do what Dave is talking about and start going after other industries, which will take a little bit of time to figure out and penetrate, and then it just goes vertical again. It's like a Gartner hype cycle. And I think this is also a,

hedge for Microsoft against a full dependence on open AI, right? This relationship they're getting with Anthropic. All right, let's go on to our next article here. Again, an NVIDIA article. NVIDIA may shift from GPUs to full AI servers. Let's go to you, Alex. What's the story here? Yeah, I think the bigger story is for the first, call it, 60 or 70 years of electronic computers, the form factor of computers got smaller and smaller. We went. went from mainframes to mini-computers, if you remember those, to micro-computers, to PCs, then to smartphones and maybe wearables. That's a pretty monotonic trend towards the form factor of standard computers getting

smaller and smaller. Probably peaked sometime around, call it the 2000s or 2010s. But now I think we're actually seeing that cosmic calendar of compute form factors reverse itself, that the key form factor of the most important computers is arguably now starting to look like these AI data centers, these coherent superclusters, and they're getting larger and larger again. And I attribute that to Moore's Law ending, as sad as that is in the beginning of horizontal exponentiation. So I think seeing Nvidia generalize and vertically integrate from just offering the chips to full AI servers is actually a reflection that the form factor for computing is now no

longer getting smaller. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger until something else changed. Is there a name, Alex, for what's the next version of Moore's Law? Is it the AI scaling laws? Well, if you ask, if you ask Ray, he'll talk about the law of accelerating returns and he'll point to a much broader trend that generalizes beyond electronic computers or CMOS. But is there equivalent for our GPU world that we're living in? We're going to create a Wang's law or Jensen's law of some type? There doesn't. There are dozens. of experience curves. I mean, if you want to name one after yourself preemptively, you probably can. Their naming rights are still open. But there are so many experience curves now, including

the one that we were chatting about for the past couple of episodes, about hyper deflation by 40x year over year of cost of intelligence. There are so many new experience curves coming out of the AI. I'll make one up on the spot, though. This is the law of abundance, right? Technology takes something that's scarce and makes it abundant. It has to be quantitative, Salim, to get the naming Fair enough. And I think the short answer to Peter's question is no, and it's wide open. If somebody out there listening wants to, it has to be simple and quantitative, like Alex said, and people have to, it has to be accurate.

It has to last a while. That's a good challenge. All right. For me, this was, by the way, for me, this was like an iPhone thing where the iPhone succeeded by owning the whole stack from design to experience the hardware all the way down or trying to get the whole ecosystem. And this is an NVIDIA trying to grab the whole ecosystem and create more value and aggregate more value in one spot. Agreed.

All right. The next article here is a fun one. XAI will be the first customer for an NVIDIA-backed data center in Saudi Arabia. A lot going on here. And I think basically Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as a. global AI superpower. All right. This is part of their vision 2030 play, their commitment to $100 billion. They're trying to diversify behind oil. And, you know, I've been going to Saudi at least once a year, sometimes twice a year in my board role at FII. And the conversations

very clear, MBS who runs the nation, you know, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he has wanted this. He wants to be, you know, their goal is number two behind the U.S. in AI. Obviously, you know, U.S., China, maybe it's a number three position. But this has been at the top of the conversation across the leadership of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia now for years. And this is a massive commitment. And this also brings Musk what he needs most, which is massive GPU capability. We'll talk about that. Alex, let's go to you first.

Yeah, I think the story behind the story is, as I've said before, inference time compute and this data center, AI data center, CAPEX, this is just the opening act for an entire stack that's about to pop out, including AI-powered, humanoid, generalist robots. So when I see stories about countries positioning themselves for sovereign inference time AI inference compute. That to me looks like we're seeing the re-architecting from the ground up of an entirely new sovereign stack. It'll start with the data center inference compute. It'll run through humanoid robots. And you'll see, I think, Saudi Arabia and other countries, probably beyond just demanding sovereign inference compute, starting to demand sovereign compute for humanoid robots as humanoid robots

start to be more broadly deployed. All of societal automation to the extent we have sovereign countries in the present paradigm, this entire stack wants to be sovereign, at least at inference time. Dave? Well, there's a long, long history of the U.S. needing international partners in biotech. We can't just try everything here. The FDA is way too slow. So you roll out in Panama, you roll out in Caribbean nations.

And then in chemical manufacturing, you know, India just took off long before the U.S. Because regulatory barriers make things so slow here. So in sovereign AI, Saudi is going to move much, much faster. I think actually Bermuda also are going to move much faster. They'll learn, and everyone's like, well, who cares about sovereign AI? Well, at the rate of technical change, we need a much faster process of creating laws and rules. And so I think, you know, Saudi will be a great test bed because they're so nimble. You know, they can make a decision and act on it instantly.

And you see this with things like, simple things like health data, miles ahead in health data. trying to do anything under HIPAA in the U.S. takes just way too long. Can I just tell you what I think one of the underlying stories is here that I want to just hit on? And then Sleim, I want to hear from you on this. It's that XAI needs compute. XAI needs a mass amount of compute for Elon's vision to happen. And they've got Colossus 1.

They're about to get online Colossus 2. but if you look at sort of the players out there, you know, Google by far is the number one owner of compute on the planet with their TPUs and GPUs. OpenAI is next. XAI is coming in third. So this relationship has got to be critical for Elon as he's standing up in Memphis and Mississippi, you know, Classes 1 and 2.

Any thoughts on that, gentlemen? Well, one takeaway from our trip to Saudi two weeks ago is I had gone in thinking that it's just going to be a massive amount of compute all over the desert, huge data centers. It's actually much more of an investment vehicle. I think they're building big data centers to learn and their goal is to invest a trillion dollars as intelligently as possible. But I think you'll see later in this pod that the data centers are more likely to go to Texas and then space. And Saudi will be along the way, you know, but it's not going to be like Saudi is the compute capital of the world. It's just a it's more of a learning experience.

experience a test bed and a sovereign, you know, a controlled, you know, subset of compute. Salim, thought, please. I got nothing. You know, this is like there's a sequence of these stories that just run from one to the other. Each one, it's a blur. Order of magnitude more crazy. And my brain is just blurred and fogged up with all of this. I mean, they're all amazing and significant.

But the broader implications is something that I'm more interested in. But for the specifics of this, let's move on. You guys have covered it way more. Yeah, I just, you know, one of my questions is, X-A-I is, I mean, they're all compute-starved, right? So, X-A-I in particular, needs NVIDIA chips, and he is getting them left, right, and center. I think one of the things we're seeing is Elon's getting access to NVIDIA chips

very early as he's been building the colossus clusters. I'm just wondering, and there was a rumor I saw out there about Elon's, potentially buying Intel, right? I mean, that would be a fascinating move by him. Yeah, that's one that actually, you know, well, anyone buying Intel would be a genius. But he might actually get that through the regulators because he's not, you know, Google could never get away with it. Yeah. And certainly, Nvidia could never get away with it. But could you imagine the world if Elon was running Intel just to accelerate it? I mean, to just literally move it warp speed forward? That would be amazing.

That would be incredible. And, you know, keep in mind also that, you know, Elon's getting tons of Jensen's chips, but he also signed up for $16 to $45 billion of Samsung manufacturing to make his own chips. So that's not exactly, you know, hey, let's see. They're going down a couple different paths, some of which are competitive. If you pull back one second, the multipolarity of this, I think, is the most exciting thing for me, where they've got major different parties doing amazing things. And that means the whole, it lifts that rising tide, lifts everybody.

I think that's really great. Yeah. Alex, do you want a final comment before we move on? Or you good? I'll just say that there is a race to superintelligence and we're going to get abundance from superintelligence. And each one of these stories is just, as Salim says, as a facet of this comment theme. Nice. All right.

This is one of my favorite stories of this week. So I want to dive into this. I care about this deeply. I know Alex, you do as well. All right, this is Elon talking about 100 gigawatts per year data center installation in orbit. Let's listen to the video and we'll go from there. Like we see a path to putting 100 gigawatts per year of solar powered AI satellite into orbit. And having this be actually the lowest cost,

to power and operate AI at a very large scale. For reference, the United States consumes roughly 460 gigawatts in average per year, because the average power in the U.S. is 460 giga. The whole country. The whole country. All electricity of all sources in the U.S. yes. And you're talking about 100 being added. Well, it roughly according to the U.S. electricity. we have a plan mapped out to do that it gets crazy it does get crazy that's 100 gigawatts per year not in

total yeah do we have a timeline for that you know well listen starship has got to become up and operational on a regular basis which uh you know is something i think we'll see in the next 12 to 18 months um and you're then basically taking compute off planet on Starship. But what I find even crazier, and Alex, we can talk about this is Elon's plan to mine the moon for silicon, right? So we're going to mine it for compute and solar power. And I think his estimate of what he could do if he was launching using O'Neill-like mass drivers off the surface of the moon is to go from 100 gigawatts per year to 100 terawatts of energy per year, which is five times the total energy output of the Earth.

As I've said, the moon's had it coming for a long time. Time to make use of that. Time to pay up. I mean, just to take a step up, it's remarkable how quickly we moved from the Dyson swarm is science fiction to, okay, we've deployed an H-100 to orbit. Now we're deploying multiple 100-gigawatt data centers in a swarm in Leo, geo, and probably soon solar orbits. The Overton window just zoomed by on the Dyson swarm.

And I think now we're moving to a regime where we have to potentially worry about interoperability between multiple competing Dyson swarms, maybe even thinking about an internet. We've talked for decades about an interplanetary internet. Now, while there were limited efforts in that direction, now I think we're about to hit a regime where we really do need a platform. Vince Cerf was designing that, right? That was a hundred version of that. Yeah, the interplanetary internet, yes, for sure.

Wait, can we go back to the timeline? What do we think is the realistic timeline? Exactly, let's come back to the timeline because I don't think it's as long. You know, we talk a lot about robotics, you know, refactoring construction all over the world, but that's a pretty long 15-year timeline. I think this is actually sooner than people might think. I'm a huge believer. I've been studying it since, you know, I didn't believe a year ago.

I was like, why on Earth would you want to reboot a server in space? But now, if you think about the cost of compute coming down 1,000 or 10,000 X, is there any barrier to that? And the answer is no, there's no barrier whatsoever other than power. And power is free and abundant in space. And then the only barrier after that is radiant cooling. But we have our first H100 in space two weeks ago. There's work to be done on cooling the systems.

And just for a reference point, if you take into account day-night cycles and the solar flux in orbit and other factors, it's about potentially a six-fold increase in energy density in orbit versus on the ground. So that's what you're doing, plus the fact that you have the ability to distribute compute and bring it down, bring down the answers to the speed of light. Can we just slow this down for our listeners a second? In the first phase of this, we're talking about using Starship to launch this next generation of Starlink. So Elon's already built the largest satellite manufacturing capability on the planet, right? Starlink, they're like 10,000 Starlink satellites. They're going to version three coming up very shortly. They'll get launched on Starship.

And so the next iteration of that is going to be putting whatever the top chips are in orbit, powering them from solar. And then the biggest challenge, Dave, you nailed it, is how do you cool them? Now you can do radiative cooling, but there's no material, there's no atmosphere, there's no liquid water to carry the energy away. The heat, right? Heat is one of the biggest issues you've got. But space is absolute zero. I mean, it's got to be easy to create that mechanism, right? Hold on. Hold on. Just let me ask one more question. And then we could So basically you get a satellite up there. It unfolds a solar panel.

That collects the energy you do the compute on there and then beam the information down. Essentially, that's what we're talking about? Yes. Yeah, exactly. And beaming the data back and forth is easy, easy, easy. A lot of people think, well, how are you going to get the data up and down? Lasers, and it's trivially easy. That's not a problem at all.

Let's go to our resident super genius here. Alex, talk to us about radiative cooling. Yeah, there is this misconception that you can't operate. a thermally intensive data center without conduction-based cooling. It's completely not true. The solution here is the cosmic microwave background is about 3 Kelvin. The universe on average is pretty cool. The truth is you want to make sure you're radiating in the right direction.

You don't want to try to radiate heat, for example, in the direction of the sun. That won't help you from a thermodynamics perspective. But as long as you can make sure that you have radiative cooling in the direction of the cosmic microwave background, background, which is most of the sky, you make sure that you aim your radiative cooling in the cooler directions, you're fine. And you can use radiation rather than conduction to radiatively cool. So there's a bit of navigational issue with making sure that you're pointing in the right direction, that you're oriented correctly. But this is completely doable. And to the timeline question, I would be mildly, if not significantly, shocked

if 10 years from now, conservatively, we don't see low hundreds, if not many hundreds, of gigawatts of AI compute, not on the Earth's surface. Yeah, I think Starship is the means, right? What, I mean, just to be clear, which is amazing, this is an attempt to move the bottleneck of AI from Earth's power grid to SpaceX's launch grid, right? So in the words, all of a sudden, it's not power on the ground, it's how many launches to orbit we can get. And alignment, what Elon has built in his ecosystem of XAI and Tesla and, you know, and

SpaceX is extraordinary. I mean, is it luck or is it genius? And in extreme, maybe both in some quantity, but in extremists, this involves taking a part of the solar system, which is I think perhaps the most tantalizing. You are dying. You are dying to nail the solar system, Alex. Like, you're just like that is waiting to be taking this. He's going to accelerando, right? Disassembling the moon is just a milestone. If Jupiter isn't decompiled, then there's something wrong. Okay. To our listeners, if you're, if you're, if, If you love looking up at the sky and seeing the moon, don't worry about that. Enjoy it while at last.

Okay. But let's actually talk about that part. So Gerard K. O'Neill, professor of physics at Princeton University, who I consider a mentor for me, who passed way too early. He wrote a number of books, a number of papers about how do you mine the moon? And one of the things that's true about the moon is there is no atmosphere. here. And there's a lot of solar flux. So he came up with the idea of creating these mass drivers, basically these electromagnetic guns that you could put something in one end. It's accelerated to lunar escape velocity and you shoot it towards the earth. And so what Elon's been talking

about here is basically the idea of you set up satellite, you know, data center manufacturing on the moon and you launch those using rail guns into Earth orbit. And his objective 100 terawatts of capacity per year yeah i think one thing that was a big shift uh in the last couple weeks you know the first h 100 went in this space two weeks ago uh it's operating it's cooling using aluminum only as the radiator and you know prior to this everyone was thinking you need obscure metals and and whatever but apparently it's working and it's aluminum only and if you read peter's you know, books, the first chapter of abundance, the best story ever. Please read it. Seven percent of the earth's crust is aluminum. We don't have any shortage of aluminum. Aluminoloxide. So it's a

great story to read. It's a silkeny the elder. And that's just such a good story. Thank you for listening to that. Well, that's a big breakthrough. So now if you want to make money today on space based compute in the future, we have to get the weight down. You get the mass down. That first H-100 is 50 kilos, that's way, way, way too much. Most of that sensors and stuff. It would be very easy to get it way down. But invest in whatever it's going to take to get the mass down so that we can launch these more cheaply. And eventually we'll make them on the moon, but that's way out there. You know, a data point that I talk about a lot is when we were launching space shuttles, it was, what, $600 million per space shuttle launch? Yeah, about a billion dollars per launch, yes.

SpaceX dropped it to like $50 to $100 million, and then relativity space where Eric Schmidt is now the CEO, et cetera, plans to do it for about $5 to $7 million a launch. And I find that interesting. That's like 100x drop in a domain. This is not a Silicon Valley social media gaming play. This is real physics trying to get out of the gravity world of Earth. And even there we've seen 100x drop. And what can you do with 100x more capacity?

And they'll go another order of magnitude by the next time I. I was in a conversation with Elon a couple of days ago when he was briefing some XAI investors. not disclosed anything confidential, but one of the things he said is in the future, if you could set up a starship launch facility on Earth next to a natural gas production capacity, right, because that's what it's basically burning methane, and you could then use solar to pull oxygen out of the atmosphere so that the fuel basically is effectively free. His estimate of the cost of transport, it would be cheaper to go to orbit as an individual seat ticket than it

would to be to fly transatlantic as an individual. I mean, this is an incredible vision he's been building. And I want to put one more figure for our listeners. We talked about 100 gigawatts per year of capacity being launched in, you know, the next decade or so. That's the equivalent of 100 nuclear power plants, right? These are typically one gigawatt capacity. I mean, that's awesome. All right. Well, I'll tell you what else is awesome is that the people who are making these choices are math, physics, computer science geniuses. And if you look back in the history of business, you know, it's Jack Welch. She's great. But John Chambers, you know, these are the people running, you know, the billion, hundred billion dollar kind of budgets. But they didn't have that

background and so now you know when Elon talks about these things he's he's almost always right in fact so far he pretty much always right because he looks at first principles and he actually does the math and he says look that'll never work but this actually will it sounds crazy but it actually will work there's no fundamental barrier so it's just a different community making these choices than ever before in history and and you're seeing like the things that are possible actually starting to happen Alex want to give you the final word here in this one please. You know what, Saturn has it, its fate marked as well. Oh, no. Stop taking apart our solar system. Solar system is a dead mass right now. Oh, my God. Computronium. We're turning it

all to computronium. You can't actually disassemble the moon. It controls the tides, not only the tides, but also the molten core of the earth, the magnetosphere, requires the moon. We can't disassemble the moon. You can do Saturn. No problem. I have no problem. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for defending our sisterly body here. All right, let's jump into the topic of energy. You know, there is, we talk about compute as energy and energy as compute. So I put this chart here for you, Salim, principally.

So here we're seeing China is driving global electricity generation. On one side of this chart, if you're listening and not watching, is the change in electricity generation over the last. 12 months, September 24 through September 2025. And what we see here is China basically four-xing the U.S. in terms of total energy production. We're seeing China leading the world in solar and in wind and in nuclear and in gas. And then another chart next to it is a change in electricity generation. And just by itself, so we see, again, this is China basically putting out around 325 terawatts versus the U.S. putting out about 80

terawatts. Selim, over to you. There was one little piece of this that I found very exciting, which was that big red drop in coal. We've been predicting this for a while, where the cost of solar is now so cheap. You know, I mentioned before that the capax and op-ex of solar is now cheaper than just the apex of fossil fuels. And what we're now seeing is that just the economics of it mean we'll start to dismantle all of our fossil fuel facilities unless we need incredibly dense energy generation. But for most normal use, we'll be doing that and then moving fully to solar. And I thought that'll be hugely powerful and important for climate change and all the carbon extraction stuff that we need to do.

I just think this is a, you know, shocking difference in energy capacity production between the U.S. and China. I mean, you know, kudos to China for having really gone all out. I'm kind of shocked at this point that we haven't seen President Trump stand up and say, we need Project Warp Speed for energy. We're seeing it in different places. We're seeing regulations change and key investments being made. Well, just yesterday they said we're going to make all this drilling. in open water available. And there's a big paradigm shift that's missing on the power of solar

energy and other solar and fusion and Gen 4 nuclear, all of these things. I mean, we've got to be, if the U.S. wants to be competitive in the long run, I mean, unless we skip this entire decade and go straight to orbit, right, that's the alternate. Alex, what are your thoughts here? Yeah, I think we have seen an operation warp speed for at least certain energy categories, including nuclear, maybe certain fossil fuels. So I think that the increase toward, call it, Cardishev type 2 civilization level energy production, I think this is going to happen with time barring some shocking, ontologically shocking discovery about the nature of our universe. It seems like we're on trend. and whether one nation is temporarily in the lead or another is temporarily in the lead,

I think the long-term trend line is fission's happening, fusion is going to happen, maybe there will be even more efficient ways to recover energy, as I like to point out, if we had microscopic black holes, we could just drop objects into them and recover their rest mass, that in principle would be far more efficient than fusion power. Fusion is like 4% efficient. vision is less than 1% efficient, we could recover nearly 100% of the energy associated with rest masses if we could just drop objects into black holes. So physics, the known physics of our universe allows enormous amounts of energy production. I think whether one country is ahead of

another in the short term, these are just non-secular beliefs. But Alex, we are electricity limited in the U.S. on our, we're not chip limited. We're not real estate limited. We're electricity limited. And I'm just... For the moment. For the moment. I mean, this is a blip. Again, fission is in the process of coming online, fusions in the process of coming online for the moment. Okay.

I'm just calling it like I see it, which is when I see the timelines for fusion, for real production of fusion, the earliest... I mean, it's going to happen, yes, but we're talking 2030 to 2035 for the first plants and then mass production, really, till 24. 40, that's, that's 15 years out. That's insane. And then the timelines for even bringing existing fission plants back online are like five years. So, minimum. So I think, I mean, Peter, like the, the gap, like we're fine through 2030 because we're looking for 100 gigawatts and we can't make the chips any faster anyway. So between here in 2030, we're fine, just taking old manufacturing power and redirecting it, just like Elon did in 10. see, you know, redirect it toward data centers. But then from 2030 to 2035, we have a massive

gap because the chip fabs have accelerated like crazy. Fusion kind of works, but it's not online yet. And then there's this big gap from 2030 to 2035. And keep in mind, as Alex is always pointing out, we're going to discover brand new physics and math between now and then. So anything could happen. Yeah, I just think, I think solar is the easiest to scale other than oil and coal. I'm predicting we'll see a massive breakthrough. in photonics or some of those domains over the next couple of years. But we're in for a five to seven year difficult period. And I think the only option is to steal all the energy from residential.

Don't go there. Don't go there. It's the only option. There are lots of options. And I would say also don't underestimate the power of the market. If the party continues, the KAPX party continues and revenue generation from killer new AI apps continues, we have the ability to reprogram the existing electricity production of our civilization to extraordinary degrees if the market absolutely demands. And I think we'll know the answer to that

in the next few years. You know, we should have Saul Griffith on. He probably has the most macro view of all this stuff. Saul is great as is Remez in this area here. All right, I'm just saying we need to scale up solar in the U.S. Parapskite is coming. Super excited by Parapskite as a technology. for higher energy conversion rates and lower costs. All right, let's move on to this next article here. Fascinating. Google's investments run deep in the heart of Texas is the concept here. So Google announces a $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027 to build new cloud

and AI infrastructure. The project is adding 6.2 gigawatts of new energy generation and a 30 million. dollar energy impact fund. You know, when I see 6.2 gigawatts of energy and I remember 100 gigawatts per year in orbit, these things sort of just, you know, they warp my mind. Space is beckoning and calling. But here's what the real story for me is. Google isn't just going to Texas for sunshine because part of this investment includes renewables. They're going because AI is about to become the biggest consumer electricity in the US. It's going to be bigger than steel, bigger than crypto, bigger than every industry combined. And I think Texas is the only state that can build

fast enough in the energy world. So. Well, and they have space. And they have, yes, they have open area. And a friendly regulatory environment, Texas is doing a great job of welcoming energy, data centers, AI leadership. I would love to see other. States. Launch vehicles. Yeah, launch vehicles. I would love to see other states provide as welcoming an environment for acceleration like Texas is doing. They'll have to. This is, it'll just the competitive nature of this. We'll open this up. I don't know. I wish that were true. But if you look at what's actually going on in California and elsewhere, it's like, come on, guys. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. Government is so messed up. No, but this provides an actual competitive opportunity

for many, many states that have a difficult time competing, let's say, California and New York. It's one of the best parts of the U.S. having different state legislatures. You know, the United States of Texas is definitely pulling in some great opportunities here. There's one problem with the U.S. right now, isn't they, in that you have to drop the word united of everything. Oh. Because it's not really the United States of work.

Yeah, but, you know, that's been true since the 1700s. And, you know, as long as people don't get violent, the variety is actually. very healthy and that you know the internal competition is very healthy as long as it doesn't tip over to dysfunction which it does every now and then I agree but you know having we're founded on freedom and we're founded on variety and a weak central government and strong local governments you know and trends go in the other direction all the time but but I think you know Texas running away should put competitive pressure on other governors and the governors in Ohio and Wyoming have reacted already so it does work you know it's just a pace it's just frustrating

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It's an advanced nuclear fuel, one of the safest and most robust ever created to power the next generation of SMRs. Alex, let's go to you on this. Yeah, so the headline is, pebble-bed nuclear is finally happening. After decades of people hand-wringing, when are we going to get pebble-bed reactors, we're getting pebble-bed reactors. This So what is a pebble bed reactor, Alex? What is a pebble bed reactor? So think of a pebble bed reactor a little bit like a gumball machine where you have sort of billiard ball-sized spheres that have uranium cores

or have lots of particles in them with uranium cores surrounded by a carbon ceramic composite. And the basic idea of pebble bed reactor is you have all these billiard balls. They're being heated by radiation from the uranium cores. You pass helium gas through the gumball machine, as it were. The helium gas is heated by radioactive decay, and that powers steam turbine, and that generates electricity. But critically, this is much safer than many other forms of nuclear reactor because the individual uranium cores are nicely encased, and they, over time, you could imagine sort of this gumball machine where these spheres, these billiard balls, fall over time. they decay, about three years of lowering these spheres in one gumbull machine, they're offloaded into another and then recycled a few times. But these pebbles, these gumballs,

if you will, because of the way they're packaged up. And this is what our country's first CAT-2 nuclear fuel facility in the story, that's the announcement here. We're finally manufacturing these pebbles domestically. This is in principle far safer than fuel rod-based earlier generations of nuclear reactor. Yeah, I think one of the key points to make is these don't melt down. They literally cannot melt down as a nuclear reactor, which gave us Fukushima and Three Mile Island and all of those failed earlier versions. So again, kudos to Cam Gaffarian.

And this is, you know, this is first principle capabilities driving us towards a new generation of nuclear. It's unfortunate. It's taken us this long. My father worked on pebble bed nuclear reactors. Really? Yeah. He was working on that in the 80s, and he was going crazy, going, why the hell aren't we

using this for everything? This has been decades. It's literally been decades coming. We spoke in a previous pod episode about thorium reactors, which go back to the Manhattan project. There are so many concepts for nuclear energy and energy in general that have been sitting on the shelf in some metaphorical sense for decades, if not almost a century, that are finally, only now being put out into production.

It's not often I can see a term from some of these obscure scientific stuff that I recognize, but this one I saw. Wow. You know, this is, I mean, there's a really important point here. AI is the string pulling everything forward. Yes. Right? So AI is driving all of the technology we've been thinking about forever.

It's driving us into orbit. You know, it's driving us to go back to the moon. It's driving us to build global energy infrastructure. I prefer the analogy of gravity well, but I'll go with string. My modal, I mean, just maybe riffing on that point, Peter, my modal scenario for the next 10 to 20 years is, like most science fiction concepts all happen at once. We're going to live in a future where it's not just like a Star Trek future,

not just like an accelerando future, not just Heinlein or Asimov. They're all going to happen more or less at once in the same universe, our universe, over the next 10 to 20s. What you said, Alex, still rings in my mind. we're going to speed run the Star Trek universe in the next decade. And the Asim of Universe and Heinlein and Charlie Strauss, all of these are going to happen. Maybe we need to rename the pot to be everything everywhere all at once. Yes. Oh, my God.

I think that one's taken. But what an exciting time to be alive. I just, again, you know, this vision of people complaining, I get it. Yes, there are problems on the planet, but also what an extraordinary time. to be alive. I mean, when, when on, during Earth's history, would you ever prefer to be living other than now, other than perhaps tomorrow? Dave, you want to close us out on this one? I'm just going to repeat, Alex's, the innermost loop of humanity is what's driving this. This is, it's AI at the core, it's the innermost loop, and everything around it is accelerating

because of, because of that intermost loop. So it's, yeah, it's just so, so exciting to watch. All right. Let's jump into drones and robots. A lot going on in this universe here. I pulled this particular story out because I love this company. This is a company called Zipline that's about to begin producing their drones, their delivery drones at 20,000 per year. This is Keller Clifton, the CEO of Zipline, an amazing entrepreneur who built this company against all the odds. Let's listen to Keller and then we'll talk about it. It is been an insane two months, but I thought it would be cool to give a two-minute update. And standing in our expansion space for the manufacturing facility as we speak, we're getting ready to build 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, all here in South San Francisco in the United States. Right now, we're growing the number of deliveries we do per day at around 15% week over week. We've been growing that fast for about 30 weeks straight.

A lot of our customers out there are placing orders three to four times per week. In fact, some customers are ordering three times a day. people actually just fundamentally change their ordering behaviors. Some people are grocery shopping once every one to two weeks, and then ordering from Zipline three to four times a week just to do fill-ins. We've also been able to launch a new Walmart Supercenter every week across Dallas for the last couple months. The U.S. right now Zipline is doing an autonomous delivery about every 30 seconds.

We have one very big announcement that we're expecting to come out in about 10 days. So thanks for believing in us, and stay tuned. All right, incredible story behind Zipline. They were founded in 2014. They're headquartered in South San Francisco. This was a vision that Keller put forward. And, you know, I did a moonshot recording with Keller. You can go back in our library and find that podcast.

And I remember him saying when he started the company, he told his employees there was like a less than 10% chance of success. And they started in Rwanda and Korn. Ghana. And it was a sort of regulatory arbitrage, you know, flying drones to deliver things the United States without having support of the FAA and DOT wasn't going to happen. But in Rwanda and Ghana, there was a real problem. And they focused on that problem, which was delivering blood and critical medical supplies to different parts of the country from a central repository. And they screwed up in the beginning. It was difficult, but they got it better and better and better.

And finally, they were operating at such a high success level that they were able to bring those operations. And by the way, they operated in Rwanda and Ghana from their headquarters in South San Francisco. An extraordinary story. And today, they're doing about a million commercial deliveries per year. They've flown 70 to 100 million autonomous miles. They're doing this for a whole bevy of companies. Walmart, Chapolte, and others, you know, sort of a 30-minute retail-to-delivery capability. Alex, excited about this one? Drone delivery is happening.

It's happening here in the United States. It's here happening in China. And I think it's an interesting thought experiment to ask, what happens when this is fully realized? This is a fully mature technology. I think it leads to a ultimately, I think, a relocalization of the supply chain. We've talked earlier in this episode about sovereign stacks. I think ultimately, if you extrapolate the ability to do drone delivery of supplies and supply chains, I think ultimately we're going to find ourselves in a regime with hyperlocal manufacturing.

And I think it's very exciting. We asked for flying cars. I think that this is in microcosm, the first version of fly. flying cars where in the near-term future, optimistically, we find that our skies are filled with delivery drones. Yeah. I have a couple points here. One is this is such a big thing.

This is one of the Gutenberg moments that changes everything, right? AI changes everything, but drones really do change everything. We're seeing the last number I saw, we're saving about a thousand people a year using drones because we can use thermal imaging to find people in earthquakes and so on. we're dropping in life-saving stuff to them. And it's going to grow exponentially as we propagate the drones. So this is going to be very, very big over time, but it's already had a big, big impact.

I remember in 2010, one of the singularity teams kind of launched this idea of drones by delivery, and then Amazon a few months later copied that and announced they were going to do delivery by drone. And that has inspired a whole vector of all of this. So really, really exciting to see. And of course, Google Wing, Wing, which is part of the alphabet, I had the CEO of Wing on my stage at the Abundance Summit last year. I think it was. Again, Zipline, just a beautiful design. If you go back to the pod that I did with Keller, I don't know, about 18 months ago, so you can see how they operate. They can set up in your store an automatic location where the drone comes back, picks up the next order, and delivers it. a lot of drones flying in the air, and these drones, of course, have cameras and sensors.

These drones are going to be helping to create this imaging of the surface of the earth at millimeter resolution when there are millions of drones flying in the air. Dave? And for many years, two more quick points. For many years, they were doubling every nine months, the price performance was doubling. So that's a hell of a curve to be riding on. And let's also acknowledge China is already doing delivery of coffee. drones and all sorts of the stuff. They were living in this universe already.

Yeah. Yeah, big time. Big time. It's that last point that Peter made that I really was hoping Peter would would do a relaunch of the future is faster than you think, one of his best-selling books. But it talks about this topic a lot, and it's all about converging technologies. But that was before the neural net-based vision and feedback control systems were perfected, which is really just the last year or two. And that's a total game changer in that whole thesis. But I had dinner with Rodney Brooks and uh do you remember helen grainer from mit she sure she and rodney co-founded i robot yeah i talk about her in my next book yeah yeah for sure oh do you okay well she's doing the turtle now which is a basically a gardening and farming robot and i'm sure she'll expand it out from there but you know

at dinner with rodney brooks and he was really down on the supply chain for robotics and he was like you know what happens is we invented it's great and then the chinese come and clone it and then they undercut your pricing and they slide you're like well okay that's what happened to i robot i get it but that was before the vision and feedback control systems and also we have a much more protectionist economy now which is another story but your ability to launch a robot that does something very specific is a completely different world today than it was two years ago in terms of its dexterity its vision it's you know and it's not just vision it's any kind of sensor can now be you can train a neural net very, very quickly.

And once you have the data, this came up with XAI, or sorry, with 1X when we're talking to Burt Borneck. The data that comes back from this deployed set of robots gives you a huge flywheel effect and a competitive advantage. So if you get your robot to market at any given use case, just like Zipline is doing, then you can use that to retrain the neural net every single night. And it just gets better and better and better.

So I think people are underappreciating the degree of dexterity, the degree of capability that's in these new generation of robots, and it should just absolutely take off. You know, one of the things that is also underappreciated as we're moving forward with millions of autonomous cars that are imaging everything on the street, where we have millions of drones flying over your head that are imaging everything at millimeter resolution, where people are walking around with their AR glasses looking around when we have, you know, thousands of satellites in orbit imaging at submeter resolution, we're entering a point where everything knowable on the planet is being imaged and recorded constantly, which leads to a point at which you can ask any question and get an answer, right? This is a very different universe where you can know anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. I remember the stat that each Waymo car is recording. a gigabyte of information per second per car. Yeah, it's crazy. Alex, can you give us some wisdom

on that idea? Yeah, I think this is the planet waking up. I speak about decomposing the solar system to build a Dyson swarm. I think a baby step in that direction is deploying small masses in Earth's atmosphere to transport other masses around. And I would expect if we are on this trajectory, And I think the jury is still out as to whether we are. But if we're on the trajectory toward a Dyson swarm, it's very natural that in the intermediate term, we'll see drone delivery and all of these masses start to move around in Earth's atmosphere.

Can I make a couple of quick points? Sure. There's the negative side of it where people go, oh my God, loss of privacy, et cetera, et cetera, right? But there's also the unbelievable positive side where there's an unbelievable amount of illegal fishing going on, for example, we're just literally scraping the line. life out of the oceans. And now we can track that and police it a lot better because we just

know. And that I think there's so many positive use cases, that way is the negative by a long margin. It's the point I've made. People, you know, people act differently when they know they're being watched. Now, this is, you know, brings an entire conversation on police states and China and so forth. But I supported the Lindbergh Foundation. This is Charles Lindbergh, now Eric Lindbergh, his grandson. And they were, they were funding drones. that would fly over herds of elephants and rhinoceros is to keep the poachers away because if the poacher knew they were being imaged,

they stayed away from illegal activities. Anyway, a few more robot stories, I think would love us to chat about here. Can I talk about that topic just for the poaching topic? Yeah. There was an idea a few years ago, which I think now started to be implemented, where if you use synthetic biology to create rhino powder horn,

you flood the market with super cheap rhino powder horn. rhino horn powder, and then you take away the economic incentive for poaching. Yep. Awesome stuff. Okay, so this is Unitries G1, learn to do human-like chores. And I'm showing this video just because I want people to start to imagine what it's going to be like to have these robots living in your home with you. And again, this is a $16,000 robot. Maybe this is a little more advanced version. So vacuuming in the bed?

No, I think it's... Ironing the bed, yes. Ironing the sheets? Okay. That's a service I don't really need. Don't knock until you've tried it. I guess, yeah. Well, that's a good point, actually.

All kinds of things I don't feel like I need are going to be so cheap. I just don't want to be in the bed when the robot tries to iron it. Oh, my God. So just, unitry is about to go public. You know, it is probably the leading manufacturer of robots on the planet in terms of volume. Again, I would never bet against Elon. And he's, you know, he's convinced that. what he's building with Optimus 3

will be the single most useful machine on the planet and by the way guys I was texting with Brett Adcock last night the CEO of Figure and Brett's agreed to come back on the pod so we'll get an update on Figure 3 so excited about that

was to decide whether we go to his facility or do it digitally here all right I just stuck this in because one of the things I put out a humanoid robot report every year. It's going to be coming out in a couple of weeks. But the number of humanoid robot companies is exploding. I've never seen this like, I mean, it's just crazy. This is hardware. This is real

hardware being manufactured. This is a company called Sunday Robotics. And what I found fascinating, and you'll see this in the video, is they've created an army of 500, what they call memory developers. So in this photo, you see a human wearing these gloves, and these gloves are basically the hand manipulators of Sunday robotics. And the human goes about their normal daily chores with these gloves. And it records every action, every motion. So they've claimed at Sunday robotics, they've created the single largest robotic data set for dexterity. Let's take a look at this video and then we'll chat about it. So he's opening a dishwasher and he's putting these wine glasses in the dishwasher with very high precision.

Nice. A Neo-Gama, would you please bring me a cappuccino? I'd appreciate it. I think by next year, hopefully, that will happen, and actually the cappuccino will materialize magically via robot. Dave, what do you think in here? Well, a couple things. The programming by actual action, you know, you just do it, you know, either vision or

you just move, and that programs the robot. That's a huge unlock versus sitting down and writing the Python code or the, you can even be Python because it's too slow. So you have to write assembly or C code. That takes forever. That's completely gone now. You just train it. And that's a huge, huge unlock.

And also, we tend to visualize the humanoids working in the home because that's what everybody loves. But, you know, these things work in nuclear reactors where no human can go. They work inside pipelines. There's just huge amounts of use cases for this in areas where there's no other option. You know, build a data center in space. Well, it's not going to be people with spacesuits. That's going to be robots in space.

100%. And so lots of unlocks here. You almost can't go wrong right now. I will be curious when we're talking to Brett about whether he's using Nvidia chips. Because you said Elon almost never loses, but Elon's making his own dojo chips for these robots. And, you know, Brett, I don't know what Brett is using. I know that 1X was using two invidias per head of each robot. So that's a big constraint.

And so we'll see what Brett's plans are. Yeah, Alex. We know algorithmically how to solve robotics. It's vision, language, action models, foundation models that are generalizations of LLMs like chat GPT. The hard part is the training data. And there are so many different approaches emerging for training data for these VLA models. I think to Sunday's credit, what they're doing is, as alluded in the video, they're using special gloves that human operators wear that are exactly matched to the size and form factor of the hands of the robots. This is one approach.

I think it's a very promising approach to their credit. It requires, as they say, zero teleoperated data for training purposes, but there are lots of other approaches. We've seen figure announce cameras on palms of hands. see a lot of so-called sim-to-reel approaches that generate lots of synthetic data and attempt to translate those over to reality. I'm optimistic that one or more of all of these approaches that are being tried for data-set generation and data-set curation will solve robotics imminently. I'd like to make two points. Somebody needs to figure out how to program the swarm, too, because when you walk around the research labs, a huge fraction of people are working on grippers

and you're like, okay, I pick this up, I'm squeezing from both sides, but you know, you can do that with a gripper, but you can also do it with two independent, you know, drones pushing against each other. And you can't program it that, you can't program a swarm of 50 drones by showing it to what to do with your hands. So someone has to crack the code on how you use that same exact approach for the swarm version. Someone's going to have to start strapping wearable cameras to swarms of birds or something like that to gather the good training data. There's a start up there for someone in the audience. So I've got a positive and negative perspective. Positive is a few years ago when Baxter first showed up. You could actually

you train it. Instead of saying lift object, turn 90 degrees, move over your hair, turn back, put it down and explicitly program a code. You could move Baxter's arms and adaptively show what to do, and it would learn that. And I think we're seeing the fruition of that vector, which I think is very, very powerful. On the negative side, I think we're a long ways away of picking up solid plates. I think Dave's point of dull-darity, dangerous, the DDD thing, is where we'll go for a long way before we start doing this as general purpose stuff at home. But still my viewpoint, let's see what happens. I may be wrong. All right. I'm going to move us along here. This is a company called Clone Robotics. They're going to be one of the robot companies at the Abundance Summit this year.

We have four robot companies on stage with their robots. Let's take a look at Clone here. so what you're seeing basically is a human-like setup with though it's different here is instead of electromagnetic motors these are hydraulic systems moving the tendons and the muscles to get dexterity it's it's sort of west world robotics and i just show this to show the variety of different approaches that are going on today um in very brief uh we're seeing the $100,000 robot from Boston Dynamics, in particular, this is their robot dog, entering into police work and safety work. Do you want to add a point here, Alex? Yeah, I'll point out. It's really interesting. The ratio between humans and dogs on Earth is

nine to one. The ratio between humans and domesticated four-legged mammals on Earth is approximately three to two. I think the elephant, no pun intended, in the room is, will we see robot dogs and robot quadrupeds scale in proportion to humanoid robots? Yes or no? I don't know the answer to this either, but one can imagine there are lots of scenarios where you don't want humanoid robots, where you want something maybe difficult to rain or other more difficult circumstances. You want lots of other animal, non-human animal form factors. Maybe you want snakes. Maybe you want insect-type form factors. I can imagine. Micro drones. Microdrones. Flies. I think we're going to see all of these, and this is one data point. Yeah. You're dead right. You're feeding

Salim, which is sad, but... Are nightmares for you, Salim? No, no, no. I'm actually... I mean, again, for policing and dangerous work, absolutely right. But if you want a dog, give me a male dog and a female dog, I'll get you a dog. I mean... Oh, my God. Selim, I put this chart in here for you. We're going to wrap very shortly, but EVs to soar as gas

car efficiency stalls. Do you want to speak to this slide? Oh, my God. I mean... Give us a rant, buddy. Give us a rant. No, I'm going to keep it short. This is the International Energy Agency, again, kind of doing their predictions. I'll go back

in history and say back in 20, they put out a prediction that the number of electric cars, it would take till 2040 before he had a million electric cars out there. And by the time they'd kind of finish their report, Elon had a million Tesla's out in the world's already. And in this case, there's one data point here that is complete, complete bullshit, which is the number of electric cars in India. As you say, they're predicting that it'll be near zero till 2035. That is complete horseshit. It's going to be vertical like all the others. So what the hell are they doing? U.S. I can just about understand, but that's even going to go away just because of the

sure economy of it. Well, the autonomous electric cars, right? The cybercabs are going to be displacing gasoline cars. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, what are they talking about here? I think what are they missing? How do they miss this year after year after year? The number of moving parts in a combustion engine car is 2,000 moving parts in the drive train and a Tesla has 17. You can't compete with that in terms of design, reliability, maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. Brant is over. Okay.

All right. I want to close us out today with the notion of science and technology is creating an increasing world of abundance. The first story here is epigenetic reprogramming trials are close. So we've got an image here of David Sinclair. David is the founder of life biosciences. Life is a company we just had at the longevity. The Abundance Longevity Summit, which I do every fall. And a number of my abundance community members are investors in Life Biosciences.

What is it? Life Biosciences is commercializing the work that David has done with partial epigenetic reprogramming. He's using basically a modified adeno-associated virus to put the OSK genes into cells. What does this all mean? it means that he's demonstrated age reversal in mice and in monkeys. And for the first time, this age reversal technology is entering human trials in the first quarter of 2026. And it is a big deal and has the potential to really transform. He's going into the eye to deal with nion, which is strong.

strokes in the eye and glaucoma. But if it's a true age reversal technology, it's going to affect the entire body. So he'll go from the eye first, they'll then go to liver and other organs. And you have to understand when you were young, you didn't have a specific disease. As you got older and your epigenome shifted, this disease materialized. So if you can reverse your epigenome to an earlier state, the disease should go away. And a lot of work here. So super excited about that. Let me link it with this story here with Anthropic as hiring life science researchers. Again, we've heard Dario talk about could we double the human lifespan on the back of progress with AI. So super excited. Anthropics been going very hard and heavy here.

Alex, what are your thoughts, please? Yeah, Dario has stated publicly that he expects disease to be or let's say disease comma, biology, comma, and medicine to be solved by the end of the decade in the next five years. And I think Anthropics doing an amazing job of pushing forward AI for science in general. But I think this is what solving biology looks like. It looks like starting to apply dedicated efforts, hiring biologists and building out facilities to solve biology by the end of the decade. And I think they will succeed. Amazing. Part of what we're talking about solving as soon as possible is the cost of sick care. Again, reminding everybody, we do not have a health care system. We have a sick care system. The system takes care

of you after you're sick. A health care system would keep you healthy, right? So AI is going to be the biggest impactor here. We saw a study out of Stanford and Harvard Medical School that definitively shows that an AI diagnostician looking at your data will diagnose you far better than any human or even a human with AI because humans introduce bias into the results. This is the progression of AI as a radiologist. And so in this chart, we're seeing basically how Gemini 3 is doing performing versus radiologists. So Gemini 3 is outperformed radiological trainees. And it's on its way to, you know, taking over the role from board certified radiologists not there yet, but I think in a year we'll be there. Alex, your thoughts?

First of all, I love benchmarks. I've made no secret that I love benchmarks. The benchmark in this case is named Radiology's last exam. It's composed of, I think, 50 radiological images, spanning multiple modalities, multiple body systems. And the basic task is handing an image or imagery to an AI of various sorts and asking it to specify a final diagnosis. And as you say, Gemini 3 Pro, which just launched, beats radiological residents. And on its present trajectory, if you just plot a straight line through progress from GPT5 thinking to Gemini 3 Pro, I think we're going to see radiology get solved in the next year. And my brother-in-law, Tim, is a radiologist.

And surprisingly, he cannot wait for AI to outperform him, which he says is basically today. but he got into the business to save lives not to have a job and he is just super excited about it saving lives also the number of other types of sensors that are coming online in medicine is on an exponential curve and so you need AI to read all those scans too there's no shortage of jobs for radiologists if you just stay on top of the wave because there's always more training data needed always more types of sensors and and the other thing is the amount of data that comes out of a scan today is way more than any radiologist could ever read. Just huge, huge amounts of very high resolution. So he's just wicked excited. I hope all doctors are super excited because, you know,

at the end of the day, it's about saving lives, not about protecting. Yeah, I think you're going to find people who are going to actually say, no, no, no, we can't let AI do this yet. They're not good enough. And you're right. There's not enough radiologists. I know we hire radiologists at Fountain. I hope we're going to transition to our AI radiologist soon. enough. Talking about creating abundance in the world, this was a fascinating article. I think you found it, Alex, so thank you for that. Rainmaker's bold plan to refill the great salt lake. Alex, you want to hit this one? Yeah, there's a scene in the Johnny Depp movie Transcendence where nanobots are released throughout the biosphere remediating it. I do think we're going

to find ourselves in a world soon where some facsimile of that scenario is the can. case. So in this case, this is drones that for weather modification that are being used ultimately to refill the Great Salt Lake. And I think this is an early preview of that scenario where many of the most, in principle, labor intensive, capital intensive, energy intensive, environmental issues that we face in the case of the Great Salt Lake, it's losing water that's resulting in arsenic that was already in the salt bed being aerosolized and people are breathing it. It's not a great situation. All of these environmental scenarios can ultimately, I think, be remediated at scale with enough automation and AI. And I think this is just a sliver, just a preview of what

we're going to see biosphere-wide. Yeah, you know, we talk about water scarcity in a world, right? Water is one of the most important things, clean drinking water. If you've got that, you can eliminate half of the disease burden on this planet. And we have to realize that we have an incredible supply of water on this planet. The problem is 97.5% of salt. 2% is in the ice caps and we fight over a half a percent of the fresh water in the lakes and rivers. But it turns out there is another source of water. It's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. And so if you can access that, we've had a couple ex-prises on that topic. You can move the water to where you want it and need it. So this is about creating water abundance on the planet, which I think is so cool.

I have two points to make sure. One is this is climate engineering and like full operational scale, which is amazing. The downside that people say is, oh my God, we shouldn't be geoengineering the world. And the counterpoint of that is we have been geoengineering the world. We've been throwing up a ton of carbon into the atmosphere for decades now. We have to use technology. You know, I've been watching the outcomes of the COPS, you know, a farce going on in every year we get all the folks together. We are not going to find a political solution to climate change. Nation states cannot solve climate change. You need a technological approach.

I think this is the start of a whole array of those. Yeah. In terms of re-engineering and gaining access to resources, one of the biggest, you know, conversations is rare earth metals are rare. and how do we get access to them for our electronic supply chain? This is a company called Vulcan. The title here is Re-Element and U.S. government launched $1.4 billion to build domestic rare earth supply chain. So critical for so much of what we're building here. And, of course, for the last couple of decades, this has been a supply chain controlled in China.

Alex, do you want to give us some 101 on this or Dave? Either of you, please. Maybe just, I'd like to comment in, again, in extremists, where do I think all of this ends up? I think it's relatively easy to imagine a future where so-called reindustrialization reaches an end state where local supply chains become hyper-local, where for rare earths, for other key elements, other key feedstocks for the supply chain of the innermost loop, if you will, are farmed completely locally. And I think ultimately that takes us to nanotech. It takes us to Drexlerian nanosystems. It takes us to robots that are able to scavenge raw resources from the immediate environment. And immediately, you get an immediate supply chain that's packaged up in some sort of self-contained way to produce finished projects.

And I think this, again, this is just the start of maybe a 10 to 15-year journey towards those types of nanosystems. Dave? Yeah, we have two investments in companies. companies now that use AI vision systems and sensor data to scour through recycling and trash looking for rare earth and looking for things that are extremely valuable. And that's a, I mean, everybody loves that because the supply chain people love it and the recycling and get the garbage out of the streets. People love it. It's just a pure good enabled by AI and robotics. And it's a really, really good theme and very, very profitable business too. There's also a book called The End of the World is Just the Beginning that Tom Petherfee gave to me. I love that title. It's an incredible, packed with data and statistics, a really good read. But amazingly, the U.S. is one of two countries in the world that has everything.

Literally everything is here. So our rare earths come from China, but that's only because we didn't bother to mine them out of the earth here. We have them. We just didn't put together our mining operations. We had rare earth metal operations. The problem is China would undercut the marketplace and put our country. companies out of business.

But that's a different. That's a different. Yeah. The whole push now is like, hey, make sure that everything is able to be done here, doesn't get undercut, and reindustrialize America. And, you know, France is the other one that has pretty much everything, surprisingly, if they can just access it. Including great croissons.

It's a great book, yeah. All right, before we go to our outro music, which is epic again this week, I put this in here, Dave, because, you know, Link Exponential Ventures is a Boston-based company. So here it is the data. Massachusetts leads in VC-backed IPO success. So Massachusetts leads with 4.1% probability of going public. Within 10 years, California companies are at 2.3% and New York companies are at 1%. Any comments, Dave?

Yeah. So no mystery here. You know, Massachusetts is also the healthiest state in the country and also best place to raise a family in the country. And it's not magic. It just tracks university density. So if you do the exact same chart on university density, you come up with the same curve. So as a fraction, if you walk out on the streets of Boston and you touch a random person, 25% chance they're a student and, you know, some other chance they're a professor or working in a startup.

up. It's just an incredible high density of very, very smart, upwardly mobile people. Not a lot of homeless problem. It's just all of that really feeds this machine. But people come to Boston to study and to learn and to build. And then, you know, a big fraction of them stay. Another big fraction goes to California. So this is tracking where they started. A lot of things actually start in Boston. Many of them do migrate to California, which is why people perceive that as being the epicenter. But it actually, if you want to be there, the day that they're founded, or if you want to recruit the talent, you know, there's 20 times more engineers in Boston than there are in Silicon Valley. 20ths because of MIT, Harvard, B.C.,

BU, Northeastern, Tufts, it's all within walking distance. It's just a really unique place on Earth. You couple that with the stat that you showed me that the unicorn venture-backed companies, the highest rate of giving birth to a venture-backed unicorn company comes out of MIT, is number one. It turns out USC is number two, and then Stanford is number three, which sort of shocks all my Stanford friends when I show them that figure.

But it's why Link XPV is based out of MIT. All right, let's- I gotta see one thing about that. Yeah, please. It's a wonderful statistic, but California has 10 times more IPOs than Massachusetts and only six times more of the population. So I think that speaks to Dave's comment about people

moving over there. So you've got to take that out a little bit of, and the weather is cold. But I think when I remember building a company, the best engineers and systems engineers we could ever find we're in the Boston area. So the game plan that has worked for so many of my friends is you start in Boston, you hire your first 10, 15, 20 people in Boston, you get revenue, you get traction. And then a West Coast VC offers you $100 billion valuation. So you move your headquarters out to Silicon Valley.

You grow, grow, grow, and then you have your first kid, and then you move right back to Boston because the school systems are the best in the world. And also it's very community oriented. You know, there's a little town center with a white steepled church and the police and the firemen and everybody all interact with everyone. It's very, very social. You rake leaves, you shovel snow, you grow up strong, and then a cycle starts all over again. So just one thought on an impossible life plan. It certainly worked for a lot of my friends. Fascinating. All right. We're about to to our outro music, which is literally called the Epic Fantasy Edition by John O. Votny 5074. Thank you. We've been getting some incredible entries into our outro music,

so thank you for all the creatives out there for your support. Didn't John create another one of ours? That's right. This is John's second contribution. Yeah. Before we go the outro music just any closing thoughts here let's go around the horn salim how do you enjoy this episode today any other closing thoughts any other rumors you're hearing any other fun things just just an epic steamroll towards the era of abundance i mean we have collapsing costs we have access into multiple industries we've got new industries forming the seams of everything very quickly you're going to have a personal AI that's a doctor a lawyer a tutor a mentor a coach and that's all going to be So when people talk about abundance, we're kind of getting there so fast.

I think all these stories that we're talking about show us how quickly we're going to get there. It's incredibly, just unbelievably exciting. Amazing. Dave, your thoughts, please. Well, two things I saw in the comments. One was, Dave, can you stop wearing checkered shirts every single time? I heard you. I'll try and develop a look. I don't have a look.

I'll try. The other one is really cool. It's like I like to listen to it at 1.5X speed, but then when Alex, I need to go to 1X and listen to it twice. Yeah, you're going to slow it down by two, two times. So we could try to automate that. That's a very easy AI problem. We'll create a little overlay that can automate the process for you.

Yeah, I do want to encourage our subscribers. We're at 399,000 subscribers, about to hit 400,000. Thank you for that support. If you haven't subscribed, please do. But please put your questions in the comments. We do read them. And I'd like to be doing more A&M. AMAs on this. So we're going to be looking for great questions and then bringing it to the

Moonshot mates for conversation. Alex, please, your closing thoughts here. Two comments. One, we didn't get a chance to talk about the new Nanobanana Pro model, which is just incredible. Encourage everyone to play with it. It has transformative new multimodal capabilities. I was very impressed. Kudos to the team. And second, I spend all of my time thinking about solving the hardest problems on Earth with AI. So I've mentioned in past folks, if you have really hard problems that you're working on solving, I would love to connect with you. I think we're entering the age where the hardest problems on earth are solvable with AI. And Alex will be at Nureps. Yeah, don't forget. I will be at Nureps next week. So yeah, if you're at Nureps, the AI conference definitely reach out to me, would love to

connect in person. And plug from my side, November, sorry, December 17th, meaning of life session online. Amazing. And we had put out a call. to see if you guys wanted to get together with the moonshot mate, sort of at a moonshot gathering in the fall of next year, fall of 2026, probably in L.A. We've had about 700 of the thousand right back saying that they're interested in joining us. So if you're interested in a moonshot gathering, send an email to moonshots at d'Amandis.com so we can hear your vote. Our goal is to get to a thousand people who say they're interested. And if we get enough interest, we'll pull this together in the fall. So DEMAN, so Moonshots at D'Amandis.com.

If we dissembled the moon per Alex's prediction, we're not having renamed this podcast. No, that's why it's called Moonshots. We're all about shooting the moon disassembling it and building the computronium cloud, obviously. Grown, grown, groan, groan, groan. All right, our outro music here, epic fantasy edition. All right, let's enjoy. So good. Check it out. please watch this oh the Lord of the Rings theme awesome oh my god this is the best have you seen this before so late you look everything wow davy look good yeah that's much better this is cool though that's the way i visualize Your kids look like that, Peter.

Wow. Moonshots, besides all the three is on me. There we go. Okay. The cats. Oh, that's crazy. Oh, that was so good. All right. If you were listening and not watching, it's worth going to YouTube to watch this.

Thank you, John. That may have been my favorite one of all of them. You got some real talent there, John. I love AWG as an elf, and Dave as some version of Robin Hood. And Saleem, show that to your wife. You're the sexiest man on the planet in that one. I looked like a troll. That's great. As always, gentlemen, love you greatly. Thank you for your wisdom. your passion and your commitment here. Everybody, that's a wrap on Moonshots. See you guys again next week. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform

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