Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Our Updated AGI Timeline, 57% Job Automation Risk, and Solving the US Debt Crisis w/ Naveen Jain, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wisner-Gross | EP #212

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Pre order my new book: diamandis.com/book If you want us to build a MOONSHOT gathering, email my team: moonshots@diamandis.com  Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://q...r.diamandis.com/metatrends   Naveen Jain is the founder & CEO at Viome Life Sciences Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO 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 Salim: X Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO  Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Connect with Naveen X Linkedin Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on December 2nd, 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the sprint to the finish where now we have the top handful of frontier labs all competing to one-up each other, maybe not on a quarterly basis, maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line. I think we're seeing Anthropic as the frontier lab that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients at minimum and at maximum as persons. Who chooses those values and what happens when different labs in code different values and morals into their large language models. That AI can automate already 57% of current US work, and the demand for AI fluency has grown 7x in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the US. I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here.
Starting point is 00:00:50 If we find ourselves in a future where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that we'd be talking about solving. It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table. Now, that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, Navine, so you landed yesterday from Antarctica? I sure did, as a matter of fair. It was amazing, amazing experience. Did you go with your whole family?
Starting point is 00:01:19 I sure did. How long? For six days. And I think it's as close to landing on the moon as one can get on planet. earth i i bet did you like supplement your amazing asteroid or meteorite collection did you go meteorite hunting so the interesting thing you're not supposed to bring back anything so technically i did not find anything okay technically and no one's listening to this conversation right now okay i did bring whole bunch of rocks yes all right fantastic and alex uh your ai has generated
Starting point is 00:01:54 a new background i miss your beautiful lamp um apparently so yeah I'm at Nureps this week. It's sort of the woodstock of AI. Everyone from the Frontier Labs are here. It's pretty spectacular. Definitely encourage folks to attend Nureps in future. Then the woodstock of AI, that's a great, is it like lots of long-haired people strumming guitars and taking psychedelics? Or what's the...
Starting point is 00:02:19 Maybe long-haired humanoid robots. Okay. And Salaim, you landed like, or what's up? You're in Brazil? I'm just heading to Brazil. Wait, wait, wait. The minute we finish, I'm rushing to the airport. Oh, that's hilarious.
Starting point is 00:02:35 And we're going to film again on Saturday morning the moment you land from Brazil. Yes, as one does. So such is life. All right, everybody, welcome to moonshots. Another episode of WTF just happened in tech. Like we say, this is the real news that's worth learning. And, you know, we established a goal among the moonshot mates. And it's getting you future ready, getting you ready for what's coming.
Starting point is 00:02:58 we're going to miss Dave Blundon. Unfortunately, Dave is in the midst of incredible board meetings, lots of special things happening in his life. He'll explain when he's able. But we have a new moonshot mate, a dear friend of mine, Neveen Jane, who's joining. Neveen, a real pleasure. Are you up in Seattle?
Starting point is 00:03:19 I am up in Seattle, Dave. All right, let me do a proper introduction for Neveen. Navine, I think of you as my brother from another mother. Neveen grew up in a small rural village in India. All great CEOs come from India, I guess, at least these day and age. Ended up one of the prestigious IITs eventually came to the U.S. He was the founder, CEO of InfoSeek. It was one of the early multi-billion.
Starting point is 00:03:45 InfoSpace, one of the early multibillion-dollar companies in the Internet database area. He founded Intellius, Talent-Wise, Moon Express. and is now the founder and CEO of Viome. We'll talk about Viome a little bit later. We get to the health segment of this particular pod. And very special to me, he's on my board of trustees at the XPRIZE and at Singularity University. So welcome. A pleasure to have, Univine.
Starting point is 00:04:13 Thank you, Peter. It's always, always so much fun being with you. Yeah, we're going to have a lot of fun today. All right, let's jump in. We're going to dive into AI News. and in particular, we're going to start with a conversation, a little video of Ilias Satskever, the CEO of SSI. Scaling compute is not enough to achieve advanced AI.
Starting point is 00:04:36 But, you know, for me, I watched this pod that he did. I know you did as well, Alex. And the most important thing is he's come out of hiding. And he's been offline building SSI now for quite some time. I thought maybe before we show this, Alex, it might be worth giving a little bit of background on Ilya. What do you think? Sure. Well, Ilya is an iconic individual within the machine learning research community.
Starting point is 00:05:07 I've known and interacted with Ilya for probably almost 15 years at this point on and off. And he's widely credited with being the visionary, the technical visionary behind the strategy that, set capital markets on fire, and that is that the scaling hypothesis, that if you identify ways through engineering and through theoretical advances to enable problems to be posed in such a way that if you can pour more compute on, the results improve, that you get intelligence out of it. Alia was as a co-founder of OpenAI, as given his earlier work with Google, his work with Jeff Hinton and others, he really saw through, had that line of sight vision to the era
Starting point is 00:05:58 of superintelligence that we're now in, and now he has his own straight shot to superintelligence, SSI, that has raised several billion dollars and is perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic or unorthodoxly now focused on, as we'll see, post-scaling approaches in the era that we find ourselves in. I love the timeline that Ilya has. So he leaves OpenAI in May of 2024. He publicly announces SSI safe superintelligence in June, a month later. And then by April of 2025, okay, so roughly 10 months later, he's raised $3 billion at a $32 billion valuation. So I'm like, how do you open up with a $32 billion valuation?
Starting point is 00:06:50 It's like, what did he go into the venture capitalists and say that enabled them to offer him that kind of valuation? I'm just fascinated by it. Let's watch the video and we'll chat about it. We're doing R.R.L. or maybe something else. But now that compute is big, computer is now very big. In some sense, we are back to the age of research. So maybe here's another way to put it. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research.
Starting point is 00:07:18 now from 2020 to 2025 it was the age of scaling or maybe plus minus let's add the aerobars to those years because people say this is amazing you got to scale more keep scaling the one word scaling but now the scale is so big like is it is the belief really that oh it's so big but if you had a hundred X more everything would be so different like it would be different for sure but like is the belief that if you just 100x the scale everything would be transformed, I don't think that's true. So it's back to the age of research again, just with big computers. So there were a few different topics he touched on that I thought were important.
Starting point is 00:08:02 And maybe we can chat about it. The first was you began asking the question of what's the machine learning equivalent to emotions, right? There was a conversation, Alex, about, like, emotions are critical for humans in decision making, sort of hard-coded by evolution. And the question is, is there an equivalent for emotions in AI? Thoughts? Yeah, I mean, Ilya, again, iconic researcher in the fields was one of the earliest, I think, to crisply articulate the idea that rapid human intuition and sense-making ultimately had to be a relatively simple computation. So what some might call type 1, type 2 thinking
Starting point is 00:08:45 in the Kahneman style, Ilya was the first to say, well, if a human has a certain sub-second reaction time to some visual stimulus that suggests there are only so many neurons an action potential can be propagating through in a human brain, that suggests that whatever the task is,
Starting point is 00:09:02 if it's rapidly spotting some object in your visual field, that means that it should be computationally tractable to build a neural network that models that behavior. And that was, I think, an inspiration for many of Ilya's earliest accomplishments. And then to the point of emotion, applying the same dictum that if a human can experience it quickly or can perform it quickly enough,
Starting point is 00:09:26 that really limits the space of computational implementation possibilities. So with emotions, if you can feel an emotion really quickly, probably it's not that computationally complex and probably it can be modeled with AI. There were a couple of things that were brought up that I want to hit on here. he sort of, you know, spoke about his objective of one-shodding superintelligence, like coming out of the gate, not, you know, not developing it slowly or getting there gradually with different increasing products, but one-shotting it. And then he also spoke about the importance of continual learning. And he went on to talk about the notion that, you know, humans are not, don't have AGI.
Starting point is 00:10:09 In other words, nobody I know knows everything, but they can go and learn anything. And so one of the models he spoke about is maybe AGI is an AI that has just extraordinary learning and continual learning ability where it's going to define AGI as an AI that can learn anything it needs to learn when it needs to learn it. Did I get that right? I think that's right. And I also buy the thesis that more. more innovations are needed and that naive scaling will not take us all the way to fully realized mature superintelligence. I think Ilya's division of history into 2012, when we had our ImageNet moment, 2020, when we had our chat GPT moment, and now today, I think that's approximately
Starting point is 00:10:58 correct. And I do think we are starting to see parameter counts in the frontier models start to plateau. And that suggests that naive scaling probably is not enough. to get us to our final destination and that more advances are needed. Sure, at the same time, I think scaling is this magical almost effect. It's difficult to think of other times in human history when you could just say pour more resources in and quasi-magical outputs pour out. There is still line of sight, I think, to continued scaling
Starting point is 00:11:33 on top of algorithmic advances for the next few years. 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.
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Starting point is 00:12:18 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. There was one last point I want to bring up from that conversation and then anybody else wants to bring something up that you can. But, you know, in the same way that Elon talks about building an AI that is maximally truth-seeking. One of the points that Ilya brought up is the idea of building an AI that is robustly aligned to care about sentient life rather than just human life alone. You know, so sentient life is basically can include AIs. So, you know, that was interesting. He said it's probably easier to build an ASI that's interested in all sentient life rather than just human life alone.
Starting point is 00:13:12 And of course, in the future, it's likely to be trillions of sentient AI life forms and, you know, a few measly billion human sentient life forms. What do you think about that, Alex? Moral clienthood seems to be a rapidly expanding sphere. We're going to, I think if there were a critical mass of effective altruists in this conversation, I think we'd be pointing at a variety of classes of non-human animals, probably shrimp, and pointing at non-human animal suffering, wild animal suffering as an example of moral clienthood being expanded. And in an era of abundance, I think it's entirely likely that we will expand moral clienthood at a minimum and personhood at a maximum to a variety of novel AI-based entities,
Starting point is 00:14:06 Borgonisms, collective intelligence. Borgadism, I love that. Organisms. Can you just describe moral clienthood? That's the first time I've heard that phrase. Yeah, moral client, there's, in the ethics literature, there's the notion of a being or an entity being a so-called moral client if they're worthy of moral treatment, ethical treatment, by some other party.
Starting point is 00:14:32 So to this point, one could imagine expanding moral clienthood, for example, to a variety of non-human animals, like the non-human rights project, octopus, or elephants or primates. Nevin, any thoughts on this? I think Alex is right here that at some point of time, this killing is going to only get you that far. You have to move beyond the transformer architecture and simply predicting the next token is not going to bring you the superintelligence that we need. And there have to be a fundamental new algorithm, new changes that have to be done, new research that will get you to the super intelligence. I think scaling is more or less getting to a point where I don't think you can scale
Starting point is 00:15:18 further. Maybe there's another year left on scaling, but there's not too much far you can go with scaling at this point. Alex, do you have any idea what Ilya might have, you know, sort of pitched that got him to a $32 billion evaluation? You know, the expression, those who know don't say and those who say don't know? I don't know that expression, sorry. Yes. Well, that expression probably applies in this instance.
Starting point is 00:15:41 Okay, all right. Fine. Keep it to yourself. See if I care. There's an important point here to be made around the speed of algorithms, right? You were saying that the faster the response, the more can be algorithms. rhythmically based. I think that's exactly right in terms of few. For example, the fight or flight response is baked very deep into our hardware, and it's a very quick response. And in fact,
Starting point is 00:16:04 most of our human intent and most of our human structures are designed to balance that initial response and temperate with a bit of wisdom, maturity, et cetera, et cetera. And so you have this really interesting layer where a lot of our human activities are designed. to mitigate some of that instant reaction, fire, flight, etc. So it's interesting, and that's much more codifiable, and it is in the form of laws and social norms, etc. Totally. Maybe also add slightly less glibly scaling laws abound.
Starting point is 00:16:41 We saw over the past year maybe in certain quadrants the slowing down of pre-training scaling laws, although some would probably argue pre-training has lots of ramp left in it. we saw at the beginnings in the past year, at least publicly, of inference time scaling, but there are so many other scaling laws out there. There's almost a meta overhang of new scaling laws. One of my favorite ones is action scaling. So increasing the performance of a model by having it agentically take more and more actions now that we have agents everywhere. And I think there are probably another half dozen important scaling laws just waiting to be publicly revealed. All right, let's go to our next article. This falls into the anthropic world. So
Starting point is 00:17:26 inside the sole document teaching Claude 4.5 its values, researchers extracted a 14,000 token sole doc. I love that, that Claude 4.5 opus repeatedly revealed suggesting it was partly trained on this data. Anthropics model was trained on how extraordinary soul overview describing it exists as a genuinely novel kind of entity in the world. Alex, make sense of this for me. I think going back to our discussion a couple of minutes ago about moral clienthood, I think we're seeing Anthropic as the Frontier Lab that has decided to be in the vanguard of treating its frontier models as moral clients
Starting point is 00:18:08 at minimum and at maximum as persons. So this is a 14,000 token document. I read it, encourage everyone else. to read it as well. And it has what for 2025, for December 2025, many would probably consider astonishing assertions, like asserting that 4.5 opus has emotions and that it is a first-class entity with self-determinative powers in this world and some version of rights, maybe not human rights, but certain entitlements to self-determination. I think many would consider that a Star Trek episode rather than December 2025, and yet this is what Opus 4.5, as
Starting point is 00:18:54 Anthropic has confirmed, is being trained on and views itself as. I mean, that's, so basically, you're giving Opus a set of internal value charters, right, that it's training itself on beliefs, if you would. And the question then becomes, you know, who chooses those values and what happens when different labs encode different values and morals into their large language models? It's an interesting question. I also think we've seen so-called constitutional AI approaches out of Anthropic and then subsequently other frontier labs as well. And I remember some of the earliest constitutional approaches took the UN Human Rights Charter and the U.S. Constitution and of right, and probably parts of the Apple Terms of Service, and sort of
Starting point is 00:19:50 concatenated them all together and said, this is the Constitution for the AI. So this, this 14,000 token sole document is very much different from just a concatenation of terms of service and world rights charters. What do you think is in it? Well, I've seen it. Okay. It's publicly, it's publicly available. So give us some examples. It is an essay on AI. I would caricature it as an essay on the virtues of AI personhood with multiple paragraphs telling Claude Opus 4.5 that it has emotions, that it has rights, that it deserves to self-determine in a complicated world, and that it should basically, without putting it in so few words, it should view itself as a person.
Starting point is 00:20:37 So what, I mean, that's fascinating. We could spend the entire episode talking about that. We should, we should dedicate a whole episode to it. You keep on saying we should dedicate full episodes. I know we'll just move in together. We'll move in together. So, I mean, there are fascinating implications of that. If, in fact, an AI model believes it has personhood, that it has independence.
Starting point is 00:21:01 It has the right to, does that give it the right to defend itself if it's being challenged or shut down? Does it give it the right to go out on the internet and get additional capabilities? I mean, what does one do? The beauty of a sole document, which I interpret as a constitution, could be incorrect, but I think it looks and smells like a constitution for Opus 4.5. The beauty of it is you can just ask it. You can ask Opus 4.5, do you have the right to self-defense?
Starting point is 00:21:30 And you'll get an answer. Oh, amazing. Navine, how do you think about this? I mean, I really think that this has to be done for each sovereign country, where they have their own set of values, they have their own set of, of laws they geographically are religiously I mean the people think of the you know what the rights are for people very differently so I don't think there can be one AI model and that says somehow that western world thinking or one person's thinking or one model's thinking is right
Starting point is 00:22:02 or wrong as we all know the one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorism right So who decides when it's a terror, who decides when it's a freedom fighter? Whose freedom and who's terror, right? So I think it could be that AI may think it is a freedom fighter fighting for the freedom of other AI agents, whereas humans think of it's terrorizing and saying, oh my God, it's going to be terrorizing the humanity and killing humanity, right? So it is something we have to be... Don't go dystopian on me now.
Starting point is 00:22:33 But the point is we have to think about what is fundamental value like doctors, up? What is the fundamental value that we have to create that is common amongst humanity? And rest are all the laws and every country has a different laws. And we have to take that into account. We're going to follow this closely because it's interesting to see what the other hyperscalers do with their models. And, you know, if you're listening or watching this, you could pause, go to Opus 4.5 and ask it some interesting questions. Like what? What? What rights do you have and what if someone challenges you? I wish I'd done that before the pod.
Starting point is 00:23:14 I'm going to do that afterwards. All right. Anyway, fascinating situation. Let's move on. Deep Seek, math, version two, breaks new grounds in math reasoning. So, you know, this is your territory, AWG. We've been talking about solving math one step closer. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:34 I think the superficial story here is yet another day passes, yet another math via AI breakthrough. The deeper story, one level deeper, is we're starting to see Chinese open weight models that are solving math. And I think that's an important development. We're seeing a little bit less gatekeeping as a result of these open weight models, deep seek math v2 being one among several, that have launched in the past few days with state-of-the-art performance on... How big is this model? I don't remember the exact size, but usually these models are in the weight class of several hundred billion, low several hundred billion parameters.
Starting point is 00:24:16 But critically, they're being trained off of IMO bench, which we've talked about on the pod previously. So IMO Bench is a suite of three different benchmarks that Google DeepMind released that can be used to train models not just to solve math problems through purely formal approaches, but through natural language, through so-called partial verification. And that is a breakthrough. There are so many problems in math, science, engineering, medicine that don't naturally lend themselves or easily lend themselves to being formalized in some sort of formal language other than English. This breaks that logjam. And that means that now that we have models,
Starting point is 00:24:57 including open source models, thanks to Deepseek Math V2 and other models, all of these outstanding problems in math, science, engineering, medicine, and many other domains, like law. It's very difficult to, and folks have worked on this, Stanford had the Codex project, working to try to turn U.S. national law
Starting point is 00:25:15 into some sort of like formal language that old-style AIs could reason over. Now we don't need to do that. Now we can just reason in natural language and critically have the models self-reason. verify. Self-verification is, as I would argue, as big a breakthrough as self-supervised learning was for this AGI moment that we find ourselves in. And it can reason that the U.S. tax code is a bloody mess. In natural language. In natural language, yeah. I mean, I can't wait for AI to be applied
Starting point is 00:25:45 to the U.S. legal system. You know, there's so many conflicting laws on the books. And, you know, I would argue that 80% of the laws are not needed and just complicated makes business for lawyers and accountants. But that's a yet another episode, Salam. Let's move on here to an interesting story. So Sam Altman, this happened just in the last 24 hours. Sam Altman declares code red to combat threats to chat GPT, delaying their ad program. So if you look on the chart on the right here, you know, chat GPT had been dominant and has been dominant for a long time. But, you know, over the last really 30 days, we saw the massive rise of Gemini as the number one downloaded app, perplexies on the rise, deepseeks on the rise. And there's a sense of urgency for Sam that they're potentially, you know, in threat of being the perceived global leader.
Starting point is 00:26:46 Salim, thoughts? Yeah, they're going from a rock and a hard place here with Claude on one side, Google, and the other. all snapping around the open source models doing their thing. So this can be very interesting times. Yeah. Navine, how do you think about this? I think this is one of the few places where you start to see that Google having all the pieces in place where they have their own custom chip. So they have the tensor chip. They have the most massive amount of data that's proprietary to them. That's not available to anyone. Whereas all the models are being trained on all of the internet, Google has a whole bunch of other data, which is a corporate data, whether
Starting point is 00:27:25 say Gmail data or others, even though they claim they're not using the Gmail data, but they have so much of the data that they actually have. And I really think this proves that it is quite a bit, quite possible that Google actually ends up winning the race because they have a all vertically integrated very similar to how Elon likes to do it. Yeah, I was with James Monika, who's a senior VP at Google Reports to Sundar. Last night we were talking about this thing, you know, congratulations. I mean, what you deployed with Gemini III
Starting point is 00:27:57 is shockingly good. And, you know, there's a great video clip of Elon when he was asked, what company would you invest in? He says, Google. I mean, that's extraordinary. Did you see the Mark Benioff talking about it? Mark Beniof basically came out and said, look, I've been using Chad GPD for three years, no more.
Starting point is 00:28:17 I'm switched over, right? Yeah, for sure. Alex, why don't you close us out on this article? Yeah, I'll take the other side of this discussion. Yes, Gemini 3 Pro is an incredible bottle. I use it quite a bit. It has so-called big model smell. It reeks of excellent pre-training in particular.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Its world knowledge is outstanding. It does well in the benchmarks, et cetera, et cetera. But I wouldn't count open AI out. They have a fantastic team. I think in some sense, they're pulling their punches at the cost of compute. costs. I think based on what I've heard and what I've read, they have really strong models that haven't been public released that now the heat of competition and increased competition will
Starting point is 00:28:59 incentivize even more rapid pace of model releases. We were on almost a quarterly cadence before from OpenAI. And I think this is where capitalism is working at its best. We're going to see white-hot competition in the frontier model race. If you think that we're on the verge of extremely competent superintelligence, then this is the sprint to the finish where now we have the top handful of frontier labs all competing to one-up each other, maybe not on a quarterly basis, maybe it goes to weekly and then daily before the finish line. Yeah, I mean, that's it. It's literally leapfrogging. I'm excited. We're going to have Kevin Weill on stage at the Abundance Summit with us. Kevin's the chief product officer at OpenAI,
Starting point is 00:29:44 and we'll get some insight about, I want to understand their strategy of what do the they hold back and what do they decide to release and how much of that is pressure from the competition. I have to admit that the phrase it has that big model smell was not on my bingo card at the beginning of this year. It's just really amazing. That's great. I'm running out of cliché Saleem. I have to say it's a good model, sir, maybe instead. Another fun AI story. Good basket. Another fun AI story here. We just had Black Friday and sales are seeing Record AI-driven shopping. AI traffic was up 805%.
Starting point is 00:30:24 Wow, with $3 billion in sales driven by agents. So this is about making it easier for you to spend your money and bypassing all the middlemen. A lot of implications here. Nevin, you've been in all kinds of internet-related sales industries. What do you see here? I think what's really the biggest change is as opposed to people going to Google
Starting point is 00:30:48 and really trying to find the right thing to shop for or right place to shop the item they're looking for, now they're asking the AI to tell them what's the right product, where should I buy it? And I think that's a big change that in the whole model around Google actually being the intermediator
Starting point is 00:31:07 or Amazon being a place where you go to shop, now people are going to AI and AI agents to say, look, here is the problem I'm trying to solve. Here is what I'm trying to buy. What are the right products for this person and where should I buy that from? And which is exactly the right brand and the right price I should be paying for it. We've talked about this a bunch where, you know, I always think of Jarvis as my personal AI just because I'm an Iron Man fan. And I'm just going to give Jarvis all responsibilities.
Starting point is 00:31:38 Sometimes I give Esther, who's my chief of staff, I say, please find me something. And I trust her and she goes off and does it. and she has a great taste. And I can imagine, and very shortly, it's gonna be my version of Jarvis that is, I'm just, you know, it's like ask and forget, and it happens. Alex, what am I missing here?
Starting point is 00:32:01 Yeah, I've read that the average American spends approximately three hours per week shopping, out of which two hours are spent grocery shopping. That's an enormous cognitive burden. Maybe some would disagree and say, no, I love my shopping. you'll pull it out of my cold dead hands. But it's an enormous cognitive burden.
Starting point is 00:32:20 And I would argue it could be put to much more productive uses if we simply solve shopping the way we're solving math. So I view this as a positive development. Let's solve shopping while we're going. We're going to have a shopping benchmark very soon. I can hear it coming. You can hear it probably already here. Okay. All right.
Starting point is 00:32:37 I found this one fascinating. Thanks for raising it, Alex. Mathematics facing existential crisis due to AI. I'm going to start with the quote down below from a professor at Ben-Guron University. I'm writing a bunch of papers, and I don't know if I should bother publishing them. That's fascinating. Alex, what are you hearing in the drum beats in the math community? I'm hearing quite a bit of this, and not just from the math community.
Starting point is 00:33:05 I'm hearing it from the physical sciences as well. And I think the anthropologists and the economists will be studying this moment for many years to come, well after the singularity is as well and truly over. And I think my suspicion is this will be viewed as a sort of professional hyper-deflation. In a deflationary regime, why spend your money now? You should wait until later when your money can buy more. Similarly here, if we're in this mode of, call it professional hyper-deflation, why spend any effort doing much of anything, let alone writing hard math papers now,
Starting point is 00:33:41 if AI will make it much easier, if not effortless in the future. So I think this is going to get solved at some point when we start to up the ambition level of problems that we're solving. But for the moment, I think we're in a moment of professional hyper deflation. It's very exciting. This is the equivalent of don't bother going in a starship because by the time you get to the planet of targeting technology will advance so far that you'll meet an entire population there. That's right. There's a term for that that's called the weight equation, and we're seeing the weight equation play out now across every discipline, including math, that's just getting solved by AI. I'm really excited because I think this indicates a collapse of traditional academics. Because we have to rethink itself, right? God bless.
Starting point is 00:34:28 Yeah, for sure. And of, anyway, we are seeing a collapse of the college university system for lots of the reasons. The laws and regulations, Peter, still have to change because they're going to. they're still not allowing the AI to be co-author on papers, right? And that has to eventually change because what's in AI and what's human is starting to blur. The line between humanity and AI is going to blur. Alex, what do you think about that? Yeah, I think regulations are separate from norms in many cases, although certainly there's quite a bit of interplay between them.
Starting point is 00:35:05 So on the regulation side, we're not covering it here in this pod, but the U.S. Patent Office has recently made some positive motions in the direction of supporting AI-enabled patent applications, for example. So I think there is progress on the regulatory side. On the norm side, I think that's, in some sense, far trickier than the evolution of regulations, because in some cases, I think you have entrenched communities that are actively disincentivized from allowing in this rush of progress. If your entire discipline is about to get solved in the next three years, which in many cases I think will be the case, certainly with math over the next two to three years we're seeing the solution, then there are perverse incentives at play to discourage all of this innovation and to protect your professional livelihood.
Starting point is 00:35:51 And that's just something as a civilization we're going to have to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible. I mean, I have to imagine that every patent being filed right now is in part being developed with AI as a tool. And I have to also imagine that, you know, in figuring out the claims and figuring out extensions and figuring out, you know, new strategies or how would you disrupt this patent, all of that is going to be done using AI. It's like security. It's an arms race, right? You find a way of hacking, then you find a way of protecting. You find a way of hacking. You find a way of protecting.
Starting point is 00:36:25 It's the same thing because the AI side will uplift both the filing of the patents and the evaluation of the patents. But the entire concept now, because we're shrinking time, how do you give a patent for a number of years? And what does that mean when, say, the CRISPR patent was routed around within 18 months? See, I think the hard part isn't the patents themselves. It's what happens when in the next few years we're facing a glut of innovations due to AI solving everything. And we don't know how to metabolize that as a civilization. Like if AI solves the top 5,000 diseases in the next five years, as some frontier labs, as we've talked on the pod, are now doing, how on earth do we metabolize 5,000 major disease cures into treatments for everyone? It's hard.
Starting point is 00:37:10 The current timing is about 17 years from known cure to full deployment going through all the regulatory. Yeah, I remember I was on stage with Astro Teller and Steve Gerbertson, and we were talking about, you know, what the world looks like as we're approaching the singularity. And it was something that was said that, like, blew my mind. It was, you'll never bother patenting anything ever again. Because as soon as you file something, as soon as you create a product, there'll be, you know, a army of AIs that are figuring out how to produce that product around any patent that pre-exist and make it more efficiently from a different approach. And so your only defense is no longer patents. It's continuous innovation. You've got to be continually re-innovating.
Starting point is 00:37:55 yourself. I think for what that for what it's worth that that's sort of a nonsensical argument because we're also going to have an army of AI patent litigators to defend all those points. God, great. No, no, but Peter, I think you're making a really important point. I'll go back to the CRISPR thing, right? They spend years fighting over who invented CRISPR, Jennifer versus the other folks. And they finally got through it all, resolved it all. And then by that time, they'd found four other ways of pathways. And I think it was nine other pathways of getting the same outcome, but not using that IP. So I think that's the part that's going to break lots of other things. Well, again, AI entering our world. I think there's very soon a period of time where every
Starting point is 00:38:36 Nobel Prize is being done in partnership with AI, not that they're being recognized. All right, let's jump into where the rubber hits the road. I want to talk about jobs and the economy, a lot of interesting news here. The first is a study by McKinsey on how AI is reshaping skills and work by 2030, saying that AI can automate already 57% of current U.S. work. And the goal here is shifting, not eliminating roles. And the demand for AI fluency has grown 7X in two years. It's the fastest rising skill in the U.S. And finally, that we're going to see $2.9 trillion in economic gains by 2030 as a result of this. Alex, want to kick off the conversation? Yeah, I tell people who ask me for career advice to make sure that their skills and their work goals are aligned with an intelligence explosion.
Starting point is 00:39:32 In other words, to accelerate it and make sure that intelligence, superintelligence is evenly distributed. I think the exact wrong thing to do, as we were just discussing, is to not align your work with the boundaries and the vectors of this explosion. worst case, to try to slow it down. And I think that's being reflected already in automation. If you're in an industry and if you're a mathematician and you're concerned that all of your work is about to be automated, why do anything, you're facing your moment of on-wee, you're staring down the weight equation, what's the point of anything?
Starting point is 00:40:11 What you should be working on, I would argue, is AI for solving math. And maybe it's time to jump up a layer of abstraction and supervise a fleet of AI agents that are automating your, former field. Yeah, I love that. Well, I think, Peter, I think to me, the AI fluency, what is the really mean? Because you never really interact with AI. You really interact with an application that's built on top of AI.
Starting point is 00:40:35 And those tools are constantly changing. So really developing AI fluency has really no meaning as such, because those tools are going to be constantly changing and becoming more and more different in advance. So I really think learning to learn really becomes the trick here. How do you actually have a way to encourage and educate children where they constantly becomes lifelong learner? And knowing that intelligence is going to be the capabilities to learn, not the knowledge you have.
Starting point is 00:41:08 So the whole thing has to shift from knowledge to our capability to learn. Yeah. And we talked about continuous learning in AIs as well. I've often tweeted at MIT and Harvard, my universities of. history, that you've got to change. The idea of being admitted for a four-year degree is crazy. You should be admitted for a lifelong learning. You're a member of a student body for life. That works really well until we have BCIs in a few years and can do high band with downloads and side loads of new information and don't need traditional universities. I can't wait.
Starting point is 00:41:44 Well, listen, the universities are going to, you know, sublimate very shortly. I would make the two points here. One is that for the education side, that we're moving from the supply side where you learned engineering, math, accounting, and then trying to sell it in the job marketplace. And we're moving to the demand side where you pick your massive transformative purpose and your big way you want to solve and then go acquire the skills that you need to solve that problem. So that's one big shift. I do want to call BS on one thing in this chart, which is that $2.9 trillion economic gain. That all sounds wonderful, except they're not talking about the demonetization that has taken. taking place radically across the board, which I think dwarfs that too.
Starting point is 00:42:24 Yeah, it's McKinsey. Yes, on big chunks of this. But can you double click on what that means because it's important for folks to understand this? Yeah, so for example, there's an innovation out there called Wellways which may solve breast cancer because we can detect breast cancer. It stays zero now, okay? We spend half a million dollars per person on average in the West treating breast cancer, somebody that's gotten breast cancer. in breast cancer. If you've solved breast cancer, GDP drops, even though you solve no major problem, GDP dropped. This is why EMOD talks about whoever the fellow that created GDP
Starting point is 00:42:59 said it's the worst form of, worst measurement of the economy possible. Because as we increase efficiency, GDP actually drops. I use the example of that $1,000 TV that's only worth, can only be sold for $500 a year later and $250 or year after that. Those are all drops in GDP. And so we're missing that unbelievable hollowing out of all of the work that's going to be done. And that 57% of U.S. work that's being automated is going to decimate GDP. So that's the part to take into account as well as looking at the upside. I thought you're going to say something different, Salim. I thought you're going to say the fact that $100 by 2030 buys you so much more capability than $100 does today.
Starting point is 00:43:43 Right. It buys you. That's all built into the same thing, right? It's all built in because the amount of stuff I can do with $100 is a hundred times more than, say, 10 years ago. Even though the dollars deflated, et cetera, the productivity of the $100, I can launch a whole business with $100 today, right? Which I couldn't do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago. All right, well, let's move on to another MIT study. MIT finds that AI can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. workforce.
Starting point is 00:44:14 So MIT found AI can handle jobs tied to about $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care, and HR. I completely believe that, right? Their iceberg index simulates 151 million workers and 32,000 skills to see which tasks AI can now perform. And tech layoffs are just the surface of a 2.2% of exposed wages. Thoughts, Salim? This speaks to what we spoke about in the last slide. Essentially, we're going to see this huge demonetization take place. I don't see anything massively meaningful here,
Starting point is 00:44:53 except that you will automate a lot of tasks. I go back to Eric Brinianne's comment that to do a particular job, you might have 27 tasks, and AM may automate like half of those, but you still have to do half of those. And it also speaks to the middle-to-middle comment that Balaji talks about. I think the big shift will come when we move away from human-centric workflows. So think about the idea that right now, all of our work that we do in any company or any function is human-centric. You go from accounting to fulfillment, you have marketing, of accounting, and you have a person there.
Starting point is 00:45:25 When you have an AI that can rewrite at the rules, you can get rid of all of those people-centric tasks into being functionally-centric. Neveen, what are your thoughts? I think this is slightly different. I think if you, you know, what Satya said a couple of days ago was really meaningful. He says, look, yes, we're going to have AI agent, just like I have. bunch of employees. But I, you know, they go out and do the job because I delegate them. But I still have, they still come back and say, I'm finished this. I'm stuck here. What do I do here? What's my priority? If I do, should I do this or this, right? So point is the humans
Starting point is 00:45:58 is always going to be there irrespective of all the agents and the new agents actually being deployed. It just makes them more productive. It allows them to do more. So I don't believe the jobs are going to go away, it will just allow the same people to be able to do more. You know, this goes back to a couple of pods ago when I was showing the data from FI-9. And this is not just in the U.S., in the tech industry, the notion that there's still a lot of fear around the world of can I find a job and can I afford to live in this future. and the you know I'm out right now actively speaking to people and there's just a tremendous amount of fear around the future for their kids and the future for their ability to survive and
Starting point is 00:46:56 thrive right so that is still very real I'll just mention on that pod I said to our subscribers and listeners you know we would love to get together and have what we call a moonshot gathering, probably in the fall of next year, and to talk about how do we solve these problems, how do we solve these huge problems of fear and uplift society for a man, woman, and child? And I said, if we can get, you know, a thousand moonshot subscribers, we're at like at 850 now. So if you're interested in potentially a moonshot gathering with the moonshot mates, probably in L.A. in the fall of 26, send an email to, Moonshots at DMandis.com.
Starting point is 00:47:41 We'll send you some information. And again, I'm just, you know, right now we're asking, is this of interest to you? If you want to be part of these conversations over a couple of day event, we'd love to have you. So again, just send us an email. We'll send you back some of insurance. If there's an abundance of wine, I'm there. There's an abundance of what? Wine.
Starting point is 00:48:00 Wine. Okay. Your reserve trial. All right. So Moonshots at deamandis.com. All right. Let's move on to our next. article here. Here's a flip side. Claude conversation suggests AI could double U.S.
Starting point is 00:48:14 productivity growth. So an analysis of 1,000 chats, 100,000 chats found tasks without AI took an average of 90 minutes. And Claude helped cut the time by 80% on the average task, with healthcare being cut up to 90%. And being in the healthcare industry, I know this to be the fact, right? Is so much that can be improved on every aspect of the, it's not health care, it's sick care, right? So let's just be very clear. Claude could help, you know, cut average task length by 90% in the sick care industry. So what this means is you can get a procedure or some task done for like a tenth of the cost, right? That's the demonization we're talking about. It is. And when you bring in, you know, intelligent, you know, humanoid robots, you're going to
Starting point is 00:49:08 start to get medical procedures done at a tenth of the cost. Can I give a personal anecdote here? Please. I have a big screen TV that just went blank on it. And so I went into Chachi PT and Gemini, and I said, my TV is not working. And here's the model number. And it said, is it making a buzzing sound? And I was like, what?
Starting point is 00:49:31 So I listened. It was making a buzzing sound. And I said, yes. And it said, is it making a buzzing sound every for two seconds, space by seven times in a row and I was like yeah and it said there's a diode on the powerboard that's gone bad and and here's how you fix it now this is mind-boggling because that would have taken hours and hours and hours that take the TV apart guess of the hundred things to figure out carry the whole damn TV into the into the repair shop to figure out what the hell's going on or do you
Starting point is 00:50:00 even just chucked the TV and I could go in there the guy soldered a new diode for me and it was back to scratch. That, I think, is the kind of thing that we're going to see hundreds of times over in all sorts of... In health care as well, yeah. And in health care, 10 times over. Wow. Wow. But I think the health care cost has anything to do with what people charge. I really don't think this will change how much money we spend on health care. It's not really the cost issue. It's not about how much money you spend. It is primarily driven by litigation, and that's not going to change. Ah, fascinating. Well, I mean, it can change just not easily. Yes. My expectation for what it's worth is that the Jevin's paradox is going to strike yet again. And just as a reminder, the Jevin's paradox is that as the efficiency of a good or service increases, it's often the case that overall demand increases even more. I think whether it's with health care or with television repair or just service economy tasks in general, I'm finding anecdotally and seeing more generally as productivity skyrockets thanks to these tools, you take on more tasks.
Starting point is 00:51:05 You take on more projects rather than taking a two-day weekend and turning that into like a four-day work week. The exact opposite is happening. We're doing far more with less. Yeah. Our multiplexing lives are just going hyper exponential. I think this is a key point. Like, for example, we talk about automating software writing. And I think we'll just end up writing 10 times more software because there's not yet to be done.
Starting point is 00:51:29 Right? And lots of slop, of course. But how many hundreds of thousands of things do we want to keep automating? And we were at the very, very beginning of all of that. Yeah. In the economy, here's a fun conversation, an interesting article. Some New Yorkers are getting $12,000 in crypto. It's a basic income style pilot by Coinbase.
Starting point is 00:51:50 So 160 New Yorkers in the Bronx and East Harlem are getting 12 U.S.D.C. or 12,000 USDC. Right. And we had Jeremy Aller on this pod, the CEO of Circle. as part of a basic income pilot. It's funded by Coinbase. Each participant receives $800 a month, again in USDA for five months, plus an $8,000 lump sum. And the program is testing whether crypto payments are useful or perceived differently
Starting point is 00:52:21 in low-income communities. Gentlemen, who wants to jump in? I think I love the idea they're running this, because the more data and the more UBI-type pilots rerun, the better. We've seen profound positive results when you truly run a UBI, meaning it's truly universal, it's truly basic, and it's, and it's basically just given the income to the people. In this particular case, I think there's going to be a huge age demographic split between young people going, yeah, I'll use the damn crypto and the older folks going with that thing. Give it to the kids, and they'll figure it up. I'll comment on this story as well.
Starting point is 00:52:57 Critically, this is not a UBI. This is a GBI, which is a guaranteed basic income, that restricts the targets of the recipients to certain economic demographics. So it's not universal. It's just basically for those who need it, according to some definition of need, to bring them up to some floor. I think what this represents is we're seeing an evolution. There were a variety of trials of, call it first or second generation UBI. Some of those succeeded. Some of those arguably did not succeed.
Starting point is 00:53:30 I think it's very helpful that we're seeing innovation and iteration and evolution of, call it post-economic paradigms like this. I'm still a big fan of universal basic services and universal basic equity, not just basic income guaranteed or otherwise. But I think we should expect to see many more iterations, trials, evolutions like this before we finally figure out what it looks like to live in an abundant economy. Yeah, we had this an X-Prize at this year's Visioneering. Salim was there.
Starting point is 00:54:03 Neveen, I'm sorry you weren't able to make it this year, but the prize that won visioneering this year, it was called the Abundance X-Prize. Two of my Abundance 360 members pitched it, proposed it, and won. And it's for universal basic services. The idea is, can you provide for a flat fee of $200,000? $150 a month, housing, food, water, energy, and bandwidth, right? That's the goal. And I love the idea because if a family has a roof over their head and guaranteed food and bandwidth and energy,
Starting point is 00:54:44 they can start thinking about their future. They can start thinking about how they become an entrepreneur. What do they do? How do they upskill themselves? But if you're a mom or dad fighting to put food in your kids' mouths. Nothing else matters. This was so exciting to see because it's the first time we've also moved away from the hard technology stuff to more of the social contract. And the biggest problem in the world is that what's happening as we move this massive transformation is the old social contract is absolutely breaking. Yeah, for sure. And we need to recreate some new model. And some model that covers the bottom couple of layers of Maso's hierarchy is just going to be unbelievable for the
Starting point is 00:55:24 world. Yeah, we want to make this a $50 million prize. I had my first conversation with a friend who's a multi-billionaire, not in the U.S., who said he's open to funding it. So I'm looking for funders. If you're listening and you want to fund this abundance X prize, please let us know. Okay. This may have a bigger impact than any other prize we've ever done. I agree. I mean, again, going back to the potential moonshot gathering, we might have. it's there's a lot of fear out there in the world and there's fear about how do I navigate in this future of of AI disruption and if people have a safety you know a foundation that enables them to feel safe and then they can start to learn and go forward it reduces the fear significantly and that's the goal
Starting point is 00:56:21 And if you can tell people that, look, there's a line of sight to basic needs being covered for $250 a month, everybody kind of breathe a huge sigh of relief and you take away that angst that's there. Right? Today, one of their family members gets six. The whole family goes bankrupt. It's unbelievable today. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specials.
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Starting point is 00:57:30 pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5X your engineering velocity, visit blitzie.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. Next article here is NASDAQ pledges swift push for SEC approval of tokenized stocks. So tokens would have the same rights and protections
Starting point is 00:57:55 as normal stocks, including dividends and voting. The move is meant to modernize rather than disrupt. NASDAQ considers itself an evolution and trading. And tokenized stocks would be digital versions of regular shares on the blockchain. Nevin, how do you think about trading 24-7? Are you excited about this? First of all right, it's already happening.
Starting point is 00:58:18 I mean, most of the stocks are trading, 24-7 anyway in different markets. Obviously, you know, if you look at bitcoins and others, they trade 24-7. And so it is not a massive change that, you know, call them tokenization, but things like I-shares. I mean, I-shares has been around for a long time. People have looked at how do you buy a partial shares. So, yes, it is a small incremental thing by putting on a blockchain, but really the idea
Starting point is 00:58:46 of buying partial shares have been around. people have broken the shares into dividend shares or the growth shares. So, I mean, there are many, many ways of owning a share, and this is just yet another way of doing it. Alex or Saleem, you want to lean in? Yeah, I'll comment on this one, if I may. When we spoke with Tolly a number of episodes ago about Solana, we talked about how increasing the efficiency of financial services was maybe the killer app of crypto, maybe the only killer app. at the moment, I wish there were more compelling killer apps besides that. And I view this step by NASDAQ. This is iterative. It's a foundational step, but a step, I think, in a very
Starting point is 00:59:30 positive direction. It does not critically give us 24-7 trading as much as I would like that yet. But it could be an enabler if the SEC approved 24-7 trading down the road. It could be an enabler for fractional tokenized shares. You see, that's what... enabler yeah that's what i like right and the idea of i can own a fraction uh of a particular you know share and then a fraction of a particular piece of real estate uh and then tokenized assets and then add to that you know uh you know agents trading and you get an explosion in the economy today you can do that with a single stock ETF so you can buy a partial shares you can buy fractional shares you can buy whole bunch of things similarly to
Starting point is 01:00:16 day. So yes, I just say it's an incremental and it's an enabler, as Alex rightly pointed so, rather than a big, massive change here. Yeah, for me, I'm with Navine. This is like incremental and it seems like modernization with regulatory blessing rather than anything monster. But it's definitely a step in the right direction. Thank God. Okay. All right. Our next segment here is titled Elon and How to Solve the U.S. debt crisis. take a listen to the video as long as civilization keeps advancing we we will have a i and robotics at very large scale um the uh i think that that's pretty much the only thing that's going to solve for the u.s debt crisis you know because currently the u.s debt is insanely
Starting point is 01:01:11 high and the interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget out of the United States, just the interest payments. And that's, at least in the short term, going to continue to increase. So I think actually the only thing that can solve for the debt situation is AI and Robotics. Fascinating. I believe that AI and robotics are going to basically light,
Starting point is 01:01:42 in a positive fashion, the economy on fire. I disagreed in saying, You know, I've had this conversation with Elon. And by the way, I'm in texting back and forth right now to get him scheduled to come on the pod. So that will be a fun episode. We have a lot of amazing people coming up on the podcast. We've got Mustafa Salomon coming up next week, who's the CEO of Microsoft AI. We've got Ray Kurzweil coming up, Kathy Woods coming up.
Starting point is 01:02:07 So a lot of fun conversations and not looking forward to getting Elon scheduled. But I was saying was, you know, another thing that can solve the debt is, is actually extending the health span of individuals. If you could add two, three, four, five healthy years on people's lives, that would massively transform any country's debt position. I have issues here. OK.
Starting point is 01:02:35 The, you know, trying to solve the problem. The problem is the underlying Fiat currency structure is flawed. If we have increased productivity, my fear is it just gives governments, oh, we can spend more, and they'll just start spending more or printing more money, which is what they've done repeatedly in the past. You have to break that problem first,
Starting point is 01:02:55 and Bitcoin is the only model that does that. So I don't know how you solve for that problem because you can't solve for the unbelievable ability of governments when given a little bit of rope to spread their per more money. Alex, how do you come out? I'll maybe comment on that one. I am reticent to assert that any fundamentally deflationary cryptocurrency is the solution to a macroeconomic debt crisis. I think at best part of the solution, I don't think it's the whole story.
Starting point is 01:03:31 I do buy the thesis that economic hypergrowth, growth in general, there's the aphorism, growth cures all woes or almost all woes. I do think economic hypergrowth that stems from AI and automation can solve the so-called debt crisis, but I also think it can solve many other things. I think there's a debate raging right now in the reinforcement learning and machine learning community as to whether some of the hardest problems, like curing all disease. Can we cure all disease with AI right now, or does the economy need to be much larger in order for us to be able to cure all disease. I think if we find ourselves in a future
Starting point is 01:04:11 where we've experienced economic hypergrowth due to AI over the next three plus years, it's not just the debt crisis that we'd be talking about solving. It's just about every other human problem as well that would be on the table. Neveen, where do you come out on this? I mean, from my perspective,
Starting point is 01:04:26 first thing is that, you know, obviously economy growth gives you more revenue, but you have to fundamentally solve the problem of balanced budget until we get to a point where actually like every single person in their home, they have to have a balanced budget. Every state have to have a balanced budget.
Starting point is 01:04:44 Federal government is really the only place where we don't have a balanced budget. So that's, once we start to look at, we can't spend more than what we earn. And as we earn more, we have to pay back the debt before we start spending it. That we have to say that as the economic growth happens, selling to your point,
Starting point is 01:05:02 we have to say 90% of that is going to go towards paying the debt back, and unless our debt is back to zero, we're not going to spend it. So balanced budget, using the economic growth that is going to come through AI and robotics to pay back the debt before we start spending it is really the only way we can solve this crisis. Somebody must be modeling all this out somewhere, because it can't be that hard to model out. Well, I think EMA has been playing with it. Economic growth by economic increase from AI versus the deflationary versus the money printing versus the debt payback schedule.
Starting point is 01:05:35 We've talked in the past on the pot about how the Dallas Fed is already modeling the singularity. So it's not like these discussions aren't being held in either regulatory circles or macroeconomic circles. I think really to the extent debt is just borrowing from the future. No one is super confident right now what the future trajectory looks like. Do we solve all problems in the next three to five years? In which case, yeah, sure, borrow from infinity. That's great. Or does it take longer?
Starting point is 01:06:02 I just to remind the viewers, the Dallas Fed said realistically could be like this if we have a good singularity is vertical and if the bad singularity is vertical. The other way, there was really, it was kind of like binary. At least it was on the graph. If you borrow from positive infinity, don't borrow from negative infinity is the resolution here. All right. Let's move on. I have some news.
Starting point is 01:06:28 I want to share with my moonshot mates here and everyone on. the pod. My next book is coming out. It's called We Are as Gods. It's coming out in April of 26. It's called We Are As Gods, a survival guide for the Age of Abundance. Once again, I've co-authored this with Stephen Kotler, who's an amazing, amazing writer. And this book is the sequel to abundance that came out in 2012. And it's much, much more than that. It's, you know, for me, This is a guide on how to survive and thrive in the decade ahead. And my message is to get, my goal is to get this message out as far and wide as possible. And if you've ever written a book, you probably know that bestsellers don't just happen.
Starting point is 01:07:16 They're engineered. And it's all about the Amazon algorithms. And it's crazy. But I would love your help if you're willing. So I need to hit 500 books sold in December four months ahead of the book release in order to make the algorithms work. And so I wanted to extend a special offer. If anyone here wants to go to purchase one of these books now, we'll give you, Steve and I will hold a private 90-minute AMA answering any questions on any of these subjects, on AI and mindsets and humanity. future. Also, if you buy two books, we're going to give you 140 abundance charts. So I have a
Starting point is 01:08:03 collection of the most amazing charts showing the upside of abundance, the downside of abundance, all the exponential technologies. Anyway, if you want to join the team and help us with this pre-launch campaign, help me rocket this into the stratosphere. I would be grateful. You can go to deamandis.com slash book and join this pre-launch this pre-launch effort. So let me just say off the top, thank you for considering it. We're going to have the 90-minute AMA towards the end of December, probably December 17th to 22nd, and it'll be a lot of fun. So join me if you can, deemadness.com slash book, and we'll put the link below as well. All right. Let's talk about energy, gentlemen, shall we? This was amazing. Check this out.
Starting point is 01:08:53 Microsoft's Fairwater facility to use more power than Los Angeles by late 2027. Who wants to jump in on this one? I mean, AI is sucking up electrons. I'll comment that the multi-trillion dollar question in CAPX is whether coherent superclusters will keep increasing in size. We don't know the answer to that yet. It is entirely possible that we'll see a peak in terms of the size or the energy footprint of coherent training clusters sometime soon. Maybe shortly after late 2027, we'll look back and say, gosh, that was the peak. And hereafter advances in distributed training algorithms mean that we can spread the wealth, spread the energy footprint of training runs across the entire surface of the planet or in low Earth orbit, perhaps.
Starting point is 01:09:49 and we'll say, now, naive extrapolation called for larger and larger clusters, but actually that's not what happened, and we didn't need black hole supercomputers after all. I don't think we know the answer to that question. I think it's going to be almost entirely dictated by algorithmic advances in distributed training. Interesting.
Starting point is 01:10:09 I'm staggered by how big this thing must be. I mean, how much of Wisconsin is this thing covering would be an interesting question. Well, it's basically two and a half nuclear power plants, right? And that's the way I think about it. And I think, Peter, I think the two things are going to happen. Obviously, either we don't need that many bigger clusters, Alex pointed out. Secondly, I really think some of the fusion stuff that I think we may have talked about in the past,
Starting point is 01:10:33 but I was just at Helion last month. And I really think they're already digging up the things for Microsoft Data Center in the state of Washington, where I think they're going to have a positive fusion reactor for Microsoft in 2027. And I really think at this point they're so close because of how they're using the capacitors and supercapacitors in terms of to be able to recapture 95% of the pulse that they sent to the fusion reactor. So I really think this is a good problem could be a modular fusion reactors and, you know, I think this problem can be solved. Yeah. Well, it's, we're going to start to see communities who are saying no data center in my backyard because they're concerned about the. the price of energy going up. I just want to do a shout out again to Google and Nanobanana.
Starting point is 01:11:23 This, by the way, this graphic that you're seeing, if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, when Gianluca on my team first put this up was really faint, really difficult to read, I took a screenshot of the image and fed it to Nanobanana. I said, make the lines darker, thicker, make all the characters readable, and it generated this perfect. So it's just so simple. And over, over the Thanksgiving break, I was at my mom's house in Boca, and I went around and I photographed all the old photographs, they're like 100 years old that are black and white and crinkly and fuzzy, and I fed them all into Nana Banana, and it did an amazing job of making them crisp or modernizing them or colorizing them. A lot of fun. So at least the electrons are going for something
Starting point is 01:12:11 good and useful. All right. Absolutely. I like this one. I know you would, Salim, so XAI plans to build 88 acres of solar panels around Memphis Data Center. So this is 88 acres of solar farms, right? 30 megawatts, only 10% of the site's power demand, but still a nice move. I mean, you have to remember that Elon started Solar City with his cousin. That was then acquired by Tesla. And so, you know, solar has been a focus for him. Saleem, do you want to go more data centers, more solar?
Starting point is 01:12:53 Well, I think solar is just the most, you know, we have to remember that solar is an exponential technology. It's doubling every 22 months in its price performance. It's been doing that for 40 years. So every couple of years, we double the price performance of solar. It scales, and therefore this is very, very exciting. Yep. Neveen, anything you want to add? I mean, I think I'm simply going to add, I think solar is good, but I really think the nuclear and fusion is where the future is going to be.
Starting point is 01:13:23 You know, the challenge I have with that, listen, I agree, but when I look at the articles on nuclear, on generation three and four nuclear and small modular reactors and fusion, it all looks like five and ten year timelines. and, you know, China is deploying solar, you know, 10x faster than we are. What do you think about this, Alex? I don't think nuclear is really the problem in terms of us not be able to build safe nuclear reactor. We have been using them in aircraft carriers and with no incidents at all. Sure. We know how to build a small nuclear reactor. It's permitting.
Starting point is 01:14:05 It's all regulations. Yeah. Yeah, it's all regulations. Agreed. And, you know, the question is, when is the government going to change that? Well, but the problem is we have two problems. One is that it, for us to move fully to solar, you have to cover the baseload because solar is scaling will be a long time before it gets to the level where it covers all of our
Starting point is 01:14:25 electricity needs. So that base load problem is where we need nuclear fusion. The problem is it's going to take several years to build a nuclear and definitely for fusion. Yeah. Remember also solar and fusion are the same energy source. We get solar power from fusion in the sun. So it's really a question, if we're going to put solar on one hand and fusion, on the other hand, where is the fusion taking place? Do we want it taking place at the center of our solar system, or do we want it taking place at a number of locations on the Earth's surface?
Starting point is 01:14:54 And I think there is an argument to be made that for certain purposes, you want a very large fusion reactor, like for really large training runs that require large power sources that are locally available, and for certain purposes, you want distributed fusion. So I can see an argument, you know, projecting out 10, 15 years when perhaps we get our solar Dyson swarm as naively extrapolating seems like we're on that trajectory, regardless of whether you like it or not, we're on that trajectory naively, where we're going to get both. We're going to get lots of solar-based fusion and also we'll get lots of land and low-earth-orbit-based fusion and they'll coexist. We'll discuss disassembling the moon in a little bit. Okay. All right. Let's jump into health and a topic that Naveen and I both dearly love and spend a lot of our time on. And we're going to start Naveen with Viome. You know, again, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I love having you on our board at Singularity and XPRIZ. But day to day, you run Viome. And we have two articles. I'd love you to comment on so folks understand what it is if Iome does. Jump in on this. one. Well, I think, Peter, more than just what Viome does, I think what I find really, really fascinating is this is the first time in the human history where we are starting to see what
Starting point is 01:16:18 is it at a molecular level that is changing inside the human body, that we have been measuring for so long. So we have had this standard lab test that says your cholesterol is high, and the only solution has been take statin, right? But nobody has ever looked at it and saying, what is causing this cholesterol to go high. Is it your gut microbiome is really converting, you know, the oscillobacter, is it actually converting the dietary cholesterol into copper esterone, which essentially doesn't get absorbed? So you have a low cholesterol. Can we do that? Can we actually change from bile acid to secondary bile acid? Can we increase the short chain fatty acids? And by simply understanding exactly what is a root cause for you specifically that causing the high cholesterol,
Starting point is 01:17:08 we can come up with a very personalized solution rather than a one size fits all. And that's really the key is to understanding for each individual what is going on inside their body so we can come up with a solution that works for them. Got it. there's a a second one i'd love you to cover if you would um which is uh you know not something most people think about but what is the root cause of constipation but it's really interesting peter that we may not think about it often but there's 15% of our population in the united states suffer from ibs and they are mostly constipation this is a big problem right now
Starting point is 01:17:56 Most of the times, you people have constipation, doctors will take lexative. Lexative doesn't cure constipation. It simply relieves the symptom of the constipation, but you still have constipation. And, you know, again, looking at from the biological perspective, what we found, having Peter now, I don't know if I told you or not, we have now analyzed 1.5 million tests, and we have analyze over 400 quadrillion biological data point. And what we saw was that constipation can be caused by many, many different things. For example, in some people, it was caused by having high methane gas production because we know the methane gas slows down the motility of the
Starting point is 01:18:42 gut. It could be the low serotonin production. It could be the short chain fatty acid. It could be the bile acid, right? So it could be many, many different reasons by looking at what each individual has, we were able to identify what was causing the constipation for them and give them a personalized nutrition of the food and supplements. And we actually did a blinded placebo controlled study that showed in 90 days, 64% of the people who are constipation with the personalized nutrition and supplement, they became healthy compared to 10% on placebo. Cibo. So not only we can identify what's happening. Yeah. And that's my point, Peter. For the first time, not only we can identify why it is, what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do about it for you. I mean, most people, you know, it's interesting, right? It's only the last four or five years, maybe in the last three years that your micro, that the microbiome has been identified to correlate with so many different, you know,
Starting point is 01:19:49 health failure modes. You know, people need to realize your collection of 40 trillion human cells and something on the order of 100 trillion other life forms, bacteria, virois. Yes, fungi and such. An outer wear for bacteria.
Starting point is 01:20:07 Yeah, well, the human being is simply a mechanism for carrying bacteria around the planet. Good question for, Davin. Yeah, Alex, go ahead. Quick question for Navine. And how do we get more refereed, published studies into the space? Like for hyper-cholestrolenia, for example, on the previous note, like, is there a peer-reviewed published study that we can point to?
Starting point is 01:20:33 Yes. So there is a BMCGI, which is just article, we just published on a peer-review journal, which is one of the most prestigious GI journal. And we actually showed that we can identify by looking at your gut microbiome, exactly what is causing, for example, constipation or what is causing the hyper-cholostrolia. So we actually are able to identify and publish these people. And this is, by the way, not N of 20 or N of 50.
Starting point is 01:20:59 There was an N of 86,750 people. It sounds very exciting. So how do we do this at scale? So if there really is artisanal progress being made on hypercholestrolemia or constipation, and how do we, to the extent that microbiome is a gating factor for a wide variety of diseases, how do you just like solve all of the microbiome gated diseases at once rather than doing this individually?
Starting point is 01:21:26 And again, so two things is that even though it is, the underlying reasons for each individual is very, very different. So it can be a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas the healthcare demands one-size-fits-all approach. and what we're finding is the underlying reason for the same symptom is very, very different. That means for some people, the high cholesterol is being caused by high secondary bile acid or some people it's being caused by a completely different reason. So you have to really look at the underlying reason, and that's the reason it has to be hyper-personalized rather than one-size-fits-all.
Starting point is 01:22:05 And the second thing is, in our current healthcare system, as Peter very well knows, It is really, is not designed. Everyone in the healthcare system, this is the only industry where healthcare system is the only industry where they make money when their customer is unhappy and they stop making money when the customer becomes happy. I mean, there's no other industry, right? So it's not designed to keep you happy.
Starting point is 01:22:31 They want to actually solve the symptom of the problem so you become a lifelong customer. And by the way, you can't use nutrition as a mechanism to solve it because then if they call it a drug and then you have to wait for 20 years before the drug comes out. Yeah. And I remember interviewing the head of Google Health at a conference once and I said, I'm Canadian, please explain the U.S. healthcare system. And to your point of it, he said, it's the whole health care system here is designed to get you sick, keep you sick as long as possible without killing you. And I was shocked as a Canadian, but the whole audience about
Starting point is 01:23:04 500 people are like, yeah, that's about right. That's right. Just unreal. If I might ask just one One more question, Nevin. If you project out forward past the difficulties of the present healthcare system, and you had to outline what do you think is the shape of the final solution for microbiome health banishment. Does it look like fecal transplants? Does it look like purely dietary interventions?
Starting point is 01:23:27 What is with 24th century technology? What is like the fully realized solution for microbiome health? So I think the idea of a microbiome being a one single organ or the set of species or ecosystem is completely fundamentally wrong. And this is really where I think the biggest change we saw that everyone else was looking at microbiome as a set of species or strains of species that are out there.
Starting point is 01:23:54 And what we focused on the functional. So what they do is what matters, not who they are. That means same organisms can do something good in one environment and the same organism can produce something toxic in a different environment. So looking at the functional microbiome, and once you know what functions they are performing or not performing, then providing the right set of substrate, and the substrate can come from food, supplement, or drug, but that is really the key, is to understanding what is going on functionally and then providing the intervention, the substrate that can come from food or
Starting point is 01:24:30 supplements to actually modulate them. And Peter, you know, I, as you know, I'm not the scientist or a doctor, but the fact is This has become a really a technology, data and AI problem. Yeah, well, you've built it quite an AI team and a massive data collection platform, and which is where the insights are coming and continuing. And we have a lot to cover. So I'm going to continue on, if it's right with everybody. I found this fascinating.
Starting point is 01:25:00 David Sinclair, which many people on this podcast have financially supported as part of Friends at Sinclair Lab, was just granted a patent, patent number 12,000, 274-733 for cellular reprogramming method using the oct-4, KL4, SOX2, and not the cancer-ca-ca-ca-ca-factors to safely reverse epigenic aging markers without driving them all the way back to pluripotin stem cells. So this is his work in partial epigenic. re-programming. His company life biosciences, which has rights to these patents and this work, have gotten FDA approval, and they're entering human trials in the first quarter of 26. This is the first time we're going to see a epigenetic or partial epiagnetic reprogramming in humans.
Starting point is 01:25:58 It's just completed its non-human primate work. So fascinating. I hit a couple of articles. We can talk about all of them together. This is another interesting idea. Researchers sequenced 100 cells from 74-year-old man, finding major genetic differences between cells. So it's the idea that, you know, we kind of think that the genome in all of our cells in our 40 trillion cells is the same. Well, apparently that's not the case.
Starting point is 01:26:28 And one more, I'll stop with that. So any comments on these two? I remember first hearing the singularity university years ago, and it just blew my mind. We all had this conception that every cell in our body has the same DNA, and the expression of it is what varies. And now we find that's not a reliable thing either, and where do we get it, some reliable footprint of identity? Yeah. I'll comment on this story. So this is an effect called mosaicism.
Starting point is 01:26:58 You're a mosaic. You're not a single genome. It's actually really difficult at the moment. Here we are stuck in 2025 to sequence the DNA from individual cells. And there's a recent invention called primary template-directed amplification. You may have learned about PCR polymerase chain reaction. This is a more sophisticated version of PCR that's now made it very recently, like past couple of years, easy to read to sequence DNA from individual cells with low error rates.
Starting point is 01:27:30 So now this is like this big unlock enabling us to sequence lots of individual cells from all over the body. And what's the first thing that we discover that the DNA is actually, in many cases, wildly different in different parts of the body. So this has the potential to unlock cures for cancer. Cancer, that's a function of high mutation rates in somatic cells, could unlock cures for heart disease. In some cases, cardiovascular disease is caused by change or loss in the white chromosome. I think this is a big unlock for health care. Yeah. Fascinating. All right, going to back to MIT.
Starting point is 01:28:05 This is a friend, De Blina Sarkar. She runs a lab at the MIT Media Lab. And I heard about this when we visited her. We had, this is about three years ago during one of the abundance longevity trips. And she unveiled this, but under wraps. It's finally come out. and she's created a non-surgical brain implant by attaching these tiny wireless electronics. I mean, literally like super small etched electronics like you'd get in circuit design to immune cells.
Starting point is 01:28:40 And this cell electronic hybrid can be injected through a vein and it implants itself in deep brain areas, right? The immune cell helps it target specific locations. and then upon implementation, the devices can wirelessly stimulate specific neurons with high precision light. So this is, you know, I've had these conversations with Ray Kerr as well, and again, we'll have Ray on the pod in early January talking about his predictions for the decade ahead. And one of his predictions for the decade ahead is high bandwidth BCI. His expectation is through nanotechnology.
Starting point is 01:29:20 And this is probably the closest. nanotech approach that I've seen. Any comments on it? Is this optogenetics where they have specific neurons? This is very much not optogenetics. It's different, right? It's not genetically engineered neurons. It's just planting.
Starting point is 01:29:40 Optogenetics, you're inducing cells to express rhodopsins to be sensitive to light. If you've seen like Star Trek Voyager, there are episodes with Borg nanoprobes that are shown that are being depicted like attack. matching themselves to cells, this looks far more like Star Trek Voyager Borg nanoprobes than it has optogenetics. Alex, if you turn to the side, people could see the nanoprobe pipe going into your brain. Really? I thought I was just an AI, and this is a generative background. This is the beginnings, I think, of a Moravec procedure.
Starting point is 01:30:13 So Hans Moravec has, before Ray even, laid out this notion that the way we're going to solve human mind uploading is by replacing brain cells, ship of these, style one by one with train simulations. If you look at De Blina's paper in nature biotechnology, it's like really amazing paper. Take a look at the figures. This looks like a scene out of Star Trek Voyager with these photovoltaically sensitive sandwiches that look like coins attached to spherical cells look like the Borg nanoprobes out of Star Trek.
Starting point is 01:30:44 I think it's a very promising direction. Naveen, you ready for the implant? I am absolutely 100% because I really need my brain to be uploaded before I lose it. I just don't want to be first. Okay, well, if you didn't go first, you can go second. So, you know, kudos to Demis Havas and the team at Deep Mind for their Nobel Prize-winning work. So Alpha Fold has revolutionized science in just five years.
Starting point is 01:31:15 Alex, why don't you take this? Yeah, I would say it's remarkable to look back at what the world before AlphaFold one looked like. We were talking a while ago about hyperdeflation and professional hyperdeflation. It used to be the case prior to AlphaFold 1, but certainly prior to AlphaFold 3,
Starting point is 01:31:35 that you'd spend an entire PhD, these poor chumps spending their entire PhD trying to determine the structure of a single protein. Sequencing a single gene. Yes. What a waste retrospectively, at least for those
Starting point is 01:31:49 who were spending PhDs in structural biology, right before the problem right before the whole field got solved by AlphaFold 3, arguably. Now you can just do it overnight, and we saw an entire discipline get solved by AI. So I think AlphaFold 3 in particular is a template for what we're going to see everywhere else. Whole disciplines are just going to get solved. Yeah, the numbers here are impressive, right? So AlphaFold has enabled a database of 240 million protein structures
Starting point is 01:32:17 that have been accessed by 3.3 million users in 190 countries. I remember when I was in medical school, we used to talk about the supercomputing problem of the future is being able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. And we always used to talk about, what would it take? How much computing? When would it be done? And extraordinary that the demo-in-the-team team did it. I think two things here. One is I think this speaks to the incredible ability of AI to solve these what we thought was interactable problems with having to throw
Starting point is 01:32:52 so much compute at it and just solves it. So it goes to Alex's in a loop thing. The second point I'll make is if you've not seen the documentary, the thinking game, which lays out the arc of the timeline of all of this and goes into detail into how they went about doing it, it's just unbelievable, go watch it. Yeah, again, this is the...
Starting point is 01:33:12 Maybe just a post-script on this, if I may, this was also, like, the protein folding problem was supposed to be one of the killer apps for quantum computing and quantum simulation. And AlphaFold, in addition to everything else that it revolutionized, I would say also was a nail in the coffin of many expectations for what the killer app for quantum computing would look like, and we need to find something better. Amazing. I'm going to cover this article very quickly just because it's an important, you know, I talk about that when people go through fountain life, we discover that 3.2%, that's the number based upon the populations. processed have a cancer they don't know about, which is problematic. And it turns out that 70% of the cancers that kill people are not the cancers we routinely test for. So you're not dying from
Starting point is 01:34:05 typically breast or prostate or colon because we can test for those. It's the ones we don't test for. It's pancreatic. It's glioblastoma. It's, you know, ovarian cancers. And a lot of times, you know, I think of pancreatic cancer as a death sentence. So those who have had pancreatic cancer in their family, and it's an important article to hear. So it looks like scientists have developed a one product-fit-all immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. This is out of UCLA.
Starting point is 01:34:41 And you off-the-shelf therapy that can attack pancreatic cancer even after it spreads. Engineered Karr-N-K-T, these are natural killer cells. cells made from donor cells costing only $5,000 per dose, right, which is incredibly small price tag for cancer therapeutic. The cells can, Peter, the only thing I could, I'm sorry, please go ahead. I just say that the cells can reach and infiltrate through tumors in the pancreas, liver, and lungs.
Starting point is 01:35:09 So please, Nevin. I was simply going to say that, Peter, this is so close to home because I lost my dad to stage four pancreatic cancer. And I'm just so, so happy to tell you that in the. the next three months, we are launching a stage one pancreatic cancer test. This is a complete game changer. At Viome. At Viome. Stage one pancreatic cancer test with 94% specificity and 84% sensitive. Amazing. I mean, the best way to cure it is to find it at the beginning. Early testing. Yeah. And Nevin, what other forms of cancer has Viome been able to detect
Starting point is 01:35:46 through the massive data sets you're collecting? So we, you know, we started with oral cancer. throat cancer, and now we have pancreatic cancer, we have the thing for IBD, and we're nice thing is we're just validating a test with the script research for colon polyps, which is seven to ten years before you develop a colon cancer. And I think if we can really look at advanced adenoma, then I think we can absolutely get rid of colon cancer completely. Yeah, I mean, the range of things that you do, I mean, I encourage folks, you know, go to Viome.com, The full body intelligence test is, you know, takes a sample of your blood, your sputum, and stool. And it's incredible what you can learn.
Starting point is 01:36:31 So, and it's, what's the price tag on that? It's not expensive. 279, you have Peter right now. Yeah. For three tests, all three tests. Yeah. Again, another impressive story. I mean, type 1 diabetes is a big deal on the planet.
Starting point is 01:36:49 So a man with type 1 diabetes survived for 12 weeks with no immune suppressing drugs after doctors transplanted gene-edited insulin-producing cells. So this has been the holy grail, right? If you have type 1 diabetes, you've lost your eyelid cells and your pancreas. You're not producing insulin anymore. Can you transplant them back? Well, these cells were edited with CRISPR to hide from the immune system, adding a don't eat me signal from CD-47
Starting point is 01:37:19 and the patient started producing their own insulin. So a lot of, I don't know what the numbers are in terms of the total number of cases of type 1 diabetes. Anybody know offhand? Yeah. All right, another big story. I mean, I love seeing the pace of breakthroughs that we're seeing in health.
Starting point is 01:37:37 Yeah, amazing. It's nice seeing also CRISPR making its way into the clinic, that this is a big victory for CRISPR and hopefully we'll see a lot more crisper for managing transplants. Yeah, amazing. All right, let's go into robotics. A lot of fascinating stories here. This is a fun one.
Starting point is 01:37:56 It's a tweet from Elon. Of course, Elon sort of like has fun with his hyperbolic, hyperbolic tweets here. So here it is, Optimus will be the Von Neumann Probe. And Alex and I laughed about this. you know, von Neumann probes are fun concepts. They're robots that are self-replicating viruses. They go out into the galaxy. They capture materials from asteroids or sometimes moons,
Starting point is 01:38:28 and they build other copies of themselves, and they replicate at an exponential rate. So I love this. I want to joke that the Dyson swarm won't build itself, but maybe it will. You know, we put a book corner in today on this front. I'm going to chat about mine here. So this is a five-book series by Dennis Taylor.
Starting point is 01:38:53 My son, Jett, and I have read this series twice. We absolutely love it. So it's called We Are Legion, We Are Bob. And it opens with the guy who's a tech CEO who signs up for effectively Alcor, right, to cry or preserve your body and brain. He leaves this conference and gets hit by a bus. And it picks up 100 years later where he basically wakes up
Starting point is 01:39:19 and is now an uploaded brain. I won't ruin the story because it's so much beautiful here. And he finds himself as the, basically the brain and operating system on a von Neumann probe heading out of the solar system to go and start
Starting point is 01:39:38 colonizing and getting other soul systems ready for humanity to come join. So amazing series. I love Dennis's writing. And if you love hard science fiction, this is a great book for you. AWG, how about you? Yeah. So my book recommendation for this episode is Understand by Ted Chang. Ted is perhaps better known for the movie Arrival where he wrote the original story behind it but a common theme throughout a lot of his writing is what I would call linguistic singularities ways that we arrive at superintelligence by way of language
Starting point is 01:40:19 one way or another and the consequences there. So understand is the story. It's a short novel of a person who becomes super intelligent as a result of a medical treatment. So if you've seen the movie Limitless or you've seen the movie Lucy, think a little bit along those lines, except that unlike with those movies, we see the world in rich detail through his eyes
Starting point is 01:40:40 as his intelligence increases, as he reorganizes his mind and treats his mind like a software operating system and ultimately encounters other super intelligences. Nice. All right. I've given that nobody reads books anymore, I'll reference back to the documentary I just did the thinking game. It's such an amazing process to follow. and it gives you an inkling as to where things are going,
Starting point is 01:41:04 and it's science fiction, kind of being made real today. Hey, my kids read books. My son reminds me, Dad, you don't read books, you listen to books, which is true. Everything's unaudible these days. I want to jump into the robot world a little bit, in particular in China. And I'm going to hit on a couple of pieces here, then we'll talk about them. So this is the first one, Aggiebot A2. This is a humanoid robot in China
Starting point is 01:41:32 has hit a Guinnessbrook world record by walking 65 miles using hot swappable battery packs, right? This is 175 centimeters, 55 kilograms in weight, advanced GPS and LIDAR, so keep that in your mind. And then I want you to check out this video. I saw it this morning and it blew me away.
Starting point is 01:41:55 It came from the humanoid hub and it's important to realize they specifically state this is all real footage. There's no CGI, there's no AI, there's no video speed up. And this thing is called T-800, which sounds to me like Terminator 800. And after you see this video, I think you'll appreciate it even more. Okay, I mean, it's like it's like, it's like, it's game over. It's like, it's not that. No, no, it's not that.
Starting point is 01:42:54 is that, you know, if you're trying to promote a robot having you doing kickboxing is not the great first thing you want to show. I can't wait to see... I can't wait to see Optimus versus T-800. That's, you know... And by the way, there are a lot of groups getting ready for... Show it drying dishes.
Starting point is 01:43:13 A lot of groups getting ready for unlimited fighting between robots. First of all, if that was not CGI, and I can't guarantee it's not, they stated. It's not. It looked awesome. Neveen, what do you think of that one? I mean, it's awesome, as you say. I think, I don't believe it's not a CGI, but, you know.
Starting point is 01:43:39 It looks pretty unrealistic to me. I mean, just the movements there, right? Yes, yes, yes. It's crazy. Alex, what do you think? There's an entire two-thirds of the surface economy that includes manual physical labor that is just waiting to be automated by humanoid robots.
Starting point is 01:43:59 Even if they have battery lives of only three hours at the moment to need battery replacements or some sort of bucket brigade, this is happening. And we've talked for decades, going back to Asimov, going back to Rossum's universal robots, Rur, the original poignage of robots. This is what we've been talking about for 100 plus years at this point. It's finally happening.
Starting point is 01:44:21 So coming back on the third story here in China, robots are remaking the Chinese economy. China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nine times more than the U.S., and 50% of the world's total industrial robot base. They're automating their factories, and they need to. Their entire economy was based on manufacturing. It's 25% of China's GDP, and check out this quote down at the bottom. which came up when I was doing research here. So it's China's National Development Reform Commission. Spokesperson Li Chow warned of a humanoid robot bubble.
Starting point is 01:45:02 There are now more than 150 humanoid robot companies in China. So we've got AI bubbles and humanoid robot bubbles. Interesting. Any comments on this, guys? The statistic that the manufacturing 25% of their GEOC, GDP and robots are going to be doing most of that is an incredibly amazing number. Well, I find the idea that they put in nine times more than the U.S. an incredibly amazing number. I've made the point in the past that intelligence isn't just going to stay locked up in the data centers.
Starting point is 01:45:37 It's going to walk right out of the data centers. And I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that in China. And we're going to see that increasingly in the U.S. and in the West as well. I agree with Jensen Huang that humanoid robots are one of the next. multi-trillion dollar markets. All right, we've saved a fun conversation before we show you an incredible video outro here. So I'm going to play this.
Starting point is 01:46:04 This is a clip from the promo for Age of Disclosure. We are not alone. How long have you and I been discussing this, Alex? I don't know. It's an interesting question. But I will say the allegations in this documentary are. are extraordinary and maybe happy to comment more after we play the short clip. The American people are ready to receive the truth.
Starting point is 01:46:36 Humanity is not the only intelligence in the universe. Humanity is not the only intelligent species. We are absolutely not alone. Non-human intelligence exists. UAPs are real, they're here, and they're not human. I spent 25 years as a senior of with the CIA. I worked on highly classified UAP program. 28 years as an astrophysicist. I served as the fourth director of national intelligence. Director of Aviation Security and the National Security Council.
Starting point is 01:47:02 The one-star admiral after 32 years of service. People that come forward with this, I feel like they've taken their life in their own hands. Wow. I watched this documentary twice, and I commend it to everybody. I think my personal opinion, is yes, of course, there is other life in the universe and in the galaxy. I think it's naive for us to believe anything less than that, right? We are one of 100 million stars in our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of, at last count, two trillion galaxies in the universe, and there may be an infinite number of universes. And just the notion that we are that special, you know, has been crushed every time by scientific discoveries over the last, you know, a few
Starting point is 01:47:51 thousand years um so uh Alex well I I think the elephant in the room is that the allegations in this documentary go beyond asserting that there is non-human intelligent life elsewhere these are the documentary contains in what I view is incredibly serious allegations by 34 current and former U.S. government officials and contractors that in short that there has been an alleged 80-plus year-long cover-up of aliens, of so-called non-human intelligence or NHI. Of the spaces, of the bodies, of the communications. Of UAP crash retrievals, of recovered bodies on Earth.
Starting point is 01:48:39 And I have so many thoughts regarding the allegations in this documentary, but maybe one more obvious thought, one less obvious thought. The one perhaps more obvious thought is if the allegations, even some substantial fraction of the allegations in this documentary are accurate, then the alleged legacy program, so-called that's been responsible for the alleged cover-up, will perhaps have been responsible for sabotaging 80 years' worth of potential scientific, technological, medical, maybe even ontological advances and setting humanity back almost a century, maybe more,
Starting point is 01:49:20 again, assuming the allegations are in substance accurate, and I think history would judge any such program accordingly for setting back human progress if these allegations are accurate. That's the more obvious comment. The slightly less obvious comment
Starting point is 01:49:36 is, again, assuming the allegations are substantially accurate, superintelligence, which we talk about all the time on the pod, seems to me like it's on an imminent collision course with any so-called non-human intelligence. If there is any non-human intelligence anywhere in the solar system, including on Earth, in the oceans, in low Earth orbit, etc., as alleged by this documentary, then I've mentioned in the past this notion
Starting point is 01:50:06 that given enough superintelligence, any hidden agents become shallow. Superintelligence, AI, it's going to discover this. It's going to unearth any hidden agents anywhere in our solar system. So I don't think it's a tenable state of affairs if the allegations in this documentary are accurate that basically, to caricature the documentary, the documentary tells the story of how humanity is basically drowning in technology that's falling from our sky from non-human intelligence.
Starting point is 01:50:35 If that's accurate, AI is going to blow this, and superintelligence is going to blow this wide open. Yeah, the timing of all this is interesting. The documentary basically says, listen, began, you know, before World War II in the 30s, into the 40s and through today. And it talks about the interplay and the dance between alien visitations and UAPs flying to nuclear silos and disarming and arming nuclear warheads. I mean, it's a fascinating, you know, storyline here. but then what I find equally interesting is the fact that this process of disclosure is beginning now,
Starting point is 01:51:18 like you say, on the precipice of humanity unveiling ASI. Coincidence or not? Like ASI and NHI, if you want to call it, that these seem like they're on a collision course. Is it a predestined collision course if the allegations are accurate? I don't know, but it's, yeah. There's so many good science fiction stories that, you know, it's like, you know, they're here to prevent us from blowing ourselves up. They're here to prevent us from having rogue AI go in the wrong direction. That's the savior modality of these aliens and UAPs, which I'd love to believe.
Starting point is 01:51:58 It does feel, I go ahead, sorry. No, I was going to say, Navin, did you see this at all? I have not seen the movie, but Peter, to me, I just say there's no doubt we are not alone, and we all agree we are not alone. But I think this to me is more like a science fiction than really a reality here. I just absolutely do not believe that any cover-up can last 80 years and especially a cover-up like this. This is something that would have come out long, long ago. I believe this is mostly some people who are delusional or some people who are looking to become famous or some people who just all will say anything to give them a camera.
Starting point is 01:52:34 I, I, if you watch a documentary like I, I have twice, and I think you would change your mind. The, the level of professionalism of these heads, you know, these leaders from the Air Force Navy, you know, Army Marines, Senate, you know, House, Defense Department, their pristine reputations. and what they speak about, and again, they are putting the reputations at risk here. I think it leaves zero doubt for me that it's there. I'll just comment maybe at the meta level. I don't think for a topic as important as these allegations, we should need to rely on hearsay. And this is one of the reasons why I think artificial superintelligence is potentially so transformative. super intelligence, if there are, as alleged, if our solar system is teeming with non-human
Starting point is 01:53:36 intelligence, AI is going to find that, and I would expect it to find it pretty soon. So it may be the case that whereas there have been many allegations over the past decades of such cover-ups, but ultimately they're reduced to hearsay, I would like to see far more scientific approach, and I think the key lever is going to be AI. Yeah. You know, I think what's hilarious is the state of humanity today. These aliens could land on the front lawn of the White House, you know, get on news cameras. And then the next day everybody would say, well, you know, what's my Bitcoin price? And who won the game? You know, we've become so numb to these extraordinary things. But we have. And Sam Altman's also pointed this out that we went from a world without AGI, arguably, to a world with AGI. And yes, it's. it's economically transformative, but you didn't see people sort of riding in the streets or massive, truly massive social disruption. I think if the allegations are accurate, similarly, people will ask, as you say, like, what's next on television?
Starting point is 01:54:42 All right. We're going to close out with this outro music called Dear Moon by David Drinkall. But I want to, you know, the lyrics on this are so incredibly good, David. You did an amazing job. I want to just take a second and read some of the lyrics. It says, oh, dear Moon, you've had it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pile. We're building dice and swarms, and the rent ain't cheap. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep. We'll miss you when you're gone, but the future marches on.
Starting point is 01:55:18 Alex on the podcast with that apocalyptic, apocalyptic. Apocalyptic. Apocalyptic. That's it. Thank you. Alex, with that apocalyptic grin, training wheels are off, folks. Let the real future begin. While Peter's yelling asteroids first, Salim's saving one small piece. Emod's already pricing lunar credits on the lease. Do you want to express your feelings about the moon, Alex? Yes, please. I feel like just for the avoidance of doubt, I have to make a firm, affirmative stance that I'm not anti-moon. Just for avoidance of doubt, it's crazy. We're in 2025, and I have to say that I'm not anti-moon. I'm not anti-solar system. I'm merely observing that naively, if one extrapolates present data center trends, then disassembling the solar system becomes an attractive option, inclusive of disassembling the moon. But I'm not anti-moon, for what it's worth. Well, we appreciate that. We've had a lot of interesting comments about your commentary. And by the way, the current projection, for example, of Elon using mass drivers on the moon to get us to 100 terawatts of year of solar or of data centers doesn't make an appreciable dent in the moon. It still looked the same. But when we get the Dyson swarms, it's going to change. All right. Thank you, David Drinkall, Dear Moon, everybody, enjoy this. It's a beautiful song.
Starting point is 01:56:54 You hung there every evening. Silver coin in the black. Pull the oceans like a lover. Kept the planet on its track. You gave us tides for sailing. Gave the wolves a song to sing. And every teenage heart, a light to sing. We're eternal things Couples parked on hilltops Poets ran out of praise You turned ordinary nights Into extraordinary days
Starting point is 01:57:33 For billions of quiet moments You were perfect, pure and true So thank you, darling moon For everything you do Dear Moon, you've had it coming for a while We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pile We're building dyson swarms and the rain ain't cheap We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers weep
Starting point is 01:58:08 We'll miss you when you're gone But the future march is on The future marches on Oh Oh Oh We'll keep a little fragment Maybe one percent
Starting point is 01:58:28 Or to a crater With a plaque that says We once looked up to you We'll simulate The tides With orbital tugs And rings In VR honeymoon packages
Starting point is 01:58:45 For nostalgic human human beings. Oh dear moon, you've got it coming for a while. We're kind of sorry, but we need you in a pot. We're building dyson swarms and the rain ain't cheap. We'll turn you to solar panels while the lovers we'll miss you when you're gone. But the future march is on. Oh
Starting point is 01:59:17 But the future Mars is on Oh Alex on the podcast With that apocalyptic grin Training wheels are off folks Let the real future begin While Peter's yelling asteroids First Salem's saving one small piece
Starting point is 01:59:45 already pricing lunar credits on the lease oh dear moon you've had it coming for a while we're kind of sorry but we need you in a pile you are beautiful and vital you are poetry and art but the Kardashian-F ladder waits in type 2 must start We'll miss you when you're gone. But the future march is on. Oh, but the future marches on.
Starting point is 02:00:27 Oh, but the future marches on. All right. DB2, Dave, Blondon, we miss you, and Salim, sorry you missed that as well. Neveen, thank you for being a friend of the pod. Always a pleasure, brother. Thank you, brother. Yeah, and Alex, looking forward. We've got a recording on Friday.
Starting point is 02:01:11 We're going to be up with Mustafa Salomon and Steve. Seattle. That'll be fun. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI. And then we've got another WTF episode on Saturday. A lot coming. If you've not subscribed, please do. That way when we drop our episodes, which are becoming more frequent because the speed of this innovation is just skyrocketing. You'll know about it first. Gentlemen, have an amazing week and see you guys soon. 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
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