Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Tech Leaders on Bitcoin, AI, and the New Global Power Shift w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #172

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

In this episode, Salim, Dave, and Peter discuss news coming from Apple, Grok, OpenAI, and more. Recorded on April 3rd, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. ���Dave Blundin is a distinguished serial entrepreneur and has co-founded 23 companies, five of which have exceeded $100 million in revenue. He is currently an instructor at MIT and is the Managing Partner of Link-XPV. Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Learn about Dave’s fund: https://www.linkventures.com/xpv-fund  Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail  Learn more about Abundance360: https://bit.ly/ABUNDANCE360  Learn more about Exponential Mastery: https://bit.ly/exponentialmastery  -- I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod -- I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog -- Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The experts, you speak to everybody in the street, they're expecting that we're about to see a bull run. We've been waiting for a long time for Bitcoin to peel off the tracking of the Dow and the financial markets. And I think this is finally the breaking point. Today, Amazon announced we are partnering with Humane, Saudi Arabia's newly created AI innovation company. NVIDIA is selling 18,000 of its top GV300 Blackwell AI chips to Saudi Arabia. The freedom to just sit back and act, you know, having infinite or near infinite capital and instant decision making is a pretty powerful thing. I think that the macro level, the combination of US innovation and capital coming from the Middle East makes it kind of unbeatable with the future of us. The safest bet by far is to run like hell toward your targets. You'll be very glad you

didn't waste a millisecond between now and 2030. Now that's the moonshot ladies and gentlemen. Everybody welcome to Moonshots and the WTF Just Happened in Tech episode with my Moonshot mates Salim Ismail, the CEO of OpenEXO and my longtime best friend and fraternity brother, the head of Link XPV, Dave Blunden, two of the most extraordinary individuals. And we're here to deliver you the real news that happened this past week. Really the only news that matters in technology that's changing our lives. You give us a couple hours, we'll tell you what just transformed. Salim, Dave, welcome to Moonshots. Good to be here.

Good to be here. Thanks, Peter. Yeah, so Salim, every episode it's like, where's Waldo? You are a traveling probability functioner around the planet. So where have you just come back from? I just came back from Palermo with a canceled flight in Barcelona a day and a half to get back. But it was nice to be back and nice to be there. There's this thing called Zoom where you can actually

go there digitally and dematerialize yourself. This is an important point. We thought when video conferencing came out in the 90s, it would kill the conference business, right? Because you could get all the content online. And as we've evolved digitally, we go to more conferences than ever because we value that human presence.

And you and I both would kill not to have to travel ridiculous distances to speak to groups, but we end up having to do more and more of it. Yeah, well, I don't know. I feel like this podcast has a lot more reach than whatever you're doing on those trips, but... Yeah, it has way more reach. But the problem is that the demand is still like the people kind of go... Yeah.

Yeah. Anywhere. Well, they want you. I know that. I'm even a crazier one. I did this TEDx talk a few years ago called Fixing Civilization. I got called by a company and said, we'd like you to come and do that talk, exactly the same talk. I said, well, why don't you just play the YouTube video? They're like, no, we really want you. I get there and get to the venue and it's literally a TV studio with cameras.

They're broadcasting to their offices. They literally could have just played the TV. I was like, this is insane. So that part I don't understand. But okay, we'll go with that. Well, because it can't be understood. Well, Peter, you shouldn't bug Salim too much. I saw you in New York this week. You're back in LA now. You're going to San Fran and then off to Hong Kong. Yeah, you know, I was supposed to be going to Florida tomorrow and the meeting got canceled

and I was like, yay, I'm so happy. Yeah, pot calling the kettle black. Yeah, by the way, congratulations on New York on Monday. Another very successful X Prize, which, but that was just epic. The way you inspired that crowd is just, that's really something to see. Thank you. We'll talk about that. We just gave out 12 million of the 111 million in our HealthSpan prize, helping people live an extra 20 healthy years.

Salim, it's your birthday coming up this weekend, I think. Isn't that true? I turned 60 in 48 hours. Amazing. 60 down, 180 to go. 180 to go. Exactly. All right. Well, let's, 180 to go. Exactly. All right. Well, let's get into this week. A lot of news, a lot happening in the exponential world and the moonshot world.

And my moonshot mates are here to help me tell the story. Let's begin. Let's start with Bitcoin. A lot of motion. And for those of us who are huge Bitcoin believers, I think all three of us were back into the 100k plus zone. So welcome back everybody. And I think we're poised for new heights. This is interesting. So Mike Seller, who I look forward to having back on the podcast soon, has doubled his

Bitcoin purchasing plan. Dave, Salim, you want to lay this out for the team? Yeah, well, you know, nothing slows down Mike. He's going to stay aggressive doubling down. Like, 21.21 is 21 billion of equity, 21 billion of debt. That's a lot. And 42.42, I think, Salim, you calculated the fraction of all Bitcoin that that implies. It's pretty material fraction that he would need to buy. It's a big number and it's

and he's making a massive bet and the bet seems to be paying off. If you're a macro believer in the future of Bitcoin then the way he's engineering this is about as amazing as you could imagine. Yeah you mentioned last time that there's a pretty big arb spread between the price of Bitcoin and the price of MicroStrategy stock a little less than 2X difference there. On the other hand, MicroStrategy is levered two to one because of the debt component. So if you're a believer, it's actually a levered way to invest, which I think is why it's attracting a lot of people.

Rather, why don't I just go buy a Bitcoin? Well, if you buy a MicroStrategy share, you're levered on the upside. But the people buying the debt are predominantly hedge funds that are buying the debt and then shorting the stock concurrently. So they're making money either way, and that's why there's zero interest on the debt. But the one thing I love about what Mike's done in 2121 and also 4242 is he's gotten rid of all the interest payments. So there's no real existential threat to MicroStrategy anymore.

When he borrowed the money originally, he was financing the debt from the cash flow of their core software company, which had scale limits because he can only pay so much interest. Now on his new design, it's infinitely scalable because there's no interest payments. So it's pretty brilliant. And Mike's making a call to the world to all corporations both private and public To go on the Bitcoin standard and of course the more companies he gets to buy Bitcoin You know the shorter the supply of Bitcoin the higher the price goes the more his plan works

I mean, you know this plan of 42 billion of stock sale and 42 billion of Debt so was that 84 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin being purchased 42 billion of stock sale and 42 billion of debt. So what is that? $84 billion worth of Bitcoin being purchased. That's massive. And of course, he's pushing as well the sovereign Bitcoin reserves. All of this, there's only 21 million Bitcoin. And we discussed this in the last episode or a couple episodes ago that if all the millionaires in the world wanted to buy some Bitcoin it's

they get access to like a fraction of a Bitcoin you know it's not enough to go around and the float is relatively low. Yeah so when we were talking to Mike in in Miami a couple months ago Peter Peter, the one thing that he opened my eyes to is, you know, we're talking about sovereign wealth funds and sovereign, you know, treasuries putting a fraction of their money into Bitcoin. When you looked at the pie chart, as a fraction of global wealth, it's this tiny, tiny, tiny little slice, all Bitcoin combined. And so he doesn't need, you know, every country in the world to move its

treasury to Bitcoin. He needs like 1% of the countries in the world to move 0.1% of their treasuries, and that would absorb all the Bitcoin in the world. So it's actually, it's and drive it to, you know, he's predicting prices, you know, way north of a million north of 10 million per Bitcoin. The number we ran was if 1% of the fortune 1000 put way north of a million, north of 10 million per Bitcoin. The number we ran was if 1% of the Fortune 1000 put 1% of their treasury in Bitcoin,

that would drive it to a million dollars of Bitcoin. Which seems more and more likely, it's so funny, I've been buying Bitcoin along the way and every time I sweep some capital in from the sale of a stock or some deal I did, I'm like, okay, I'm putting into Bitcoin. I am putting a certain percentage in micro strategy as well. This is not investment advice, it's just what I'm doing. And one of my financial team members said, hey, should we wait for it to dip? And I said, you can't do that.

You can't play that game. You have to just buy and hold. If it's 103,000 or 97,000 or goes up to 120,000, just buy it and hold it. You can't try and guess the market because what you see over and over again is that the Bitcoin price will jump like it did last week, seven, eight, $10,000 over the course of 24 hours, and then it's flat for a long time. If you miss those trading days by having selling in and out, then you've lost all the upside potential. I think there's something like 10 days in the year that Bitcoin does 70% of its upside.

Yeah, crazy. So if you miss those 10 days, of course, which 10 days is the challenge? Here's more news. This is from Brian Armstrong. Crypto is about to be in everyone's 401k. My goal is that 5 to 10 years getting into Coin 50 index will feel as good as this. This is a quote from Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, who will also be on this podcast soon enough. Coinbase joined the S&P 500 days after Bitcoin

soared past $100,000. Salim, what are your thoughts here? Finally getting legitimacy. I don't think there's any turning back. I think the macro world and the money world will be forced to kind of start to address this. I was talking to one of the top wealth management folks in a particular country, and they won't let their advisors recommend Bitcoin.

It's crazy. It's crazy. And the advisor going nuts because the client's coming to them and going, I want to buy Bitcoin. And the company won't let them because there's legal liability for them or legal risk as determined by the risk folks. So there's like a complete cluster going on around what they're allowed to do. That pressure will slowly ease as we get more legitimacy into the space. And I think this is great, great news overall. And in the meantime, people buy micro strategies or other companies that are following suit. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Next time we'd circle up on Bitcoin, I'd love to talk more about the agent to agent AI economy. Oh my God.

And micro payments. For sure. Because I think, you know, putting Bitcoin into 401k, I've been working on that thing about that for years. It's clearly getting legitimacy now, but the new thing is the A2A payments and how that whole economy is going to evolve. And that's clearly going to require digital currency. You're not going to transact dollars. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive

news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. Every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at diamandis.com slash subscribe. That's diamandis.com slash subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. David Bailey and BTC native holding company Nakamoto merged into kindly MD to establish

a BTC treasury. Saleem. Well, this just speaks to the fact that, you know, Michael Saylor has been operating on a lone wolf basis. And now other people are going, wait a minute, why is he getting all the upside and the flood here? He's getting a huge chunk of the pie we want in on this. And so I think there'll be start to see more and more of this. I think we'll see a flood of this type of announcement in the next six months as people go, we got to get into this. And it'll be a self-fulfilling strategy because then it drives the price upward all the while.

Dave, are you seeing this in any of your companies? I told you I green lighted them all to do it. And I'm just waiting. The bellwether for me is when they call back and say, hey, Dave, is it still OK if we if we put part of our treasure into Bitcoin? I'm just waiting for that call. You know, the minute it happens. Please do, because that is an inflection point that, you know, we're about to see a price spike.

I mean when my mom says you know should I buy buying bitcoin, but by the way then her financial advisor says you can't do it here, then I say hey buy micro strategies instead. That's right. It's crazy. All right, let's continue on here. This is another piece of that puzzle. On this next slide here corporate bitcoin This is another piece of that puzzle. On this next slide here, corporate Bitcoin purchases now outweigh the supply of new Bitcoin by 3.3 in 2025.

Suleiman, this is what you were speaking to. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's going to start to become mandatory for corporate treasuries. I look forward to the day that somebody will be deemed unworthy of that role if they don't put Bitcoin in the treasury. Ah, fascinating. Yeah, I mean, this is basically saying, you know, we're mining Bitcoin at a certain rate and the availability of that new Bitcoin plus what's available for sale is being outstripped by demand and that will drive the price through the roof for sure. It's really interesting to think about the original protocol document. I don't know if you ever read it, but the years ago, yeah.

And it, you know, it expands the supply pretty aggressively for a period of time. And then it's capped and then it just trickles out with mining after that. And, uh, the amount of foresight in that design is just unbelievable. Everyone, it should be mandatory school to read that document. It really should be. This is one of the most prescient documents. And you know, we've talked about this before, there've been many attempts at creating a viable digital currency or store value over the decades. And so lots of people have waited for two, three years to see if Bitcoin would actually bite because all the others fell apart after a year or two years.

And the damn thing held, it gamified it so perfectly, it's unbelievable. Here's a homework assignment for those listening who want to play in this. Go and download the original Bitcoin white paper, stick it into Google's Notebook LM and just listen to a podcast about it or ask for an understandable two or three page summary. It is a beautiful work and the most extraordinary thing about it is it's working, it's never been hacked and it has become the dominant store of value. So extraordinary. The part that I find people struggle with the most is there's no central authority or point of value. So extraordinary. The part that I find people struggle with the most

is there's no central authority or point of control. It's a completely decentralized peer-to-peer participatory network. And that, I find people just cannot get their heads around. It's amazing. Yeah. All right. Here's just a chart to back it all up.

The experts, you speak to everybody in the street, they're expecting that we're about to see a bull run. BTC is signaling a comeback, reclaiming key one-year MVRV momentum average. I'm not someone who looks at the charts and studies the charts myself, but this seems to be self-evident. I think what's noteworthy here is we've been waiting for a long time for Bitcoin to peel off the tracking of the Dow and the financial markets and I think this is finally the breaking point and I hope this continues and if it does we're going to see a massive bull run if this

is the point. Yeah from your mouth to the universe's digital ears. Let's jump into our favorite subject here at Moonshots, AI. This is a huge week for AI. We're seeing a global power. By the way, unlike last week, which was the hugest week. No, no, the point being that every week is like blowing apart the previous week. It's unreal Yeah, this is a global power grab in the AI universe and it was centered not in Washington DC not in Silicon Valley This week we were in Riyadh where the tech CEOs from the US

joined President Trump To go and do a deep dive into a Saudi investment forum. Yeah, this isn't even the full list. You have Jenny Johnson who runs Franklin Templeton is there. Larry Fink who runs BlackRock is there. I mean this is ridiculous and I knew Dubai has historically attracted that crowd recently. Now the Riyadh is catching up. Unbelievable amount of activity and investment, but boy, did they get the best of the best worldwide to show up this week. BRENT JOHNSON Amazing. I'm on the board of the Future Investment Initiative, FII, which is under PIF, under the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, and I sort of help address

the AI agenda at FII every year in Saudi, in October, in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia wants to be number two to the US in the AI world, and they're prepared to bring a huge amount of capital and relationships to the table. So this was a massive success for the ministers and for the ruler of Saudi. Let's dive in a little bit further. This is a tweet from Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO. Today, Amazon announced, we are partnering with Humane, Saudi Arabia's newly created AI innovation company to collectively invest 5 billion

and to build a groundbreaking AI zone in the kingdom. Let's pair that with the next article here, which is NVIDIA is selling 18,000 of its top GB300 Blackwell AI chips to Saudi Arabia. It's a $10 billion commitment by Jensen. Humane is owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, working to develop AI models and data center infrastructure.

This is a huge deal. Dave, how do you think about this? Well, for starters, there's some great video coming out of the conference out there. A lot of it is public. So if you have a free minute after this podcast, you might want to look at David Sacks meeting with His Excellency Abdullah El-Swah in particular. We'll show a clip on that next. Oh, great. Great. Yeah, because they're basically taking a lot of the handcuffs off the chip exports within this region as part of this conference. And this is it right here. That was kind of inevitable, but also, you know, Saudi's got big investments in core weave and cerebris. So they're working on their own infrastructure as well. Those are

unrestricted. It's not really their own infrastructure, but unrestricted infrastructure. So this isn't the only thing going on. But it's very consistent with a couple of things. The Liquid AI team was telling us that Arabic in particular has a thousand dialects. And none of the US foundation models are addressing that at all. So they really want to be able to control the regionalization of the technology. And also the cultural values. We've been talking about this a lot. They're having a culturally matching version of these AIs. Because what's going to happen next is anyone under the age of, say, 20 is going to spend a lot of time talking

to their AI. Yeah. And so then a lot of what their worldview is comes back from whatever the eyes is telling them and very very important you know for various regions around the country to have some say in what it says and how it interacts with their next generation of kids. mean, I think one of the most relevant things here is this places Saudi Arabia You know strictly in the US court as opposed to China the US, you know They've teamed fully with us US infrastructure US partnerships US investments Making a massive commitment into the US AI infrastructure so it's huge.

And Nvidia agreeing to give them 18,000 of its top Blackwell chips is massive. I mean, countries around the world are frothing to get access to that. So interestingly enough, we have both Saudi Arabia and the UAE making massive financial commitments to this. What we saw about a decade ago was these two nations making massive commitments to new energy and environmental investments. It's the advantage of being a nation ruled by a ruler who can say, okay, yay, verily, we're going there and not having to deal with a full Congress and Senate and democracy.

But their ability to pivot so rapidly and say, listen, the most important thing in the world is AI, and we're committing a trillion dollars, and it will be multiple trillions into AI is a massive advantage for them. Salim, you've had these conversations. It is incredibly impressive to watch. When you get a, we often talk about governance models and it's always clear that the best model is a benevolent dictator. The problem is in many cases, a dictator doesn't stay benevolent dictator. Yeah. And the problem in many cases, a dictator doesn't stay benevolent. But in

these cases, it actually they actually seem to be very much so. I was I've spent more time in the UAE. And the stories you hear about His Highness bin Zayed is are unbelievable in terms of the character of the man. And the sheer integrity that is coming through and then that cascades down all the way very quickly. So it's super impressive to watch and the fact that they're making these investments. I think at the macro level, the combination of US innovation and capital coming from the Middle East makes it kind of unbeatable with the future holds. Yeah, for sure. Let's go take the next slide here. And this is the minister, Abdullah Suwaha, is having a conversation with David Sacks. I'm going to play this video in a moment.

Abdullah Suwaha is the minister covering space and calm and technology. He's a beautiful man. I call him a friend. I knew him back when he was at Cisco before the ruler of the kingdom tapped on him to come back and join as a minister. And in fact, Dave, you and I hosted him in Venice in a makeshift Majolus, what about a year ago? Venice, Venice, California, by the way. Yes, Venice, California. That was great. He's a brilliant guy.

And he's close to, Elon close to all the tech CEOs. Let's play this interview between David Sachs and Minister Abdullah Swaha. Technologies have helped us deliver a passport

within five minutes you said to me we're gonna see soon see that in other economies as well how you could renew your license how you could do all of your different digital services in a cashless society as well from the digital age and then the intelligent age we've showed you firsthand how we're creating nano robots with CRISPR technology leveraging generative AI to tackle sickle cell disease, bad cholesterol, have targeted gene therapy, which is remarkable,

reducing the cost to treat a patient from $2.2 million to just sub-$100,000. Think about the remarkable work that we're doing in agentic AI, helping Aramco energize the world, which we need to fuel the US ambition and Saudi's ambition in AI training and inference, because we're going to converge not only to the price point of electronics, but it's really the price points of electrons. Amazing.

I mean, we're seeing huge investments by the government across all exponential technology areas. Now, I think what's incredible is by virtue of their size and their technology base, they're outstripping other nations around the world. They don't come close to what we're doing in the United States, but they're focusing their capital and they're driving breakthroughs. And they're moving quickly. I think in that video clip, if you have time to watch the full video, David Sachs has some brilliant things to say as always.

But you can sense, they have tons of capital and complete freedom to act quickly in this AI environment. And you can feel that vibe just in that video clip. And David Sachs, he is within the constraints of congressional votes and wearing a suit and tie and a dress suit. You can just feel the difference in ability to be nimble. And I remember when I was a kid growing up, you know, mostly in Iran as a young child, and my mom would always tell us like, US foreign policy is going to be a disaster in this country.

She learned the language, you know, she spoke Farsi, she really got integrated into the culture which very few Americans in the country did at the time. And she said the problem fundamentally is that Americans, you know, every four years we completely change our mind on what we're trying to achieve in this country. And there's no consistency whatsoever over time. And boy, did she turn out to be right about that. So you're right, Salim. And this kind of AI timeframe is so short,

and there's so much that needs to be done so quickly. The freedom to just sit back and act, having infinite or near infinite capital and instant decision-making, it's a pretty powerful thing. You know, every, during the COVID, when we had to make decisions very quickly, every major democracy failed in navigating COVID well. Actually, every major country failed.

All the small countries did very well. So I think there's a hint there as to the future of governance as you go to a micro level. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities.

If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. Dave, you said something that's really important in a second, I guess I want to point it out. Speed here, we're going to see the AI, I don't call it AI wars, AI dominance play out over the next two to three years, two to four years, at which point it's, I don't say it's game over, but who's on top and who's second and third is unlikely to change after that. So what we're seeing is really a jockeying for position between major nations, in particular China, the Emirates, Saudi.

Qatar will play in there as well. I don't think Russia is going to be relevant unless they team up with China in some fashion. And then whoever is leading the game is going to make the rules. I mean, do you agree with that? Can I offer a counterpoint? If I give the counterpoint side, the speed of democratization is such that even if one kind of pairing of partners goes ahead of the other, that it'll level off very quickly after that.

We've seen that over the last couple of years. You've got OpenAI and then you've got Gemini and then you've got DeepSeq and that gets overtaken. I think it's going to democratize much faster than the past and therefore you won't see one taking off in a winner tick all type of opera. That's my view. I think it's a safer view if that's the case, but I think we'll have a conversation on this in a few minutes where AI is beginning to self code

and we have the potential for a runaway digital super intelligence race with whoever's on top. Dave, how do you think about that? Well, Peter, your first statement was so right and you can't overstate the winner take all effects that are going on. There isn't currently a force to democratize any of this and it would take an amazingly

huge amount of inertia very quickly to democratize all of this. The forces of concentration of everything are just unbelievable because of that self-improvement effect that Peter just mentioned. And so, you know, I'm telling everybody around here, everyone around MIT, everyone around Harvard, everyone around my kids, like you have a window of opportunity that's exactly the timeline Peter laid out of about four years to set the course of your entire life. Nobody knows what's gonna happen after that, but the forces of concentration are much stronger than the forces of distribution. So the safest bet by

far is to run like hell toward your targets and in the event that something happens that spreads out all the value, you're fine. But in the other event where it's all concentrated, you'll be very glad you didn't waste a millisecond between now and 2030. I think there's two different things here, right? One is exponential opportunities if you move fast, which I 100% agree with. Okay. But the other part of winner take all I will disagree and let's see who's right over the next little while.

Well, we will see. It's gonna play out over the next two to four years. I mean, why do you think the entire AI leadership of our nation and the financial leadership of our nation showed up in Saudi Arabia for a week. Everybody, not just a few people, there was a significant enough meeting and a significant enough purpose of that meeting to say you had to be there. And I think this was, I think we'll draw a line from last week to consequences that will be dominant for decades. Yeah, I mean, I cannot tell you how unnatural and active it is for a Saudi Arabian to wake up one morning and invest in core weaver cerebrus.

That doesn't happen. I was like, what, because we have to stand nearby? No, no, no. There's clearly like a really intentional and intelligent awareness of where the bottlenecks are and those investments are turning out to be brilliant by the way. But like chip design, Saudi, what's the connection there? Well, the connection there is that's the bottleneck to self-improving AI. We can go on about this for a long, long time. When I was meeting with Minister Abdul-Aswaha, he said something which really stuck with me. He says, every week I have a meeting with MBS to talk about AI.

It is his number one item on his agenda, and it should be. It drives me nuts that it's not the number one item on every senator and congressman's agenda here and how it impacts health and how it picks education. It's so transformative. All right, let's go to this news clip from Mark Andreessen on Google and OpenAI Visions. Let's take a listen to Mark. Kind of a big company, little company, kind of big company thing. And I think that's repeating itself.

And I think one of the ways to think about what's happening right now is OpenAI is kind of growing up to become Google. And Google's kind of reinventing itself to the OpenAI. And so there's a similar thing there. I think that's fascinating, right? So OpenAI is going into the search business and wants to dominate.

And of course, Google's been in the search business. And it really needs to go Gemini first for this next few years. That's true, huh? What do you think about that, Salim? I think it's very eloquent, as usual, for Mark. The thing that I find fascinating is Gemini is probably the best model out there

for general use, and yet OpenAI just continues to soar in adoption. Yeah, it's like when my middle schoolers are like, all they talk about is chat and OpenAI. It's like, seriously, they've captured OpenAI. And let's talk about the relative value. So we have Google at $2 trillion and OpenAI at $300 billion, just $300 billion.

Dave, how do you think about the relative value there? Well, I mean, NVIDIA at 3.3 trillion today. So NVIDIA is almost 2x Google all of a sudden. Oh my God. That's crazy. Yeah. And I tell you, there's some real interesting quandaries in there because Google is losing search. There's no doubt about it. You can only debate the rate, but it's moving. And then Google's in a good position to capture a lot of that, but they have much lower value per impression.

So, it really cannibalizes their revenue machine. On the other hand, YouTube and video content are killing it, and they benefit tremendously from synthetic video creation and also ad optimization using AI. And so, those tailwinds are very strong for Google. So you got the core dying at the same time, the new things are growing like crazy. Then within GCP, you know, the Google's cloud, they have the TPU seven, the new TPUs

that have this incredible weight stationary systolic array design, which allows them to be much more efficient than Nvidia at running these core AI processes. I could go on for hours about it, but I'm telling you, this is like, this is the future of AI chips. And they've got it and they've got it ahead of the curve. And so it's going to be completely sold out.

And they're going to redirect it into GCP and use it within their own internal use cases. And I don't know that it'll ever end up not being sold out before they can even manufacture it. So then you're like, okay, Nvidia is in a race with Google over who controls the AI chip stack, uh, that no one's even talking about yet. And it's all bottlenecked at what's TSMC willing to make for who and why. And, and Elon Musk now has a huge voice in that because he's part of the, so I mean, like the like it's like a drug

This was gonna be the best TV series Baby, it's Silicon Valley soap opera And and of course the whole the whole Taiwan China of it all puts this incredibly crazy You know, so what is China said they want to own Taiwan by 2028. Yeah. Yeah crazy Yeah So what does China said? They want to own Taiwan by 2028? Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah, and I think the federal estimate, they don't talk about it much, is that you have to make the assumption that no access to chips from Taiwan by December 2027, which is nowhere near enough time to get the US fabs up and running. So how's that going to play out? They tell us 100% for sure that if China takes Taiwan, the fabs won't be operating for China.

Yeah, they will blow them, they will destroy them, they'll shut them down. Yeah. All right, let's go to our next article here. This one does my heart well, having been in the pharma related industry. So, FDA announces completion of first AI assisted scientific review pilot and aggressive agency-wide AI rollout. So here's the FDA Commissioner Martin Makari. FDA is rolling out a GEN.AI tool across all centers by June 30th to speed up scientific review for new therapies. I mean, one of the incredibly crazy hardships of our world

is what's the problem with the development of new drugs? It's the regulatory slowdown. It's the fact that we take sometimes years to make it happen. And the FDA, you know, an FDA employee who approves a drug that then has, you know, kills some patients, has disastrous results. But what we don't do is we don't value all the lives lost for not approving a drug. It's just a flip situation. This is the safety versus efficacy problem, which is structural here, but I think the fact that they're using AI for a bunch of stuff is amazing. I think it's great. I think it's the beginning.

I mean, we should be rolling this out across all agencies and we've discussed this before. this out across all agencies and we've discussed this before, right? So AI can help streamline all agencies and all approval processes. And it's going to be crazy, you know, in the future, people are going to look back and say, really? Humans did this? Seriously? How long did it take like decades? Yeah, it took decades. Yeah, I'm looking for the administration to make real structural change that lasts beyond just one administration. I think one of the greatest assets we have as a country is 50 different states that can try 50 different ideas so that if you're stuck somewhere, you can try somewhere else.

And we're way under utilizing that core strength that we have. So one of the best things you can do is say, look, let's push, let's deregulate like crazy and push a lot of this into 50 different shots on goal. Even if we make mistakes, we'll be far better off as a country if we have chances for entrepreneurs to move forward in many different places. Yeah, you're spot on there, Dave. And here's an example.

For the last decade, the FDA under previous administrations were shutting down all stem cell clinics in the US. And so what happened was if you wanted access to stem cells or a sort of an advanced experimental therapy, you would leave the US. You'd go to the Caribbean, you'd go to Mexico, you'd go to Costa Rica, Panama for these treatments. The problem is you're in a location that doesn't have advanced medical capabilities if something goes wrong. Well, this year, in fact, this month, we're about to see new regulation in Florida, specifically.

I know this because Fountain Life has two centers soon, three centers in Florida and Florida is about to pass legislation allowing for stem cell treatments to occur in-state. So you're gonna have the data finally and people able to stay there, be near their near their physicians, take the treatments, collect the data accurately and then then learn. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our next subject here. And this one's on CoreWeave, Dave. Lead us here. Read the article and let's talk about it. Well, we talked about this being a bellwether for the whole IPO market opening up again. And I think CoreWeave is above 70 bucks now, which is great. It's up 40%, 50% from the IPO price. So far, the investors are all happy.

I'm sure the iBanks all over Wall Street are saying, hey, we're open for business. Who else is out there? Let's go. So for those who don't know, talk to us about what CoreWeave does. So CoreWeave, it's a bellwether for AI. It's a data center company. The thing that makes it a little weird to people is they borrowed a huge amount of money. They have an enormous amount of debt, which they use to buy NVIDIA chips.

One of their investors is NVIDIA. They finance the data centers with the value of the chips. And the reason that's controversial is because nobody knows how quickly they'll depreciate. I think the current logic is we're going to be compute bound for years. Like everything that can compute is going to be incredible demand, in my opinion, forever hereafter for humanity. We'll look at this early wave of sort of, you know, computation from 1970 to 2020 as kind of the test ground, where sometimes we use the chips, a lot of. There's their line all over our office here not processing anything. But starting around now and forever hereafter, they're all going to be doing AI all the time.

So anything that can compute is going to be in huge demand. And so I think that, you know, CoreWeave will go up in value if that theory is true. Computronium, baby. Computronium. It's for those who haven't read enough science fiction, aren't science fiction geeks, computronium is what AI eventually turns all matter in the universe into. So, compute all the time everywhere. The article here from CNBC says, Corwee beats on revenue, reports more than 400% growth in the first earnings after the IPO. So we've been waiting for some red hot IPOs to move the financial markets really to break

open the logjam because we haven't had many companies going public or even that many acquisitions. So for the venture business, Dave, as the head of our partnership with with Link XPV, this is amazing news. It is amazing news and it was also the companies that are in the pipeline behind this are much less risky. So I was worried about this being the bellwether because you know it should go up but it be with all that debt you know if it goes bad it goes really bad, and that would shut down the markets again. So I'm really glad to see it went well. But the ones that are in the pipeline, they're almost all either chip companies or vertical use case companies,

and they just can't. They're so low risk, such high return. So this is good. Once the pipeline fills up and we have five, six, seven more IPOs, then I think the train will be rolling. I hope so. All right. Here's another one from Bloomberg. Next slide here. Microsoft layoffs hit coders hardest with AI costs on the rise.

So engineers make 40% of the total layoffs as AI begins to take over parts of their work. Not a surprise. Dave, how do you think about this? Well, it's like right in my wheelhouse. So, you know, we've all been telling people for a long time now that almost any white collar coding or other job, it's not going to exist in 2030. And so there's a line between today and 2030. And very few people are doing enough planning to get ready for it. Just to be humane to your employee base, you

should have some kind of plan in place. And had some real frustrating conversations this week with a couple of our companies because they're all using Blitzy. Blitzy is supposed to be an opportunity to learn what long-form, you know, an AI that writes three million lines of code in a single night. That is incredibly world-changing. And then the reports I got back are, hey, it had some bugs. Like, oh my God, you completely missed the point. Look at the rate of improvement. Look what it's going to do by the end of the year. Can you slow it down? I love Blitzy. It's one of our investments, full disclosure and link xpv. I love Blitzy. It's one of our investments full disclosure and link XPV.

But if you wanted to replicate another company, right? So one of the biggest challenges right now is the ability of AI to basically go in and replicate a SaaS business to just basically stand up competition. And so where would you bring Blitzi in to do something like that? So Blitzi, you know, in its current form if you have any legacy code base, you know, 5, 10, 20 million lines of code and you say, hey, I want you to rebuild this entire product, make it faster, better and run on the cloud. That's kind of their sweet spot right now.

But that's not the real point. The real point, if you look three months, six months, nine months into the future, and the rate of improvement of the AI, not just to write code, but to build entire plans, like project plans, it's on this crazy, crazy upslope. And so then if you look just a few months into the future, then Blitzy can come in and say, well, look,

here's Greenfield opportunity. I've wanted to write a piece of software that does something that has been burning a hole in my pocket for years, but it was too expensive. Can I do it now? Yeah. Not only can you do it, you can do it in like a night or a week. You know, a lot of people right now use Salesforce.com or Outlook to do things that they've kind of bastardized to their actual use case. And it sort of, it sort of works, but it's not exactly what they wanted, but it's good enough. Now you can just vibe code or blitzy code your way to a perfect solution for exactly

what you were really after originally. And so that creates this whole long tail of really, really good high quality software that does what you actually wanted. You know, you know, you're kind of dream Peter of like, I get on stage, I've got all this IT around me, I've got avatars I'm talking to, why am I talking to an IT person? Why can't I just talk to the AI? Yes. Or orchestrate, that is imminent.

I mean, so that's a good example of the kind of stuff you can suddenly build, because the cost per line of code is down 1000 or a million X. And so that's what Blitzi is enabling. And you know, I just want to walk into a business meeting on a thousand or a million acts. And so that's what BlitZ is enabling. And you know, I just want to walk into a business meeting

where I've got a presentation on my computer and have all the AV work. That's all I want. You know, Our favorite joke there drops in, right? AI is easy, but AV is really hard. Courtesy Brad Templeton. Something just struck me, Davis,

you're talking about this. This means we can finally retire all those old COBOL systems. Yeah, yeah, no, this is, I mean, I mean, the world runs on legacy COBOL that nobody wants to touch and nobody knows how to maintain. We can essentially rewrite those for the modern world. No, the CEO of State Street Bank was telling me that they have all the NAV accounting for all the mutual funds in the country is done on PL1 code on mainframes. Why? It's like three hundred million dollars a year of maintenance for that tech stack. Why? Well because it's a billion dollars to rewrite it and I don't want to eat that cost in any given

quarter it'll kill my bonus. Wow. Well you bring that billion dollars down by a factor of ten or a hundred and they're like oh now I'll do it easily because it fits within my bonus cycle. It's just that simple. A little dysfunctional, but it is just working. I'll just, to end on this particular article from Bloomberg here on AI, I used to harangue my kids, like you gotta learn to code, gotta like to code,

gotta learn to code. And now it's, you need to learn to vibe code and you need to learn to think in a way that's concrete and described to your AI. I mean, everybody's going to be a coder. Everyone's going to have this ability and it's pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I'm working on a memo right now that I'm going to send out to all the CEOs that says, look guys, be humane here. Some subset of your people are going to be masters of AI and then another subset are going to get crushed.

Come up with some plan for the people that are going to get crushed so that it's humane. And then for the people that are going to be masters of AI, free up half or two-thirds of their time so they can start the 10,000 hours of learning that they need to do to get on top of this wave. What you're doing right now by turning a blind eye to it is you're dooming all of them by not giving the time to become masters of AI, not learn to use things like Blitzy and cursor. Yes. Let them play. Let them play. Yeah. But you know, we'll the way allow that you know, it's not gonna happen

naturally got to have a plan. You know, and one of our clients, they had to lay off like a third of their call centers because they automated it all. And they gave them an internal one year UBI and said, go to whatever you want for a year. Here's a chunk of money play and and their employees absolutely loved it and something like 95% got a job very quickly. You know, I would say here's a year of UBI, use it to come up with new business ideas

that our company could utilize. I mean, that would have been equally good. The other point you made I think is really, really important because if anyone does choose to take our advice, telling them to go play with cursor and do some vibe coding is not good enough. That you have to get them into that new... there's a new mindset related to creativity that allows you to use the AI to do something productive that goes way beyond just vibe coding. We haven't fully specified that skill set but we know it involves creativity.

We know it involves vision. We know it involves knowing how to use the tools and what the tools do well and don't do well. But it's way beyond just saying, hey guys, play with cursor a little bit. Okay, now you're an AI person. So take it a step further, buddy. What would you recommend?

I would say that we, you know, the three of us kind of specify what we're learning about that skill set, who's succeeding, who's failing, and then codify it into actual programs. Like I suggest you use this product, you do this training program, you try and build this thing and just put it out on a website or put it out in this podcast as a roadmap that they can follow. I love that. And the other people who choose to follow it end up being masters of AI.

It'll evolve over time, But if it's, it's not as hard as intimidating to everybody, no one's trying, even though it's not that hard, actually. You know, what if we have a dedicated podcast episode just to that? I'd love that. Like, just, we'll just go so have one session, Peter will talk, let's talk to Nick and the team about this. But we just have one dedicated session running through and saying, let's talk to Nick and the team about this. Sure, do some homework. We just have one dedicated session running through and saying here's how you build your own future and envisioning and here's some tools and let's run through some sample use cases. You know, a brand like a badge of honor, you know, like, you know, people love these alternate to

a university badges of achievement. Yeah. We give it one of those. This reminds me of like when electricity was first entering the factory ecosystems. And people were hesitant to bring in electrical systems. And they would finally see a electrical motor running some part of a factory. And they would learn from that. Then they'd put it into a different part of the factory. Very slow. It's very slow. Yeah. Can I give a quick anecdote here? Of course. The worst example of this was in the 1600s when a Scottish guy discovered that the definitive cure for They then take 50 years to deploy throughout the Navy. They take 50 more years to go, oh, maybe we should tell the merchant Navy.

Take the merchant Navy another 50 years, and between known cure and full deployment was 264 years. Forty percent of sailors or thousands of sailors are dying every week. It's a testament to how bad we are as a human species. Oh, we humans are so screwed. Luckily, that's shrunk a lot. And most of that is down to 17 years, most of it being longitudinal testing for known cure to disease. But I think this is the cultural issues that we have in adapting to things. My biggest insight about human beings ever is they'd much rather be comfortable than happy.

adapting to things. My biggest insight about human beings ever is they'd much rather be comfortable than happy. Wow. Sad. All right, this is a story from... Well, my leader is going to be an intern at Blitzi this summer, so I'll lean on him. Well, I'll learn a lot from that, but I'll lean on him to come up with this like, okay, he's high school, you know, coming into college. And so what's the perfect roadmap for staying ahead of this curve from your perspective? We can weave that into our plan for... Fantastic. Let's do it. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and

could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out.

So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action.

Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller,

Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really it's something that is for me me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter.

It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. Our next story here is from NPR, which I guess still exists for the moment. I won't go into that, but the story is, family shows AI video of slain victim as an impact statement, possible legal first. So what does this mean? AI was used to create a video of a victim speaking at his perpetrator sentencing. And it says slain victim, so I guess the victim is dead.

For the first time AI was used in a US courtroom for a victim impact statement, legal experts see of AI as powerful and ethically acceptable. Fascinating. I'm just, it's just fascinating to see how AI is gonna play into different parts of our ecosystems, our regulatory and social worlds. Any comments on this? I'm surprised they allowed it also. That's a really forward thinking to allow that. But I guess it's the voice of the victim and this is deep fake versus deep fake now. So it's a very slippery slope. I

Assume in this case, it was you know, the the judge and everybody wanted the the outcome to be You know, there must have been pretty obvious Yeah, they were worried the jury wouldn't know see it that way So having the victim talk on their own behalf is going to get you the outcome that they want. But again, that opens Pandora's box like crazy. All right. Dave, I would love if you would cover this one. So specialized AI systems deliver breakthrough results. Domain adaptive pre-training.

What is this all about? Well preface this by saying when one of the listeners last time posted I love this podcast is amazing. It's just like the all-in podcast for geeks That's that's it that's the highest compliment I think I've ever gotten so We're dealing with the real news that matters, right? This is the stuff that's impacting our lives for the long run. So yeah, this is called domain adaptive pre-training. So the way this evolved is I was actually two weekends ago trying to design a circuit, a neural network circuit as usual. And I said, I wonder if Gemini is any good at designing circuits and it was terrible.

And so I talked to Alex Wisner-Groves, the mutual, hygienist friend, and he said, hey, have you heard of this thing from NVIDIA? They took an open source model, in this case, Lama 2, this was a couple years ago, and they retrained it to be a circuit designer. And so I pulled up the paper, and I'm looking at it, and I was like, wow, let's try this thing.

So apparently, it's like an order of magnitude better at circuit design than the raw model is because it's been retrained to be a circuit designer on specific circuits. But the reason I wanted to bring it up is because in this particular case the cost of training it to do that specific task dramatically better was only a 1% increase in the overall training cost. And so this matters a lot to upcoming startups because the new Lama 4 model, the 2 trillion parameter model, is a massive, massive investment by Meta that is free, open source, here it is, and the tools to then retrain it to do things like, you know

drug discovery or self-driving or You know chip design or speak some obscure language. Those tools are all are open source online There's a whole cookbook in this paper On how you can do it yourself and a lot of the companies that I that I look at a lot of the teams even the high School teams they're afraid to retrain They're just putting wrappers around the core models and they're using the models all day. They're talking to either GPT or Gemini all day long, but it never occurs to them to go and retrain it and make it an order of magnitude better at some specific task.

So this really addresses, I don't know if you remember, there are a whole batch. So let me get this straight. So you take one of the generalized models, in this case, Lama, and then you give it a training set for that, a very specific niche use case, and then at very, very low cost, you get unbelievable outcome. That's exactly right. And it skipped one step in there where first you distill it, make it smaller, much faster, don't lose any of its capability within your domain, but throw away a lot of the irrelevant capabilities because it's been trained on 15 trillion tokens, every language, every conceivable.

And you're just trying to use it to either do math or to do chip design or to speak Swahili. And so there's a lot of overhead that you can strip out. So the distillation process can shrink it by a factor of 10 to 100, make it much faster, and then you can build it back up again with new data that's specific to that domain. So it's called domain adaptive pre-training. It makes total sense given what you're doing. And very, very few people are trying to do it, even though it's so straightforward. It's just a cookbook laid out for you by NVIDIA.

Here's how you do it. And I did notice that after NVIDIA did this, they went completely dark and internal on it, which tells you how well it works. They're using it internally to buy new chips. But they said, holy crap, this is so good. We can't just throw this out there anymore. You know, it's just we don't know how many of these are out there, these hacks, these improvements.

We're going to see one in a moment. Let's go there in fact. This is an article that I read. I just thought it was extraordinary. It's news from DeepMind. Google DeepMind introduces Alpha Evolve, a coding agent for algorithm discovery. So here's what what we learned from from DeepMind and Alphabet company. So AlphaEvolve uses Gemini AI and evaluators to evolve high performance code. So in doing this, they were able to improve Gemini's training speed by 23% which is massive and improve GPU performance by 32.5%. So we're talking about new models that allow an AI to self-improve, to improve its own algorithms. I mean, we're seeing really the knee of the curve in this self-referential, self-improving AI future that really drives

us in a super exponential towards digital super intelligence. It's all happening right here, right now. Yeah, there's a cool video out of Sam Altman over at Sequoia's office this last week. And one of the questions he got from the crowd is, hey, is coding just another capability within all the open AI capabilities that you're working on or is it somehow special and isolated and you're work on it more? And he said, oh no, it's definitely special. It's very, very special. It's special because we use it internally and then he bites his tongue and he says,

let's move on to the next question. So I asked Alex Winsor Gross about that and he's like, yeah, that's the third time I've seen that. The problem with talking about self-improvement inside these big foundation model companies is it attracts all the dystopians and then all the regulators come right after that. But it's really obvious that the reason they care so much about this use case is because the thing is gonna improve itself and that's gonna accelerate the timeline. 32.5% GPU performance and this is just like generation one of this

thing, right? That's unbelievable. Yeah, it's not just, I mean, when I say it's a super exponential, you know, it really is, we've gone from 2x every two years to 10x a year to 100x a year to something beyond that in terms of the improvements that we're seeing. And it's not slowing down. I mean, there are no physical limits right now that we can see. Here's another one from Meta. Meta's FAIR shares new research to achieve advanced machine intelligence. So a number of things announced from Meta this week. Open Molecules 2025.

It's a massive data set enabling breakthroughs in molecular discovery with large atomic system simulations. So I love this stuff. This is where we can discover new materials and we can discover new drugs and drug interactions. This is humans designing with atomic Lego sets. And then universal model for atoms, another item, another model out of meta. A foundational machine learning model for accurately predicting atomic interactions across diverse materials.

Again, Salim, you and I have discussed this. Material science is at the fundamental core of everything. Material science is going to drive energy, it's going to drive environmental breakthrough, it's going to drive space exploration, it's going to drive all of these things. Well, there's this amazing thing of going from atoms to bits, right? And then once you can use bits to then affect atoms, you end up with this incredible feedback loop. And if we can actually manipulate the physical world with these advanced Aon models, then

holy moly. Yeah, it's crazy. Did I tell you Peter, Alexander Keisling, you know our frat brother, much younger, is now one of the top quantum computing guys in the country and you know quantum computing is good for two things that we know of. One of them is cracking cryptography, but the other one is simulating biological systems. The hell were you guys doing in this frat? What in God's name? What was in the water? Actually, MIT has just become a ridiculous place since we were there.

The concentration of entrepreneurs is just unbelievable today. So I'm not surprised, but I think that we should follow up on how that interacts with this because the AI gets faster and faster and faster, but it needs that simulator in order to keep it on track. And so if you can take the whole drug discovery thing or the whole molecule discovery thing, and then the simulator is actually quantum computer based. Well, this is what Jack Hittery is doing at Sandbox AQ. They're basically using super fast AI models to run quantum equations and being able to model things in a way that is understandable on a quantum basis but doing it with conventional

AI. And you know, I don't think we've seen anything yet coming out of quantum compared to what we're gonna see over the next few years. I don't know if you've ever watched Three Blue One Brown, unbelievable videos on all things science, math, technical. It's just the most incredible explanations of everything. Like the transformer AI explanation is epically great. Would you text me that?

I would love to probably watch with my boys. That would be great. Yeah. The quantum computing explanation, couldn't do it. It's just you cannot fathom quantum computing, what it does well and what it doesn't do well in an hour or two. Well, Selim, you want to share our favorite conversation about quantum computing?

Sure. 10 years ago, Steve Jervitson spoke at Singularity University and we asked him in the Q&A, the amount of computation that these things can do is off the hook. Where is all this computation coming from? And he goes, well, we have a consensus answer amongst the top quantum physicists in the world,

but you're not gonna like it. We're like, what? Just tell us. And he's like, okay. He goes, it seems the current consensus is that we're doing the computation in parallel universes and bringing the answer back And at which point everybody's brains exploded and we're like, okay, he goes I told you wouldn't like it

So that was that was like ten years ago. By the way, that's true. It's still it's still the consensus What is the point last year? We you had? Helmet heart heart and would never never never the heart of Google's quantum computing lab and I said to him in the Q&A. Hey Steve Harkmont Nevin, the head of Google's quantum computing lab. I said to him in the Q&A, hey, Steve Jervith said this 10 years ago, now we have 10 years more data experiments, thousands of teams have been working on this. You know, what's the consensus? And he goes, you're not going to like it, but that's the same.

In fact, he said the existence of a quantum computer may be evidence that we're living in a multiverse. In which case, you know, everyone just goes, okay, come on. The existence of a quantum computer may be evidence that we're living in a multiverse. In which case, you know, everyone just goes, okay, come on. Before that scares everyone away, we really ought to get Keesling on the pod for a little bit. But the reason there's lots and lots of hope and enthusiasm around this is because we're very close to an AI quantum compiler, where you can just say, just like you do with Gemini,

say, hey, here's something I want to do. Does it fit quantum or not? And it'll actually tell you and also then compile what you were saying into the actual quantum code. And so then the usability for a startup or for just a weekend hacker and also the quantum computers are on the cloud. It's not like you need to go and get some atoms in your face. It's just another login on the cloud. So it's really pretty practical and exciting and coming soon. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments

lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. This literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products I use it all the time.

If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. I'm always looking for tipping points. When do we know things are hitting an inflection point and accelerating and things are changing? And this article at the New York Times is one of them. So, quote, top priority from Pope Leo warned the world of the AI threat. So Pope Leo XIV warned that AI poses serious risk to human dignity, justice, and labor and considers that AI must be developed, quote, for the good of all and calls for ethical use. And it's not his commentary, but the fact

that this is in New York Times article and that the Pope is focusing on AI in the first month of his You know people leadership if that's the right terminology. So it's pretty extraordinary Yeah, I think it's great because you know, there's a billion Catholics all over the world including my wife and the under reaction is rampant and When you get somebody as renowned as the Pope saying, okay, here are the priorities. It's very similar to experience, much smaller scale, but Joe and the president of North Eastern in the commencement address last year said, AI will affect every one of you no matter

what you majored in, you must do AI. And he's the only university president I heard say that. And it's like, wow, thank God. So now you've got, well, thank God again, you got do AI. And he's the only university president I heard say that. And it's like, wow, thank God. So now you've got, well, thank God again, you got the Pope giving you heads up that this is coming. And hopefully that'll create some motion. It's great to see them getting in front of this, as opposed to waiting 300 years to acknowledge

the Earth goes around the sun. This is at least much more. And I gotta admit, gotta admit a couple times I've been to the Vatican the last few years, Peter you've been there a couple times as well, is they've been way way more up to speed with what's happening in technology than I ever would have given them credit. Yeah, we had sessions on regenerative medicine and longevity there and I was pretty impressed the topics were allowed. But I think it's going to be interesting if an AI claims to be conscious, right? And see what the reaction is then.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe they'll let women to actually become priests someday. And then AIs will follow after that. Well, just another note on this was, you know, the last pope had this defining quality, which was tenderness. One of the most extraordinary, humble, wonderful men you could ever meet. And usually when they voted a new pope, they go the other way. And it's amazing to see them continuing the same path in this new pope. So it's great to see.

You know, by the way, one of the most extraordinary things you can do with the large language models is Take very dense and complicated Information like the Bible and make it understandable to you You know and the Bible and the Bible is in every large language model out there in detail. So, I mean, talk about Bible study. I think there's no better Bible study than a conversation with your favorite. Can I give you the retro version of this? Sure.

In the 1500s, there was a Swedish monk. He was called Swedenborg. Okay? Okay. And he was a psychic. And what he did was he basically realized that this decided that the Bible is a set of coded rules and he had to kind of apply these filters. So one of the rules that he applied was any verse that has water in it is truth.

Any verse that has fire in it is false, and you should just check it out. And he basically rewrote the Bible based on like these rules that he divined. And when you read the resulting text, it's unbelievably beautiful. So this is like a new version of that I think applied when we say AI can help us interpret some of this stuff. Amazing. All right, let's turn to other exponential news beyond AI. This is a story that I love. This came out from Archer, Archer Aviation. I've had them on my stage at the abundance summit. Archer is a new official air taxi provider for LA 28 Olympics.

And here is the tweet. We're extremely proud to announce that Archer is the official air taxi provider for the LA 28 Olympics and the Paralympic Games and Team USA. So I've been saying this for a bit now, that is the target deadline. So Archer is beginning operation, it's built manufacturing plants. We also have in the US, Joby Aviation and we have Beta. These are sort of the flying cars. And I've had this conversation, they're officially called eVTOLs electric vertical take off or landing.

And that name just rolls off the tongue and hits the floor. I think flying taxis or flying cars is better and the 28 Olympics is when manufacturing operations FAA regulations all need to be in place. You know, I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica Airport here, which the runway has been shortened from 5,000 feet to 3,000 feet. Eventually, it's supposed to be closed down in 2028. And hopefully, what will happen is it will become a vertiport for these to take off and land. So, if I want to go to, you know, Malibu or want to go to a Dodger game

downtown LA or Santa Barbara, I can hop in and avoid the 405, which is like hell on earth. If there was one breakthrough I've been waiting for forever in a day, it's this one. Because this will open up and enable so many things. Just consider how many amazing little plots of land are high up on the side of a mountain that you can get to, right and now become accessible.

Huge geographic arbitrage, right? I mean, massive. I've talked about, you know, go buy island real estate off the coast. That doesn't have easy access, but is beautiful beautiful and just set up EV toll service. A lot of islands out here on the East Coast, Peter. Say again? A lot of really nice islands out here. Actually, I look at a bunch of them every day. All right, well, let's do it.

Let's do it. Yeah, I think the barrier is safety, obviously, but the safety... Each of those electric motors is completely independent and so the power safety is gonna be I think pretty doable and then the air-to-air like it's all AI controlled they you know yeah I think it's more infrastructure because you need specialized gates you need specialized chargings to deal with this all that stuff yeah it is gonna be the safety is definitely I think I'd feel safe even landing at New York with one

of these right now. I think my real point there is there are absolutely no barriers to this and it's all regulatory. So having this forcing function deadline is going to put the manpower on it. I think it's great. Once the people are working on it, it's going to happen. Yeah. It's really exciting actually to have a deadline. It is.

I mean it's the number one driver I think and super excited to hear this announcement I spent two hours yesterday trying to get home from Kennedy Airport and two hours last week trying to get to Sao Paulo Airport So God help us get this thing going faster. The alternative is helicopters, which are are damn dangerous Yeah, yeah It truly are. All right, let's move on Next subject here is longevity. Uh, one of my favorite subjects. I want to hit on a couple of articles and subjects here. Uh, Dave, you were there. Salim, you were someplace on earth,

even though you're a director of the XPRIZE Foundation. So the big news here is in November 2023 in Riyadh. Once again, this is Saudi Arabia putting their money behind advancements. We announced the 101 million dollar HealthSpan XPRIZE. This is an XPRIZE directed at trying to add a minimum of 10 years, a goal of 20 years of additional health in immune, cognition, and muscle. And for the first time, what we're doing is we're providing milestone awards to help teams make progress. We've had 623 teams register for this XPRI. Super proud of that. And last week, Dave and I, you and I were sitting together. We awarded 40 of the teams with $250,000,

totaling $10 million in this milestone one award ceremony. And pretty amazing teams. I think we had winners from 12, 14 countries, from Australia to China, throughout Europe, the US, much of Asia. What do you think of it, Dave? throughout Europe, the US, much of Asia. What'd you think of it, Dave? Well, right out of the gate, it's amazing how you've, you know, the original XPRIZE that you conceived of was trivial to measure compared to what you're doing now. Yeah.

And, but the impact of this is so incredibly massive. So in terms of the XPRIZE overall mission, it's just the best idea ever. To try and make it a measurable, manageable prize must have been incredibly hard. And so congratulations on that. This is clearly working. Thank you. I gotta pass the congrats on to my partner in crime, Dr. Jamie Justice, who is the executive director of this competition. Justice, who is the executive director of this competition. Yannick Salty's helped me find her, and she's been running it, working with an incredible scientific advisory board,

Mahmoud Khan, the CEO of Evolution, which think of it as health and evolution. I'm invested in a whole bunch of different technologies here, and I advise different companies. So I am conflict incarnate, but I'm outside, just be clear, I'm not involved in any team selections, any team judging, I'm a bystander watching and rooting for a winner here sooner rather than later.

I think it's awesome. This is the biggest public prize ever given in the history of humanity. Yeah, it is. And this is just compared to Elon, just a word, Elon's 100 million dollar prize and this one's 101 million dollar prize specifically so would be bigger than Elon's X prize. Yeah, the other thing that jumped out at me on Monday down in New York is the original X prize, 10 million dollar prize, and I think maybe 100 million dollars of effort to win the $10 million prize.

Yes, it was a 10x return, yeah. So then the carbon removal prize was kind of the opposite of that huge prize from Elon Musk's coffers, and somebody actually made a lot of money on it. This one is back to the original mission, which is as a force multiplier, 101 million dollar price. The number on stage was some massive amount of effort has gone into winning these stages. I think it's the overall leverage that the prizes are delivering now. Yeah, so we've generated, we've launched about 550 million dollars of prize purses and we're close to $10 billion in R&D spent cumulatively by all the teams over the last 30 years to do this. And it's a great idea and you know if you go to xprize.org

folks can see about all the X prizes. One of my favorite ones as well going on right now is the Wildfire prize. I did a moonshots podcast with Palmer Lucky, which was super fun, the CEO of Anderil, and Palmer was the first person to register in this Wildfire prize. I've seen his technology going after it and it's amazing. Super excited for that. Alright, let's go to a related article on longevity. A lot of people are concerned that if we extend the human health span, so in the United States, average life expectancy, how long your heart is ticking, is about 79 years old, is when the average, you know, age of death. Average health expectancy, how long you're healthy is 63.

So, there's this 16-year gap between when you stop being healthy and when you die and it's just miserable for a multitude of reasons. And so, people say, well, if you extend the health span and lifespan to 100, 120, are are we gonna have an overpopulation issue? Well, it's just the opposite. So I used this article to bring this conversation to us. Turkey declares 2025 as the year of family to curb declining birth rates. So, this article just popped out in 2024. the birth rate in Turkey was 1.48 children per family.

You need 2.1 children to replace your existing population. But you know, Turkey is doing pretty well compared to other countries. So I went and used my favorite LLMs to come up with who are the top 10 lowest birth rate countries. And they're not insignificant countries. So check this out. South Korea has 0.72 children per woman. South Korea is sublimating. It's vaporizing.

It's going away. Hong Kong 0.8. Palau 0.8. Singapore 0.9. Puerto Rico 0.9. Taiwan 1.1, China 1.16, Spain 1.19, Italy 1.2, Ukraine 1.22, children per family. It's a problem. You know, Elon's been very vocal about this. I have as well. The biggest issue is not overpopulation, right? The old population bomb theory isn't playing out. As we create increase abundance, the opposite is true. It's

a underpopulation issue. Yeah, I mean the South Korea one is nuts. It's saying that the birth rate is three times less than it needs to be. Yeah, to maintain their population. Yeah, it's really ridiculous. So what does a country do? It starts offering massive benefits for- Incentives. Having children. Dave, any thoughts on this? Yeah, I've read up on the incentives and they're not even close to covering the cost

of raising a child and no one's reacting to the incentives. So I also haven't modeled out how the declining birth rate and the increasing longevity, you know, is there a dip and then a decline or is it smooth? It would be worth trying to, it's hard to predict the longevity curve, but it'd be worth trying to map that out. But one thing I can say is there's a perception in the US that China's trying to beat us in AI and China's trying to take over the world and China's going to use it.

But actually what's driving China's incredibly fast push into AI and robotics is a ridiculous demographic time bomb that hit Japan and they have the exact same problem times much worse coming in China. It's survival. It's fundamental survival. By the way, the other side of the equation is India, right, with 1.41 billion people, the majority of which are an absolute, you know, bottom of the pyramid. They need AI and robotics for education, for healthcare. They can't survive as a nation without this. Are you seeing that, Salim?

I have to go a bit tongue in cheek on this. I was in India and I introduced two random people together and they knew five people in common. Then I introduced two other random people together and they knew 10 people in common. I'm convinced that India has like 50,000 people and CGI simulated one and a half billion. It's like everybody knows everybody. It's insane. I have not lived in Bombay since I was 10 years old

and I can go to a party and I will know five people. And it's ridiculous. Anyway, but the broader point I think is dead on that the opportunity for robotics, for elderly care and education and healthcare in general, there's such, so little of it. It's like water in a desert. Any little thing is going to totally change the landscape. I'm super excited by the potential there. But Chinese

robotics, your folks think it's incredible. Yeah, it's a good segue into Elon updates. But one of the things I'm excited about in the direction things are going, globalization is kind of falling apart in a big way actually. But globalization was almost entirely driven by cheap labor. Now with the direction things are going, robotics doesn't happen naturally in the U.S. because you can always do something very cheaply with Philippine or Indian labor. But if that becomes less true, then we have to invest in robotics, which in the long run is a much, much smarter direction for the world to go.

And so that should kickstart investment in the category because the technology, the vision systems, the tactile systems, all of that is solved now. And it wasn't just a couple years ago. Let's put the numbers on the table here. Minimum wage in California today is $20 an hour. The projection, I was just with Cyrus Segiri, we do a monthly exponential mastermind for the abundance members and Cyrus gave one yesterday on humanoid robotics and flying cars and spaceships

and we're talking about this. The projected price per hour for operating a humanoid robot is going to be $1 an hour. At a base cost, it's $0.40 an hour, but at maintenance and electricity and everything else on insurance, it's a buck an hour. And this arbitrage between $1 an hour for a GPT-5 level, GROC-4 level humanoid robot that operates 24-7 compared to a you know a teenager from California it there's just no comparison ain't gonna happen until the until the robots become conscious and start demanding equal rights and well it's like if we have robots doing all of our drudgery work they're not gonna be

happy about that let Let's go on. We actually added a special section this week on Elon company updates because there's a lot of them and we'll wrap up with this segment today. But I think it's important. You know, Elon still is our moonshot, our moonshot mate, just really driving extraordinary progress and how he does this while everything else he does, right? He's in doge in the news all the time, but still he's operating four other you know

crazy moonshot companies five if you want to Your yeah five. All right, so let's talk about three of them here Uh, the first is elon in saudi Saudi Arabia. He was by Trump's side the entire time. Let's listen to a conversation about Elon announcing robotaxis and Starlink in Saudi Arabia. Here we go. My prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be tens of billions. Potentially we could have an economy ten times the size of the current global economy where no one wants for anything. Sometimes in AI they talk about universal basic income, I think it's actually going to be universal high income,

where anyone can have any goods or services that they want. It would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the kingdom. I'd also like to thank the kingdom for approving Starlink for maritime and aviation use. So there he is with Minister Abdul Aswaha, who has been sort of a key point of contact making sort of announcements on robotics. I'm going to be amazed if we don't see Optimus manufactured in Saudi Arabia as well. manufactured in Saudi Arabia as well. Here's the next article. SpaceX deploys 28 additional satellites. Now there are 7,135 Starlink satellites in orbit.

The FCC has approved 12,000 of the Gen 1 and 7,500 of the Gen 2, but SpaceX has proposed expanding the constellation to 42,000 satellites. That's either 42 because of, you know, Douglas Adams or it's 420 hundred because like Elon likes 420. I don't know. But hey, let's pause there. What do you guys think about Elon's companies in Saudi? Well, I mean, Elon, like you said, his ability to manage five concurrent mega companies plus Doge.

It's a case study and a role model for how you use one AI assistance and then two integrators, you know, people who are incredibly like-minded, finish your own sentences, but are entirely focused on operations, very similar to Google in the early days. And so I try and encourage everyone I bump into to study Elon very, very closely like at the individual actions level and you know take the part you want to take but replicate a lot of it and it clearly is a as a path to success. The part I love is where he every week he has what five companies so he goes one day a week to each one and says what problem do you need me to help solve and then so you're solving a

problem a week 50 problems a year per company amazing where you wanted to go exactly but but there's never been a point in history where the tech titans have hung out with the politicians and world leaders there's a world a lifetime world first. I don't know if anyone's really appreciated the magnitude of that. I love your guys' opinion on Tesla, right? So Tesla has taken a massive beating because of Elon in the government, in Doge in particular. And I tweeted, I don't know, a couple weeks ago that the value of Tesla is not in the car sales,

it's in the robotaxi and an optimus, which are trillion dollar opportunities. How do you guys feel about Tesla stock? To me, this one's really, really obvious. So we all live through the Apple cycle where Apple was the greatest company and enabled us like crazy, then Apple products didn't work at all. And it was torture, like our actual daily lives turned into this hell of needing to migrate to Son or to a PC. And then Steve Jobs came back and magically life is great again. It's a very real thing. But you just have to track the talent. So if Steve Jobs comes back, it's not Steve alone. He brings have to track the talent. So if Steve Jobs comes back, it's not Steve alone He brings this incredible wave of talent and inspiration

Inspiration. Yeah. Yeah. So if Elon can attract that talent to Tesla still it'll become a great robotics company It's it's cheap if you look at LinkedIn and you see that Elon's so distracted. He's not working on the recruiting You mean X then it's a car company. Yeah. So, yes, go ahead. I've, you know, in the early years of Tesla, when he was about to run out of money every quarter, it was like hard to put money into it. And so lots of us didn't put money into it.

And then early as the SpaceX, the rockets were crashing. So you didn't put money into it. Earlier as a Starlink, you're like, how is this gonna work? And so the lesson that people have learned over the years is don't ever bet against Elon. His manic focus, his engineering ability, his ability to distill key problems

and just go after them and solve them. The cluster approach they use at a crock to solve the things is legendary stuff that's going to go down for centuries in terms of somebody making massive turning points. So I think the opportunity for Tesla to totally turn it around with robotaxes, but also note that there are all these million cars are carrying around energy that is a huge marginal impact on things. There's that. There's the fact that you can integrate that with Starlink, with solar panels, with other

stuff. Then you bring in the humanoid robots. Right? And now things like, so I think this is a monster opportunity to buy a stock that will never be lower than it is now. Yeah, I agree with you. So we think about Elon's companies, we think about SpaceX, of course, and Tesla, and X, and XAI, and Neuralink and People forget about the fact that he still has the boring company What's that but I'm in Neuralink but boy I mentioned early yes

But I remember the tweet, you know, he's he's going from Hawthorne to Beverly Hills to his home. He's going from SpaceX headquarters to his home. And the 405 is jammed. And he goes, this is insane. There needs to be a better way. And he tweets, I'm going to start tunneling under LA. And that's him. When he has a crazy idea, he goes, yep, that's what I'm going to do.

It's going to be a boring company. I'll call it The Boring Company. But let's watch this video. For the first time ever, the boring company has continuously mined in a zero people in tunnel configuration. There's no one in the machine which is simultaneously advancing forward and erecting a ring, in other words, building a tunnel behind it. Each full ring weighs 24,000 pounds. So you can see here in this video, basically, a completely automated process of drilling, extracting the earth and building a tunnel behind.

I was, you know, in my conversations with Palmer Lucky, Palmer was saying that while we are, you know, we have a space force, an air force, an army, that eventually there will be an underground force as well as tunnel technology gets more advanced. An underground force. Yeah, crazy. I think the Boring Company has the greatest name for a company in history. I agree. I think The Boring Company has the greatest name for a company in history. I agree.

So that's the articles for this week. Pretty intense, guys. I can't wait for us to get together again. If you've been watching this episode of Moonshots and WTF Just Happened in Tech, our mission here is to deliver to you and contextualize the most important news in the tech world that's impacting every company, every industry, every parent, every aspect of our lives, please subscribe, give us your feedback, tell us what articles you enjoyed listening to what you want to listen to next. Tell me,

you know, do you like Dave better or saloon better? No. And and who else would you like on this podcast? Yes. Can I do a small plug? Yeah, of course. We did an EXO workshop last year for 100 bucks. It sold out. People said it was one of the best workshops they ever had. We're doing another one on May 20. So anybody interested? What's being covered in that workshop on May 20, which is my birthday, by the way. It's how do you build an EXO? So Peter, you should drop in for 30 seconds, say happy,

so we can say happy birthday to you. Yeah, send me an email. I'll get you the details. But we cover how do you build an EXO and people loved it. So we're going to just keep doing that every month, roughly. Last one sold out, so it'll be great. Amazing. And EXO is an exponential organization that's performing 10x compared to your competition. Saleem and I have written an extraordinary book on the subject. Check it out, but more importantly, go sign up for Saleem's workshop. We'll put it in the notes below, but where do people go to? Just go to OpenEXO.com.

You'll see a link to it, but we'll put a link in the notes. Dave, what are you excited about for the coming weeks and months? Well, that comment in the last week's podcast about, hey, the geeky version of All In. I really, if people are commenting on this podcast too, entertaining you, sure, that's fine, but we really actually want to do things and say things that help you map out your life and change your direction. And so if you're suggesting guests or suggesting topics or whatever, keep it actionable and really be honest with yourself. Did anything I heard here today impact the way I'm going to spend the next week? And so we can really focus on those things because this is the only podcast I know of where we cover not just the technical aspects but also the societal, the macroeconomic, and I don't know of any other place that does

that well. So if we can keep bringing in more of that to this, this can become the kind of forum. I think the umbrella premise is so simple, right? Technology is a major driver of progress in the world. As Ray Kurzweil says, it may be the only major driver of progress in the world. And so these breakthroughs that are happening at an increased frequency become more and more material to how our lives are going to be lived. And please know that between Salim, Dave, myself, and our entire research teams, we're scouting everything that's going on in humanoid robotics, in space, in AI, in Bitcoin, in 3D printing, and we're doing it well. It's why I'm bold. But beautiful.

And we have a lot of resources too. If there's a complicated topic that you really want to understand, we can either figure it out or farm it out and then bring it back to you. Yeah. Anyway, give us your feedback. We love doing this. And guys, I love having you as my moonshot mates. See you guys soon.

Take care, guys. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. This is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology

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