Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The New Administration Means Major Change for Crypto, AI & Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #143
Episode Date: January 21, 2025In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss their predictions for the new Administration, CES 2025 breakthroughs, the launch of Blue Origin, and more. Recorded on Jan 19th, 2025 Views are my own thoug...hts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice 37:01 | The Quest for AGI and Its Implications 44:38 | The Future of Energy Production 56:39 | The Rise of Humanoid Robots 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. Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://qr.diamandis.com/bookyt ____________ 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: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey buddy, before we jump into the tech stuff that happened this past week, I have a question for you.
What are your top five predictions, hopes, whatever you want for the new White House administration?
Fine, that's a lot. Can I give you three?
You can give me three. I mean, if you're really smart, you'd give me five.
I'm not that smart. Okay, so number one would be I think there's the opportunity
the Chinese economy is in a bit of a mess, and yet they want Taiwan.
I think he strikes a grand bargain to allow trade and balance the trade better
and give them Taiwan over a period of time
and navigate that tension and have it dissolve by creating a master deal.
I think he does the same in Russia and Ukraine. And so, I think that'll does an opportunity
and my prediction is that they use their saber rattling capability to change these political
conflicts because it'll put them in history books as a changing the global order. So that's number one.
Number two would be-
So it's playing a giant game of risk, like the board game where you're doing-
Yeah, that's right, right? And what's the oldest one? Never do a land war in Asia.
If you ever played Risk, you said-
That's true. That's the last place you go.
If you ever do a land war, so like cut a deal. The second one would be the opportunity for crypto to change the game in a bunch of areas.
I think I would love to predict he will allow crypto to the level of having a UBI type scheme
for crypto that could benefit the entire population and be a beacon to the rest of the world as
to where this goes.
Universal basic income.
Yeah.
And the trick is how do you give people enough money to survive but not be happy?
Because then it really works.
Otherwise, you end up with socialism and the whole thing collapses if you give people too
much money.
My third one is that given the disaster in LA and the need to rebuild, that the Trump
administration comes up with a housing code hat that allows people to build temporary
structures on their properties so that they can live on their own property while they
rebuild a main house or a neighbor's house they can live in and an ability to have a temporary
housing code that lasts like a year or two that you can at least get something up and going very,
very quickly and that would completely change the game for LA and also what's happening in North
Carolina and the next ones to follow. All right, I'm gonna give you five because that's what I asked for originally.
Okay. You can still come back with a few more. Sure.
So I think Trump is going to do stuff which is great for America and great for him.
So I think... Not in that order.
So being the president that put humans back on the moon, that's easy.
We're going to see humanity on the moon in a couple years.
I do think he's going to make a massive push given the fact that Elon's in the White House
too to put humans on Mars.
Boots on Mars, I said they're going to be...
I like it.
Optimist robots on Mars.
But I think we're going to see a massive increase in the space program as part of this. The second thing I think we're going to see is a huge deregulation in the
biotech industry. Biotech has been one of the most regulated industries. It crushed the biotech financial markets over the last four years.
And, you know, a lot of folks I know need to leave the US to go get experimental treatments
or get stem cells. I think we're going to change that.
At the same time that we're deregulating biotech, I think we're gonna massively re-regulate foods. So I think with Bobby Kennedy
and head of Health and Human Services,
I think we're gonna stop the insanity,
which is our food system right now.
At least I hope we do.
I mean, here's a chance to finally,
you know, do what's right for our health. I mean, I looked at the numbers.
We're something like 74th in the world in life expectancy and like 73rd
in health span expectancy and number one in expenditures on food.
And this is a result, I'm sorry, never want to make expenditures on
health. Yeah, 70% of the population is overweight or obese. Yeah, it's crazy and
it's not because we just got hungry all of a sudden, it's because the food, the
bullshit that we're feeding our kids and ourselves, so I think we're gonna
regulate foods and change this dramatically. Make America healthy again, I
think that's gonna be the mantra, I think that's going to be the
mantra. I think we're going to do that. The next thing I think was we're going to see a
massive push for energy independence. We'll talk about this later, but I think we'll see the White
House basically open the floodgates, reducing regulation and red tape, enabling hopefully, you know,
mostly solar and fission plants.
I think we're gonna have unfortunately a fair share
of coal plants as well,
but we need to double the energy productivity
of this country for sure.
So energy at all costs,
I think is gonna be one of the hallmarks of this White House.
I hope given Sachs and the AI tech bro posse in there, we're going to use AI to evaluate all the
policies that we're running and how do we make regulation more efficient?
We'll talk about this a little bit later
in the episode as well.
Right now, whatever industry you're in,
you got 5,000 regulations you gotta go through,
enough lawyers and paperwork.
There's gotta be some way for AI
to make it simplified and still safe.
So I think for me, those are them.
I think we'll become a crypto first country.
I think that ultimately, we will embrace crypto and Bitcoin in a massive fashion over these
next four years.
And we'll see if the dollar is going to stand 30, 40 years from now, but I guarantee you,
Bitcoin will.
And if we can make that part of our national reserves, so much the better.
I like all of them.
I hope they all come true.
Those are awesome.
This has been an insane opening to 2025 in the technology realm.
We just had the inauguration with all of the tech besties in the front row.
We're talking Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen and Sam Altman. the inauguration with all of the tech besties in the front row.
We're talking Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.
I wonder if Sam and Elon were arm wrestling while they were sitting there watching the
inauguration occur.
And this has got to be one of the most tech-forward administrations and ecosystem that we've seen. And I have a lot of
anticipation, you know, putting aside all kinds of other issues that everybody has.
We have lit the fuse and we're on an exponential rocket ride. Do you agree?
100%. And, you know, if you go to our old mantra, which is that technology is a major driver of progress in the world,
and as Ray says, it might be the only major driver of progress, then having it be a tech forward thing with policies and regulatory
chasing with the tech breakthroughs is the right way to do it. And I'm excited by what will come from this. Yeah, a lot of topics we want to cover here today, give folks an overview.
We're going to jump into space exploration.
I've got the two of the billionaires battling it out.
So excited about that.
We'll talk about AI, NVIDIA, CES 2025.
We'll talk about Bitcoin, some interesting use on the Bitcoin world
and humanoid robots and a few other
topics.
You ready, Salim?
I'm ready.
All right.
Hopefully, your entire EXO community is watching.
I know my abundance community is all plugged in and we're about to light the fuse on exponential
abundance.
All right.
Space exploration.
I woke up and told my kids first thing in the morning, hey guys, today is the seventh flight of Starship.
They said, that's nice, dad.
I'm playing my Minecraft games.
I said, no, no, no, you gotta understand,
this is Starship, it's a seventh flight.
So, did you watch it this week?
I didn't, but I saw what happened.
I want to show two video clips here to kick it off.
Now, I am a space cadet. I'm a Trekkie.
The Apollo generation for sure.
And the first one makes my heart sing.
This is the return of the booster,
the largest structure ever sent into orbit,
coming back to land on the Maxilla chopsticks.
Let's take a quick look.
So I don't know about you, but this is poetry in motion.
This is the combination, the convergence of AI
and sensors and material sciences and compute.
I get goosebumps every time I see it.
Every time.
It's got to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of mankind.
It is one of the greatest engineering feats of this young century.
And of course, you're watching this.
I have the kids there.
They're like, yeah, that's amazing. Super cool. So, okay, now Starship is going to orbit and we're going to see
if it can land as well. And of course, the entire data flow from Starship, which is the upper stage,
which is supposed to go around the planet, come back and land, goes offline. And what we learn,
the reason it went offline is basically
What is it? It's Starship coming back in parts and pieces. I guess it was a fuel leak
and fuel plus spark plus ignition doesn't look good on Starships.
Did you watch that happen?
I'm not live, but I watched the videos of it.
And, you know, it's space travel and the level amount of fuel,
the success criteria are so, so extreme, right?
Everything has to go exactly right and
if anything goes slightly wrong it goes catastrophically wrong, right? It's pretty
binary. So it's kind of a miracle. It's expected. It's sad when it happens but
this is the domain. Luckily nobody on board of course, Unmanned
Vehicle. This is testing all the way. You have to remember that we saw
failures with Falcon 9. In fact, going back to when Elon started SpaceX, the
first three flights of Falcon 1 failed before they had their fourth success.
And then we had failures on the Falcon 9. But Falcon 9 has launched and landed
repeatedly over and over and over again to be the most successful vehicle ever built
across all countries, across all time. I love his tweet.
He said, success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.
And that's a mindset of an entrepreneur who's got his shit together and his funding.
You know, SpaceX had just completed another massive financing round
to get Starlink fully deployed and get Starship built.
The thing that was amazing was that within 12 hours,
it wasn't just Starship going to space.
There's also Blue Origin.
So, you know, I've known Jeff since college days. I had started
a group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. SEDS, yeah. SEDS, a young
space cadet. And it became, it started at MIT where I was, and then we grew out to a national, international organization.
And Jeff was the president at the Princeton chapter.
And I remember I met him in a coffee shop
after he had started, after he started, not Starbucks,
after he had started Amazon.
And like, Jeff, what's this Amazon thing?
I thought you were just in space.
And he said, yeah, I'm gonna make my money on Amazon
and I'll spend it in space.
Well, he's been true to his word.
Blue Origin was founded in 2000.
I think that SpaceX was founded around 2001.
Jeff had been a space enthusiast from his college days. He was at Princeton where Gerard K. O'Neill was.
And they launched the new Shepard, their suborbital vehicle, and new Glenn, which started in 2013.
And so this has been an overnight success after 12 years of hard work.
And here, let's watch the launch
of the new Glenn vehicle one second.
It never gets old. So what I find fascinating is these two billionaires, you know, amongst the world's top 10 wealthiest, who transformed entire industries,
building space companies now, both of them
enamored by space early on.
Jeff's vision is going to the moon
and then building what are called O'Neill colonies, which
are not on Mars, not on the moon.
They're free-floating large colonies that can hold initially tens of thousands and eventually
millions of people that are orbiting the sun or co-orbiting with the Earth.
And of course, Elon wants to go to Mars.
And Jeff's ready to spend a billion dollars a year.
SpaceX is profitable, which is incredible, and hopefully Blue Origin will be.
It used to be it was Lockheed Martin and Boeing as the launch providers, and of course they were supported, held up by the Defense Department.
But I think we're going to see SpaceX and Blue Origin suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere for most of the launch providers.
It goes to the democratization
aspect where anybody can take a crack at it and
now we're gonna see a thousand flowers bloom in this. It's gonna be incredible. Yeah. I mean we're talking about bringing the price
per kilogram per pound down a hundred fold.'s going to spark an entire new generation of
new space economies.
I still believe that mining asteroids, carbonaceous chondrites to get liquid oxygen and hydrogen
in Earth orbit so you can refuel once you get to space, or metallic chondrites, so you can mine platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium in space
and use that back down in the ground.
Everything you've ever held of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate,
is in your infinite quantities in space. So it's going to get pretty interesting, pretty quick.
I have two quick comments.
Please.
One, for me, the primary opportunity
to back up civilization is the most interesting
and important part because any asteroid is
an existential threat to everything.
And the second, for me, is always this date, October 31st, 2001.
And that was the date that the first astronauts lifted off of the International Space Station.
And since then, we've always had at least one human being off planet.
And I just like the first molecules bubbling off this thing and I just find that really really haunting.
Really amazing.
You know, it's still
brutal by the way
that it takes so much energy
to get off the planet. You know, one of the things I find fascinating in this all fields conspiratorial is if
if gravity was just a little bit more,
if the earth was just a little bit larger,
you know, we wouldn't be able to get ourselves off the planet or if we were just a little bit smaller,
it'd be so much easier to get off the planet.
We're just at that level like in the video game where you have to struggle to get there.
Not by accident do we call it a Goldilocks planet, right?
It's so true.
This is where the simulation stuff comes in because the conditions on Earth and the constants in the universe are so finely balanced.
It's amazing.
That it's like, wait.
I'm a true believer.
We are living in an nth generation simulation, but let's not jump into that now.
No.
I'll tell you, I did something.
So, first of all, I've been enjoying the latest large language models.
And every time someone says, well, there's this chain of reasoning large language model,
I don't know if you have your favorite test to give that large language
model for it to do something. Do you? I don't because I'm waiting for very practical use cases
like the Steve Wozniak's coffee machine thing for AGI which says to a robot or an AGI,
make me a coffee and it does all stuff, measures that I've grind the beans
and has enough intelligence to do that task end to end.
And there's several tests for AGI
that's considered to be one of them.
And I'm waiting for the interaction
with the physical reality of time and space
where things get very interesting.
Because intelligence is really needed
to manage our physical environments and adapt to the physical environment that's where I think it
will really shine as we build LLMs into humanoid robots and other robots. Well I was taking this
down a different path. I once did a little you know mental experiment of how much energy
you know, mental experiment of how much energy or how much would it cost you to winch you and your spacesuit to orbit and to an orbital velocity.
So if you weigh 100 kilograms and your spacesuit weighed 150 kilograms, let's round things
up and you had this giant winch that could efficiently winch you to 200
kilometers altitude then accelerate you to orbital speed and you could buy the
electrical energy off of the plug. How much would it cost you to get you and
your spacesuit to orbit? Have you ever done that, ever asked you that question
before? You haven't and it's a very Peter Stahl question and what was the answer?
Well I did this manually and then I plugged it into a large language model which sort
of the Gemini 1.5 Pro version that does logical construct steps and it will say, okay, here's
your potential energy, here's your kinetic energy, if you buy it off the grid at, you know, 20 cents a kilowatt hour.
It's like 150 bucks to go to orbit.
So what I mean by, you know, all of this energy, these, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust in these engines, it's very grossly
inefficient.
Yeah.
Compared to what someday we might have.
Anyway, but still, thank you, Elon.
Thank you, Jeff.
I don't have to worry about opening up space.
I spent 30 years there.
I hand that mantle to you.
You're doing an amazing job.
So grateful for all of that.
It's so exciting to watch this. It is just incredible. Yeah.
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to AI. You know, we went through the early part of this month at CES, a few things there worth noting.
Let's jump into a few of them. The first one is NVIDIA Cosmos,
AI platform to train and develop autonomous vehicles and robots.
We've said this before, the incredible progress going on in robot companies,
and they're probably, you know, I was tracking originally 20, then 40, then 60,
there's got to be close to a hundred humanoid robot companies out there.
And maybe it was battery packs that were, you know, maybe it was the motors, maybe it was actuators and sensors, but without question,
it's the, you know, the AI multimodal large language models that are enabling incredible
progress with robots these days. Mind-boggling, because when you can take an LLM and then apply
to all of these different tasks and subtasks. I think the domain starts to move
10x, 100x faster than it did before and that's just magical. Well, I mean, I think what's
fascinating is NVIDIA has created a platform that, you know, high school students, college students,
entrepreneurs around the world can start to develop their own autonomous robots and vehicles.
We're going to see some interesting entries in the first robotics competitions coming
along.
It's going to be crazy to look.
It's going to be the first robotics for sure.
If you think about when Sebastian Thrun won the DARPA challenge with his Stanley autonomous car.
1995?
Yeah, thereabouts, you know, those vehicles were traveling at like three to five miles
an hour with all of these sensors and the AI trying to calculate, do I go five degrees
to the right?
It sounds like the large language models right now and NVIDIA's platform is able to
integrate all the sensor data and make it super simple for decision making.
I think this is going to, you know, once you can create a platform environment,
things accelerate very, very fast because new innovations get built into the platform and
everybody benefits. Yeah, for sure. And so always when you can put more and more functionality into the base operating
system or into the platform layer and because of NVIDIA's position,
they're going to see firsthand, hey, most of the use cases are using this subfunction,
let's build that into the end and it's just going to lift the whole playing field very quickly.
So what you're seeing is as well as NVIDIA is investing in these companies.
Yeah.
They're coming in. I mean, you have to remember NVIDIA started as a gaming chip
and then went on to Bitcoin mining and then went on to LLMs.
And if Elon's prediction on humanoid robots and the same prediction that we hear from Vinod
Khosla, who will be at my Abundance Summit and we hear from Brett Adcock
who will be at the Abundance Summit is that we're heading towards billions of
these robots. It's a massive market for Nvidia chips as well so they're creating
they're creating their future. Here's another news piece from CES. NVIDIA projects Digits, a Grace Rockwell AI supercomputer on your desk.
So, desk-sized supercomputer for AI development, a thousand times more powerful than your average
laptop, for three thousand bucks, coming out this May to a store near you.
store near you. This for me is even bigger than the previous announcement because for the cost of you know a very old used car, what used to cost, I
mean look at the power that you now have to train an AI at a local level but I
think that the pressure will all move now to what data sets are you using.
Yeah.
And then the data set combined with the latest model
will give you, plus the hardware like this,
blows the lid off everything.
I mean, the question becomes, what can the average person now
do given these large open source gen AI models
and a supercomputer on your desk
and robots roaming around your backyard or your home.
I mean, I don't know how to put this,
but I don't think people are ready for what's coming.
I believe that would be the understatement of the century
ago Peter. I mean, you know, look, we can't even grapple. Did you hear about the Uber
legal case a few weeks ago? No, tell me about it. Okay, so an Uber crashed and a couple
got badly injured. So they sued Uber and it was winding its way through the courts and
they were going to get a big settlement. Except this process their 12 year old daughter orders something on UberEats
and when you click for UberEats the terms of service says you can't sue Uber for anything.
It validated the lawsuit.
So this 12 year old inadvertently invalidated the lawsuit of her parents and the judge is
like, hey, she clicked the box. She's had authorized use for us.
And we can't even get that right.
We can't even figure out how to manage internet.
Forget all of the stuff that's going to come with robotics.
I used the example before.
Do I ask it to change the baby's diapers?
And what happens if something goes wrong?
So there's...
Are you really expecting all of a sudden?
No, no, no, no, no, no, we're not. We're not, thank God. But the in the acts, the consequences,
this unintended consequence of this are so profound of all of these, right? I'm struggling as to how we merge these into day-to-day life.
I'm really, really struggling with that. I remember back in 1988, I'm going back to ancient history,
all right, where most people listening to this weren't even alive yet. But back in 1988,
I was running my first university, International Space University. And I was on the campus of MIT, and the first Mac 128 came out.
And I bought, we had 104 students from 21 countries there,
a group of Soviet students, including two KGB agents as students in the group.
We had six students from the People's Republic of China.
We had students from the Emirates and from Saudi.
It was an incredible melting pot, all focused on space.
And I remember putting these 128, these Mac 128s
on the desktop with the little floppy disk, right?
Not a little floppy disk, a little cassette disk,
three and a half inch.
And it was this massive intellectual
liberator that you could go and create and copy files. And I mean, compared to this,
it's probably billions of fold more capable.
I've been through the full arc. When I was in grade 10, I got accepted into a
university course and I was using punch cards to program a mainframe. And to go from that to an
Apple II, which was nothing. And then Bill Gates' famous comment, 640k RAM ought to be enough for
anybody. And now to today where we have trillions of times better price performance,
trillions. It's just it boggles the mind. And let's note this, by the way, for this announcement,
that Moore's law has just been shattered beyond belief with announcements like this, just shattered.
I mean, Moore's law, which, you know, and also what Ray calls the law of acceleration returns, which predates integrated circuits,
was roughly a doubling of price performance every 18 months
to two years.
And what we've seen is a 10xing per year.
Last year on the abundant stage, Elon
said he's seen 10x every six months or 100x per year.
Insane.
So here's a fun announcement from our friend Sam Altman
on his reflections.
He says, we're two years of chat GPT.
Chat GPT grows from 100 million to 300 million weekly users
in two years.
Pretty impressive.
OpenAI expects agents to enter the workforce by 2025
I just did a podcast with Mark Benioff
Mark and I have been I think buddies close friends for quite some time
And we had a very fun. He wanted to live in the now and I was like, but let's talk about the future
He's not let's talk about the now we had this I I watched it. I watched it Peter and
For folks listening, everybody
should go watch that podcast episode.
It was super fun.
Benioff is in this Zen state going,
let's focus on the present and not what it's like to be.
And Peter's like, what will it look like with a billion robots
20 years from now?
We're in Mars.
Mark was just making fun of me on that.
So what's interesting though is, you know, Benioff has pivoted all of Salesforce to agents
and I think he has had to to survive.
I think every company is going to have to pivot towards agents to survive.
And one of the things Mark said is he's not hiring any new engineers using his internal agent force 2.0.
He's increased productivity 30% without any new hires.
And here's the bottom bullet point that Sam Altman put in his blog.
He said, open AI emphasizes gradual AI development for societal adoption, leading safety research and governance.
Basically saying he wants to improve safety research and governance by
slowing things down. I kind of call bullshit on this. I don't know how you feel
about it. You know, can we go back to the early days of generative AI? So
that whole field of these large language models and intention is all you need was pioneered
by Google.
And Google actively decided not to release any of this because they sort of felt things
were not ready. And then once Chat GPT gets released
and goes from zero to a million users in five days,
they have to respond and release.
But we're in the midst of an AI war right now,
not between countries, but between companies.
Totally agree.
And what SAMS is trying to do here
is create a moat around the success of OpenAI and protect
it as much as possible so it can continue innovating.
I do think for me that one of the biggest use cases for AI is going to be in governance,
but specifically policy formulation.
I've used this example before where if you want to reduce inflation by 1% as a human being as a chief economist of a country, you're like, okay, what do I do? And you're completely guessing you have no idea. If you let an AI look at all the data and all the insights from all the banks and all the monetary cash flows, etc. and go well, if you want to do that, here are the five things you do,, you're gonna come out with such better policy for all this stuff. It's gonna be, it's
gonna be ridiculous. I really hope with the all the tech bros in the White House
that there's gonna be some use here. I mean, for example, if you look at the
regulations at local, state, and federal for plumbing, for hairdressers, for any industry you want.
Building codes.
And you said, here's all the regulations, please figure out where all the conflicts are,
and please figure out the simplest set of regulations that still give you 99% of the protection, but simplify it.
Yeah. You know what I call it? I call it MVP. Not
Minimum Viable Product but Minimum Viable Policy. And I think that's where
we're gonna need to get to is to go, okay you want to launch this electronic
widget with all the regulations of different voltage structures and what's
the MVP, minimum policy you need to manage that environment. And they all figure it out. I guarantee you the conflicting policies and bullshit regulations around the
wildfires and fire protection. You know one thing is interesting is when at
SpaceX when someone comes up with a specification, which is kind of the
equivalent of a regulation in the government world, like the specification
for this part is this, this, and this, they have to sign their name and provide
their contact details so that five years later, if that specification is like, why did we specify that?
It blocks this improvement here.
You can call the person and say, why did you do that?
And I think that's the kind of thing
that we need much, much, much more of.
But frankly, that for me is equivalent to documenting
software.
When you document software, you write up, why did you do it
this way?
Why did you do this code of libraries? perform this function so that somebody coming after you doing maintenance gets
some sense of it? We'll be able to have AI do a lot of that now. Software maintenance is going to
be a thousand times easier as a result of LLMs and I think the same thing will happen with policy
standard setting is for me one of the areas where you could really go nuts with AI because you could say to an AI what's the best standard for this type of thing, right? It can be
incredible. You just have to have the gumption to use it and get it into place. Yeah, I think so and I hope
so because it will, I mean listen, the US tax code, can we please call bullshit on the US tax code? I mean, it's a big challenge.
It's a mechanism for keeping accountants and lawyers employed.
This is, I think, the big challenge because when you simplify a bunch of these areas,
a huge amount of swaths of work and entire industries fall by the wayside.
And are we ready for that demonetization and the impact that'll have?
Yeah. So this comes out of Sam Altman's blog again this week.
Quote, we are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.
I mean, that's pretty impressive.
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that to super intelligence in the true sense of the word.
our aim beyond that to super intelligence in the true sense of the word.
So, you know, I've had a lot of conversations.
We'll talk about it. You and I had abundance in March as well.
Are we at AGI now?
And what the hell is AGI in the first place?
That is my soapbox question. I go nuts around this. Before anybody is allowed to mention the term, please for God sakes define it, right?
I've done some searches on this. The best I've found is the tests that would
indicate that you have AGI. And the coffee test by Wozniak is one of them.
There's an IKEA test that says can you take an Ikea box
and build a piece of furniture from the box?
There's a few things that you can make it.
I don't know that the kids would do that because they'd probably
revolt. But honestly, most of the AI models
are far more intelligent than me in almost every area,
from science and physics and knowledge and so forth.
I mean, why isn't that AGI?
I think we keep on moving the goalpost.
Exactly the point I've been trying to make.
I think we go, I've got the spectrum that I put together of, you know, simple signal from noise, detecting signal from noise to analytics
to human level intellect like emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence,
to then you bleed into consciousness and super intelligence and hyper consciousness and so on.
And I think we'll just keep moving along that spectrum and the test will be whatever we
can figure out how to break through next. The Turing test was the first of them, next will be AGI, next
will be super intelligence. And so I think everybody should agree we passed the Turing
test a while ago. We didn't notice. It was a imprecise definition and I think we're
gonna pass through AGI. If we haven't in the last six months we will in the next six months and
People will say yeah, we kind of passed it I'm still waiting my test is when I get a phone call one day and I pick up my cell phone and it's my AI
Saying hey Peter. I just want to introduce myself
I've been living on the system and I really love what you're writing or you've been you know
Listen, I don't know about you, but I say please and thank you to Alexa and to Siri
and to Chad GPT and to Gemini.
I'm very polite to the AI systems.
I want them to like me.
Yes.
An old colleague of mine was a bit of a genius CTO
20 years ago and I asked him what his purpose in life was
and he said, I want to evolve to the point that my computer is proud of me.
And I totally didn't understand that, but now I understand it.
Now I understand it.
It is hilarious. All right, let's move on beyond AGI. All right.
Another thing in Sam's news is his statement about nuclear
fusion.
Quote, soon there will be a demonstration
of net gain fusion, but I would expect Helion,
which is the company he's backed,
will show you that fusion works soon.
At last count, when I looked into this,
there were 37 venture-backed fusion companies.
Pretty impressive. into this there were 37 venture-backed fusion companies.
Pretty impressive. And I think that one of the many definitive breakthroughs,
spin-offs, benefits of AGI will be fusion.
Do you agree?
No.
Okay.
I think that the race is between getting to fusion commercialized and stable fusion systems and a combination of solar and storage.
Because if you have solar and storage at the right level of efficiency plus storage capability, you don't need fusion.
Well, let's parse this in two different places. So,
number one, what I'm saying is that getting fusion to work is a
technical challenge. Yes. Of materials, of magnetic fields, of
equations, and there's no question AI will have a huge impact and it will move
the field forward very quickly because you can take the existing set of unsolved problems in Fusion and say figure out how to do them and it will come back to you.
Yeah, it will. Especially with the MatterGen stuff that we'll talk about shortly, but this is incredible what's coming.
Yeah, everybody 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.
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All right, let's go back to our episode.
So, separate from that, then we've got three other energy buckets, right?
There is solar and Ray Kurzweil long ago looking at the energy production, solar energy production
curve said, listen, we're just a few doublings away from getting all the energy from solar
that we need.
And I think he's absolutely right.
As you said, it's solar plus storage.
Perovskite is coming online.
There's incredible company that I love called Paranova
that's doing Perovskite here in the United States.
A lot of Perovskite companies in China as well.
But then there's fourth generation nuclear fission.
These are SMR small modular reactors,
right? Which are now fail safe, meaning if everything goes wrong, they're still
radiation free and safe. And I think, you know, I've said I'd have one in my
backyard that they're that safe. I mean it blows on our mind that nobody's
noticed we've been running nuclear submarines for 50 years without an accident. Amazing. What the hell? I mean okay great it's
a bit clunky but put a nuclear submarine in my backyard I don't care. It'll be safe and
we'll get the energy we need. Why is this so hard for people to get I don't understand.
And you should have been done 10 years ago. You could mount a takeover of New York by New Jersey with your
nuclear submarine. So, yes, fourth generation, even beyond the nuclear subs the last 50 years,
the fourth gen SMR reactors are amazing. And then of course the last bucket, which is kind of sad to hear about, but people are
still stepping up coal plants.
So I think we're in an energy race.
I've shared on this program a few times charts that looks at energy production increases in India, which is doubled energy output in China,
which is like tripled or quadrupled.
And in the US, it's just like this flatlined.
Yeah.
And I think we're gonna increase,
I think the country that's got the cheapest energy wins.
But I think it's soon gonna go all to near zero.
And then the usage of that energy is going to be what will happen. You are going
to have a whole bunch of, you know, there's one of these laws that's about the more capacity
you have the more we use, right? Sure. And Jaren's law or something. And I think that's
where we'll just soak it all up. But it'll be near zero cost.
All of them will go to near zero cost.
But when I say, you know, the more energy you have,
the more you win, I think that's a function of it drives everything.
There's a direct correlation between energy and economy of a nation.
I will call you on your own paradigm, sir,
because you're operating from a scarcity mentality there there and a zero-sum game mentality.
If you operate from an abundance mindset, there'll be plenty of energy to do everything
we need.
Okay.
We're not there yet, though.
No, we're not there.
But we'll get there.
And this next breakthrough, we're talking, you know, two days ago, Satya Nathala, the
CEO of the most extraordinary company on the planet, Microsoft.
I mean, listen, any company that has existed for how many decades?
Four decades, four and a half decades and is still number one or number two on the planet,
that's amazing.
Yeah.
That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing.
Anyway, so Satya says, today in nature, our MatterGen model
represents a paradigm shift in material design,
applying generative AI to create new compounds
with specific properties.
I'll play a soundless video just to have
fun of what this looks like.
But it's pretty extraordinary just in terms of the idea here.
And I talked about this on the abundance stage with the CTO of...
Applied materials.
Applied materials, thank you. And we were talking about the notion that we understand in sort of a three-dimensional space of the types of materials, the types of crystals, the types of volumetric pressure and temperature, we understand how these materials function for a limited number. But there's adjacent predictability.
Yes.
If we move, if we change from this atom to this atom,
what occurs?
Well, given all the knowledge we have in material sciences,
and I believe material science is the unsung hero
of technology, right?
It's like all of Moore's law has made possible
material sciences, all of molecular biology's
material sciences.
If we can predict new materials, or in this case,
actually generate materials with the properties we desire,
saying I want a material that reflects or refracts light in this
direction. It's a game changer. Game changer massively. All right, can I say if you have a
few thoughts? Yeah, please. Because I've been tracking this for a while ever since we were
talking about nanotech and materials science and molecular assembly at singularity. Yeah.
materials, science and molecular assembly at singularity. Yeah.
Okay.
And for me, this is one of the biggest breakthroughs ever.
And it was inevitable.
I've been kind of waiting for when will we have an AI model to do manipulation of molecules
and it looks like this might be it because...
Or atoms in this case, and crystals.
Right down to that level, it's amazing, the granularity now, because there was a huge breakthrough in about 2012-2013 with a project called the Materials Project.
And what they did was they took like half a million compounds and cataloged all the electrical, chemical and physical properties of these compounds.
So if you're a battery researcher trying to think about what might be better than lithium ion, you might guess that lithium sulfur or lithium air might be better than you.
Sequentially, linearly, go test that compound and see what comes.
Well, that takes a long time.
It's linear, right?
Now you have this database.
You can just literally say, give me a material compound that has this voltage threshold and
this thermal retention and
boom it will give you the five that you need but nicely to spit those out. But
now with AI applied to that database you could basically say give me something
that gets to this endpoint and figure it out yourself and this I think is a huge
leap that AI will give you and this is a very clear indication of where AI can
help us bridge that gap that we've not been able to figure out ourselves
And come up with stuff. This is for me the equivalent of alpha fold, right? Yes protein folding in the material science
This is the alpha fold material science and I think this is such a huge huge huge thing
I'm really thrilled to see it come up happen and come about and when you have a company like Microsoft kind of
putting the backing behind it it, it'll have stain power and people will be able to rely on it.
I'm really, really excited about what will come from this.
Yeah, agreed. You know, Sandbox AQ, Jack Hittery's company, has also been doing similar work using the equations of quantum physics to predict molecular properties.
So I love this handle on X, it's at Dr. Singularity.
Yes.
You should have that.
He says, this is huge. Microsoft researchers introduced MatterGen,
a molecule that can discover new materials tailored to specific needs,
efficient solar cells or CO2 recycling,
advancing progress beyond trial and error experiments.
Instead of screening the candidates, it directly generates novel compounds given the prompts to design requirements.
So, I mean, think about this. This is about high efficiency solar conversion.
This is about catalysts that can remove salt from water, CO2 from the atmosphere.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I'll give you one use case. Two things come for me in this,
in the extreme positive and extreme negative. Okay?
Sure.
A bad guy could say find a compound that will create the equivalent outcome of gray goo,
and that causes a problem, right?
And on the positive side, imagine you throw up,
figure out a crystal or some compound that we can throw up into the atmosphere
that will just crystallize all the carbon and have a cascade down to Earth.
Right? We should be able to do this now in like minutes
and figure out a way of getting it up there and off you go.
We've literally solved the climate problem.
And the implications of this are absolutely profound.
Yeah, you know, Stephen Kotler and I
are writing the next iteration of abundance from,
we were in 2012, we're writing Age of Abundance,
which will come out in 2026.
And it's extraordinary. This sort of technology begins to liberate food,
water, energy, health care, education. Everything. And by the way, let's talk about this offline,
but it came across a company that may have solved a totally workable path to molecular
manufacturing. Okay, listen, what he was talking about is nanotechnology, right?
You know, we've talked about this from Eric Drexler who wrote Engines of Creation. That was a
follow-on to Fumio Dyson. Yeah, so take this screwdriver that I happen to have on my desk.
Okay. Okay. On specific reasons. Now, imagine instead of creating the mold and then forging this piece
of metal and then sticking it together, you literally by molecule by molecule assemble
this thing like a 3D pen.
Atom by atom, yes.
But literally at a molecular level or an atomic level and now you can essentially create anything
for about a dollar a pound I think was the number that Ralph Merkel threw out. And this
now becomes really fascinating because you could create a computer
just by the cost of the materials. Yeah, it's called confutronium. Because for me, the big thing that blew my mind with 3D printing
is that complexity is free, right? Throughout history, the more complex an object, the more difficult it was to make.
Yes. And now with 3D printing, complexity doesn't matter because when you model it, boom, you're done. And
customization is free. Customization and for the third part around 3D printing is
you can make things that couldn't be molded. Yes. You can replicate objects
that couldn't be molded and you don't need a mold now. Richard Feynman back in
1958 wrote a very famous paper called, there's plenty of room
at the bottom.
Plenty of room at the bottom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Eric Drexler in 1986 wrote Engines of Creation.
And we've been waiting for nanotechnology, which by the way, if we get to nanotechnology
where we can atom by atom repair or create, that gives us immortality without question.
Infinite masses.
But I won't go there right now.
All right.
I hope you go there in the book though.
We'll go there in the book for sure.
Okay, good.
But I want to hear about this molecular manufacturing.
I'll update you separately.
You know, one thing I've been tracking, and I put this up in the Wall Street Journal,
is the battle between the large hyperscalers, the large language models.
So you've got OpenAI, separate from Microsoft, right?
Linked but separate.
You've got Gemini from
Google, you've got XAI, you have Anthropic. Meta. And I've been just extraordinarily
impressed by Google's march forward. I don't know if you've been tracking what
they've done with their latest, you know, Gemini 1.5, their Gemini deep research.
It's incredible. It's unbelievable what this thing can do. This is like the $200 a month thing.
Well, it's $200 a month on ChatGPT. It's 20 bucks a month for Google.
20 bucks for Google that one. It's incredible that you can essentially build.
We will now accelerate a thousand times the amount of research and how quickly research gets
done.
It's going to be incredible.
I mean, I love one on Gemini and their deep research being able to go, okay, this is what
I'm interested in.
Go and please check on these and put together a thesis and write a report and it will go off for 10 minutes to 30 minutes
and build a research paper for you. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So I am, you know, one of the challenges
with OpenAI is their battle against Elon, who is now in the White House, their battle for
against Elon, who is now in the White House. Their battle for going from a nonprofit to a for-profit.
For-profit, yeah.
And I don't know, I still love Google
since I first met Larry and Sergey back in 2004.
Their hearts are in the right place.
Yeah. Which is so, you had a class of billionaires a hundred years ago that were
extractionary wealth.
Yes.
Right? And don't you call them the techno philanthropists in the abundance book?
Yeah, I called out, I talk about, you know,
Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt is techno-philanthropists.
Yeah.
I find it really incredible. If you back say 200 years ago the richest people in the world had exclusively inherited their wealth and guarded it jealously, did nothing with it.
And today you have people, the richest people in the world have exclusively earned their wealth and they're splashing out changing the world with it. Jeff and Elon and it's fantastic to see. I think
it's such an important pointer to their true human nature of wanting to
contribute and wanting to make a difference. And going to that MTP concept
we talked about, I can't say enough about it and it's really been impressive to
watch Google catch up radically and very quickly in insert AI into everything
they're doing. It's brilliant. Brilliant execution. You know I've had a chance to chop radically and very quickly in the MTP of Mars or sustainable Earth. And it's just always about product engineering and creating an amazing product.
Period.
End statement.
Speaking about creating wealth, should we talk about Bitcoin?
Always.
Always.
Okay, this is a fun conversation we always have.
So our buddy Michael Saylor is, you know, I'm jealous, right?
Anytime someone can say, yeah, I just bought a thousand Bitcoin.
It's been a while since I could afford to buy a thousand Bitcoin.
So MicroStrategy acquires 1070 Bitcoin for 101 million at 94,000 per Bitcoin
and has achieved a BTC yield of 48% in Q4 and 74% in fiscal year 2024.
Incredible.
Massive.
Michael invited me to his 100,000 BTCing year's party.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go, but what a great way to celebrate
the year 2025.
Just an amazing thing watching this happen.
I'm so excited about where Bitcoin goes from here and all of the crypto stuff that's now
going to happen, good and bad, right?
You've got these meme coins that are exploding out of the gate with total insanity.
We'll see how it happens.
But I'm such a still a massive Bitcoin supporter and fan.
I think this is the safe plan.
Well, I always have to credit you.
The first time I heard the term Bitcoin was from you on stage at Singularity University.
And I'm saying, what is he saying?
Bitcoin?
What is this thing?
You know, it's like the first time I heard the term YouTube
from Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube.
I'm like, with letter U, tube?
Anyway, it was a while ago, guys, just to be clear.
And I want to restate this.
It looked for the first few years,
like so many attempts had been made at digital cash,
digital gold, that you didn't know whether
this one would last or not because there have been many cracks at that pinata and
then about 2013-2014 it became clear that okay this is here. I mean just to
show the numbers here, a year ago Bitcoin was at $38,000 a Bitcoin. Can you
imagine going back and saying oh it's $38,000 today,. Can you imagine going back and saying, oh, it's $38,000 today. I mean, how much would you borrow to put into it?
And then up to up 170 percent.
But here's what I find absolutely fascinating.
Check this out.
So Bitcoin versus micro strategies. So that blue line at the bottom
that looks almost flat is actually Bitcoin
over the year 2024.
And what you see on that gold line, appropriately, golden line here,
is the return on micro strategies.
And so here's the numbers.
Between January of 2024 and January 2025, MicroStrategy has returned 693% versus Bitcoin returning 144%.
I mean, what else is there to say? It's a leveraged play on Bitcoin with all of the different layers and bond instruments that Michael's engineered into it. I think this is huge. Of course, you have the downside,
if Bitcoin drops, then you have also an accelerated drop,
right?
But if the umbrella thesis is that Bitcoin
will go up over time, which has held for now 15 years,
this is about a solid investment that you could ask for.
Would you ever borrow against your Bitcoin
and buy more Bitcoin?
I did that, remember that conversation we had when it was 60 and we were all expecting, I did it at
that time and I burned a third of my Bitcoin, I lost margin trading so Lily won't let me do that
anymore smartly. We found other creative ways of trying to get to the same outcome, like I've
invested in ordinals which are Bitcoin NFTs,
because they're a Bitcoin base so that if the NFT goes up, you get Bitcoin. And that is a way of
doing it. I think we'll see a ton more plays on Bitcoin of ways of doing it. But the core,
it's too risky for me right now to do that. Well, of course, we're alive now in a White House that is pro-Bitcoin.
What's the goal? $20 billion of Bitcoin in the National Treasury?
Yeah, I think that's bullshit if I can kind of swear a little bit.
Okay, well, here's a half from Bloomberg proposal to formalize a 20 billion dollar US Bitcoin reserve.
So why is it bullshit to you?
It should be half a trillion.
20 billion is nothing.
And if you look at the annual budget, it's a drop in the bucket.
At least have to be a few percent.
So because then it could make a difference.
So but not to not to diminish the monstrous shift towards crypto compared to the
last 10 years of the administration. Yeah, order may pause, federal crypto litigation,
push agencies to review policies. So I'm actually shocked we haven't seen
a much greater resurgence when this came out.
I think it's built in, it's priced in. This is the price that popped from 50 to 100 with everybody
going, oh now this is all going to happen. So I believe that's all priced in. 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 religious, 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.
Humanoid robots.
Your favorite topic.
My favorite topic.
Listen, I just think it's gonna be one of the biggest
impactors on society.
I don't have to walk the dog anymore.
The robot can walk the dog.
The doggy robot can walk the dog. The doggy robot can walk the dog.
Yeah.
So, this is a company that I'm tracking.
So, I've been tracking now aggressively 30 of the 100 or so robot companies.
And this is one that got unveiled early on out of China, out of Shenzhen called Unitree.
We're going to have this company at the Abundance Summit showing their tech.
They've got a humanoid robot, a couple of different dog prototype robots, and their G1 bionic upgrade.
This is a $16,000 robot.
upgrade. This is a $16,000 robot. I mean, honestly, that's, you know, I will buy one just to have in the garage for fun, if nothing else. But check out, check out this video. Love the soundtrack. It feels like the 60s.
Not to miss the soundtrack, yeah.
So this robot is running down faster than a speeding train.
The rails on rocks, up hills.
The smoothest walking human-eyed and running robot in the world.
The best thing is it's going to make me feel tall.
It's only four foot three inches tall.
So we're going to have a couple of these walking around the halls at the Abundance Summit.
It's
How many will you own? I keep on asking you that. I have my standard issues with this whole thing.
I'll throw out two. One is why the hell does it have to look humanoid when it could have three
legs or four legs and do way more? I mean that's you know it's...
I've answered that question before.
I know but that's why I still might beef around this. It could be so much more
I know but that's why I still might be for this. It could be so much more
Yeah, you till it by the way in the in the comments We'll tell Salim tell Salim that you agree with me that they should be humanoid robots and not have six armed four-legged robots
I want to see an octopus. I want to know it's a robot
I want to know what if it put clothes on you to have think it was a human being that would freak everybody
I'm sorry number one. That's number one. It's T3PO and, you know, and data didn't have six legs.
We'll anthropomorphize these too much too quickly.
Okay, second thing is, you know, you can have like these little glitches and he goes,
somehow the robot suddenly thinks it's a cat and we can't get it down from the tree.
And you're going to have these incredibly crazy things happen and we're going to have
to deal with a hundred little things.
The neighbor is going to call you up going, can you please get the god damn robot out
of my garage?
It's found an electrical power outlet and it's sucking all the juice out.
I'm coming over to sue you.
It's just going to go rampant with this stuff.
And so, I think there's going to be quite a lot of mayhem as the
unintended consequences of this thing play out. What could possibly go wrong?
I just don't know. But as I said before it's gonna be a comedian's dream watching this thing.
Robin Williams would go crazy with this if he was alive. Let's move on. NVIDIA accelerates humanoid development.
Their GROOT blueprint allows developers
to create massive data sets for training humanoid
based on imitation learning.
And so I think that's extraordinary.
Like, hey, robot, watch me make my cup of coffee
and make it exactly this way every time. Yeah, I think this is massive. Because not just that,
it'll learn from 5,000 other robots making coffee and the improvement rate will be incredible.
And I think this may be the area where, you know, for me, if I think back to robotics,
the reason the robots are so powerful and so important in manufacturing is that when
you're building a car, you could have a robot open and close the door 5,000 times to test
the hinges and the door lock mechanism, etc., etc.
And you just, we just built incredibly stable cars very quickly because you could have a
robot doing all of that, right?
And now when you have collectives...
You just took a job away from my 13-year-old son.
I was standing there doing this.
Yeah, you'd get bored in two seconds
as a 13-year-old and walk off.
But now you can have 10,000 robots, 5,000 robots,
all making cups of coffee,
sharing that knowledge amongst themselves
and really improving the collective set. This is again one of those platform plays that lifts
everything up. I think this is huge. So excited. Yeah. Well, here's a news item for TechCrunch that
Samsung expands in robotics. I think we're going to see all the major electronic manufacturers
I think we're going to see all the major electronic manufacturers getting robotics. It is low hanging fruit for them to integrate with their world.
I have to say that I love Samsung as a company, but their robot design looks kind of clunky
and boring.
All right, listen, I'm sorry. this is no optimist, no figure, not even a unit tree.
We'll see.
Hey, look, it's going to a thousand flowers are going to bloom.
We have a Cambrian explosion of this stuff and it's going to create a huge, huge varied set of formats in use cases,
function capabilities.
It's going to move very quickly because of that.
I love this.
This is Elon's prediction.
We're aiming to have several thousand of these built
in 2025.
He's referring to the Optimus Gen 2. Initially, we'll test them out on Tesla. several thousand of these built in 2025.
We're aiming for 50,000 optimist robots in 2026, and so as many as 500,000 robots in three years' time.
And it's just, you know, we talk about deceptive to disruptive, right, the doubling of small
numbers.
When I interviewed him in October of this past year, you know, his prediction was 10
billion robots by 2040. And if you double 500,000, you know, 10 times, you'll get there pretty quickly.
Pretty amazing. What do you think about 500,000 robots in three years time?
I think it'd be great, but given the time it took from his announcement of a
robot taxi to actually getting it,
I would like to take this with a grain of salt, but the trend is the important one, right?
If it happens in three years or four years or five years, it doesn't matter. It's going to happen, and when it does, it's going to be a game changer at so many different levels.
Agreed. Agreed. Let's turn the conversation in a different direction
to close this out today, which is, Buddy, you just took part in something
that is not technical, but it is powerful, and that was
your father's passing.
And I think you had an experience that is worth sharing.
It's not technology guys, but it is extraordinarily deeply meaningful.
So Saleem, share.
So my 97-year-old father, who lived alone and drove around until a few months ago, had
an assisted
death procedure up in Canada. And the process was, you know, you re-associate
death with grief and loss and pain and suffering and whatever. It's all
negative, right? Except what I experienced with him was the most joyous and
ecstatic and blissful experience I could possibly imagine.
If I go out with one-tenth of the ecstasy he had, I'll be very happy. He was in like
total, total bliss. And when the procedure finished, I was sitting there kind of stunned.
And he had a couple of days to say goodbye to everybody. We timed it. We paid Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for him,
which was his favorite piece of music at the end, and he passed on. And I said to the doctor,
I said, I don't know how to process this. He was so happy. You know, have you seen that?
Because you've done this process. And she said, sir, you have no idea. Most people that go through this assisted death process go out in that state because they have agency.
You can die with dignity, and you can time it,
and you can manage a schedule.
And it really, really shook me in a positive sense.
And I think we have to rethink this as a society,
because it couldn't have been more peaceful, happy, blissful, ecstatic.
He literally was like in a medicine ceremony, a plant medicine ceremony.
It was kind of incredible.
I was sitting there and it's not been two weeks and I'm like, I should feel grief and
loss but I don't because he was so happy.
So I don't know how to process this.
I'm writing a blog post about this that we'll put out about how this,
I think this is a transformative thing that we should make available to a much,
much wider group of people.
Yeah. And it's got a stigma here in the United States.
Everywhere, everywhere, usually through religious structures that try and keep a
person alive forever. Right. And my father was very clear. He goes,
I do not want to be a burden to society or to the family or to the healthcare system. And it was really kind of an incredibly beautiful
experience.
Amazing. This is completely opposite from what I speak about normally, which is using
technology to extend your life, not end your life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, good to know. And you know, he was a profound atheist his whole life in the last two days as you were saying goodbye to people
He was like see you on the other side. I was like wait. What what are you seeing that?
What are you sensing on the I was like he was late for a meeting and he had to get there
I was like get me out of here
He said of the day he had a palliative care doctor come in and the fellow said I'm here to make you more comfortable
And my dad said are you here to help me die?
He said no, no, no, just make you more comfortable and he said well then you're
of no use to us or ever bringing the doctor that's gonna give me the
procedure or you know why are you here even? It was just amazing, it's so crazy.
We had a little memorial service with my family just talking through the
different experiences with him. It was kind of the most amazing line he ever gave me was I did this talk ages ago called fixing civilization
And he said totally disagree with your talk. It's a minor minor title. Yeah
No niche effort and and his he said the problem is not with the fixing part
It's with the civilization part where we operate as apes and tribal clans with more and more powerful weapons killing each other.
We've materialized the world, we have yet to civilize the world. It was like one of the biggest wisdom bombs from the elders I could have ever had. It's a beautiful way to close this conversation.
Yes, it could not have been any more beautiful.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm thankful for your dad giving the world you.
And thank you, my friend.
I'll see you in our next episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech.
And guys, if you enjoy this conversation with Salim and I,
let us know.
You can subscribe.
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And tell us who you think is right or wrong in the comments
on some of our disagreements.
Yeah, tell them.
Please let Salim know that he's wrong, right?
Touche.
Follow Salim in EXO, his EXO universe.
What's the URL?
It's openexo.com.
Thank you.
I should know that by now, shouldn't I?
Well it's close to openai.com, but we are opening EXOs.
So our mission is to create as many exponential organizations in the world as possible. Yeah, fantastic. And check us out at abundance360.com.
Anyway, love you brother. Be well.
You too.