Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Race for Super Intelligence Will Decide Our Future as a Species w/ Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #179
Episode Date: June 27, 2025Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO Dave Blundin is the founder of Link Ventures – Offers for... my audience: Get the first lesson of my executive course for free at https://qr.diamandis.com/futureproof Test what’s going on inside your body at https://qr.diamandis.com/fountainlifepodcast Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://qr.diamandis.com/oneskinpod –- Learn about Dave’s fund: https://www.linkventures.com/xpv-fund Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO https://openexo.com/10x-shift?video=PeterD062625 Connect with Peter: X Instagram Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on June 26, 2025 *Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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We are going to become limited by power in our quest for digital super intelligence.
This is a structural issue we have in the US.
This is America's Achilles heel.
China is going all in on energy production and it's epic.
Meta is worth $1.8 trillion today. They've got $70 billion in cash.
These offers of a hundred million dollars
or their acquisition offers on companies, it really is a winner-take-all mindset in this.
The natural dynamic is winner-takes-all because the AI becomes self-improving very, very soon.
The biggest threat to Meta is that they fall way behind on AI.
We're in the middle of probably the greatest drama in human history here, which is why
everyone should be tracking these moves closely.
These numbers are so unprecedented, but they're completely justifiable given the impact.
Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to an episode of WTF on moonshots.
I'm here with my moonshot mates, Salim Ismael.
Salim, I'm calling you the emperor of exponentials
because that's just who you are.
And Dave London, the alchemist of AI.
How's that for a title?
We need one for you, Peter.
All right, Peter, you have to be something epic.
How about the humongous bungalongus of abundance?
Not sure I like that.
I like what Dee came and said on stage.
She called me the Pope of Hope.
The Pope of Hope.
That's awesome.
Yeah, my mom liked that.
She's watching all of my abundancy, you know, abundance videos
and the whole show on stage and she writes back, she goes,
Pope of Hope, I love that.
Thank Dean for me.
All right. We have a lot to cover today. and she writes back, she goes, Pope, I hope, I love that. Thank Dean for me.
All right, that's it.
We have a lot to cover today.
And as always, our goal here is to deliver you the real news,
the news that's gonna impact you,
the news that's changing every industry, every family,
every country right here, right now.
So rather than watching the six o'clock news,
join us on this epic mission,
deliver a compelling, hopeful and abundant future.
All right, buddy.
Here we go.
Buddies, let's jump in.
So let's talk about all things AI, another epic week.
Every week is just accelerating, it feels that way.
Let's kick it off with this conversation.
This is from Elon and I'll just read his tweet.
He says basically, we will use Grok 3.5.
Maybe we should be calling it Grok 4, which has advanced reasoning to rewrite the entire
corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors, and then
retraining on that new corpus.
So first of all, we've got this like name escalation, right? and then retraining on that new corpus.
First of all, we've got this name escalation.
We're going to GPT-5 and then Gemini 2.5 through Gemini 3.
I think Elon feels behind Grok 3.5.
Dave, what do you think about this idea of retraining Grok 3.5 on a new corpus corrected by AI and getting
rid of human errors.
Yeah, that specific idea is actually low-hanging fruit and a real big win.
But it's one of many big wins.
The rate of change of what we've seen in the models in the last two weeks since the last
time we talked is just mind-boggling.
An experience everyone needs to have is if you pick up either Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-4 voice mode
and just talk to it as you're driving in a car for like an hour or two hours.
That's something you couldn't do a month ago. And now you can do it and it's engaging.
And if you draw a line between a month ago and today and you look a month into the future,
it's gonna replace a lot of what you do in terms of media.
It's just so incredibly engaging all of a sudden.
So I think what Elon's talking about here is look,
the training data, you know, believe it or not,
the actual original training data for these models
had a Reddit subreddit in it that's called Microwave.
And the Microwave subreddit has a series of M's, just goes, mmm, for thousands and thousands
of lines.
Then at the end, it goes beep.
That gets scraped and gets thrown into the training data.
A lot of crap.
Okay, there's a lot of crap.
I think Elon might actually be referring to a lot of his own tweets with Donald Trump here.
Okay, well, if we get rid of that crap, then the neural net has a much easier time learning
what really matters.
So this is part of a long list of low-hanging fruit that's right in front of these training
algorithms.
So you're going to see really rapid improvement just from the obvious, including this.
Salim, what could possibly go wrong if AI rewrites the corpus of human knowledge?
You know, I've been watching a few videos of Yuval Harari talk about, oh my god, AI
can now program itself and program things and he's going to go nuts on this type of
concept where if you can edit history, right, where do you end up?
Where do you draw the line?
Who decides what's accurate or not?
In the beginning there was AI exactly exactly God said let there be AI and then everything followed from there
right this this really has will pose some huge philosophical challenges now
on the plus side there's there are so many gaps there's so many flawed
narratives where history is written by the winners of all the epic battles and
wars in the history in the past and
Therefore we can balance out that viewpoint a little bit and get a little bit more reality into it. That'd be great
But there's a very dangerous line here and and I think it's the right thing to do
It's gonna cost a lot of constrictation. Yeah, so we're expecting grok 3.5 any day now
You know, he was promised in May then delayed into early June. What
is today? We're recording this on June 26th. So, he said by the end of June, he's got four
days left. But even if it's July, it's going to be epic. Can't wait to try and play with
it. All right. I'm going to play this video also from Elon and the subtext here is, super
intelligence may happen this year or by the end of next
year.
All right, let's listen.
I think we're quite close to digital super intelligence.
It may happen this year, maybe it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure.
The digital super intelligence to find us is smarter than any human at anything.
So here we've got the issue of definition, right?
What is AGI?
What is digital superintelligence?
Dave, you and I recorded an episode we'll be sharing shortly with Eric Schmidt going
deep into digital superintelligence.
His prediction is a little bit more, you know,
I don't want to say pessimistic, but you know, it's the next five years on his timeframe.
But what is it?
You know, do you still have the confusion that I do when people are popping back and
forth between AGI and ASI?
Yeah, because no one's really locked down a clear definition, but I think Elon gave
a very, very clear definition in that presentation just for that reason.
AI that can do anything better, any intellectual task better than any human, that's the hardcore
definition.
And he's saying by the end of next year, which is the soonest date that people are saying,
but he's very close to the progress.
So he has every reason to be right.
Yeah, I would not doubt his timeline.
I actually went on to ChatGPT and Grok
and asked them both for a definition of AGI versus ASI.
Can I share that with you guys?
Yes.
So ChatGPT says,
AGI is a machine capable of understanding,
learning and performing any intellectual task
that a human can do across domains with reasoning
adaptability and autonomy and then it says ASI this is chat GPT is an
Intelligence far surpassing the best human in every field creating with creativity problem-solving decision-making
GROCK says
AGI is an AI capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can do
with general problem solving and ASI is AI surpassing human intelligence in all intellectual
tasks.
Even these definitions sort of blur the line.
I go on my classic hobby horse here because we have no idea what we're talking about when
we talk about intelligence.
And so I don't need to get into that trope again, but let me suggest this, right?
The minute you can prescriptively, if you want to define something like this, you have to define what you mean by it.
And the minute you can prescriptively describe a task, an AI or robot is going to be much better than you anyway.
So the work that then comes down to what was the task prescriptively?
Saying that it'll be smarter than a human being. That's a different kind of a model. Here's where I'd like to see it do.
So you know you have Kepler
a couple hundred years ago
one day making an intuitive leap that maybe the moon is affecting the tides and makes a massive intuitive leap that then can be backed
up with scientific and experimental evidence.
That's the kind of thing that if AIs can do, then you start tickling at the edges of what
we mean by intelligence because we have emotional intelligence, we have spiritual intelligence,
etc.
There's the end of my rant.
Well, I think that's going to happen.
I mean, one of the predictions is we're going to start to see math, physics, chemistry, biology getting solved by these advanced AI models in the next two to five
years. This is what our friend Alex Wiesner-Groves keeps on hitting on. We're going to solve math
in the next 12 months.
Yeah, I think it's important to stay out of the philosophical debate if you want to succeed
with AI and focus on the capabilities
within swim lanes.
Because the reason Elon Musk is saying, look, guys, I'm talking about AI that can do literally
any human intellectual task better than any human.
He's just trying to create awareness and motion because people are underreacting so badly
in so many areas.
But I think as Alex Wisner-Gross is saying, it gets miles ahead in areas like math and
code writing where it's not data constrained.
And it lags behind in areas like biology where it needs the full cell simulator to make forward
progress.
And so the rate of progress is going to be hugely different in these different swim lanes.
The exact date when it can do any intellectual task versus any other human, it's gonna be like a blur
that comes and goes and you know,
whether somebody was right down to the minute or not,
nobody will care a year later,
but we'll care a lot about the impact on society
and all these different use cases.
So I think going down that path of saying,
here's a vector, a swim lane,
that's a really good way of framing it.
But when you throw out general words like AGI or ASI or whatever, that's when I go a little bit
nuts. But the swim lane thing, I can totally vibe with that. Every week, I study the 10 major tech
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All right, I love this video.
I asked the team to cut it.
This is from Jeff Klune, who's a DeepMind advisor.
The title here is,
the first AI may be,
I mean, the first ASI may be the last ASI. So take a listen
to this.
It is a world in which the first A.I. is the last A.I. and the creation of the first ASI
suppresses the creation of ASI worldwide. Then that organization, whoever they are,
has a decision to make. And that decision is we just invented effectively, if that thing
is aligned to them and will obey their commands,
we just effectively invented a god.
Do we want to sit around and let those people over there also invent a god?
And nobody talks about as much as they probably should, is how quickly things might get nationalized.
If you are the premier or prime minister or head of state of a country,
and somebody, a company within your borders
creates a super weapon, a superpower, effectively a god.
Do you nationalize that?
Do you start giving them orders?
Do you make them run everything by you?
Are you going to let them just like run as a normal company?
That seems very unlikely to me.
So just wow, right?
I can very much imagine that.
In fact, I just read a book with my son, Jet, called After On.
Actually, second time I've read it.
And it tells a Silicon Valley story of the first ASI coming online.
And it is basically taken over by the government.
And it is basically the last ASI because it suppresses other AIs around the world.
It's a great story.
Dave, what do you think about that?
Yeah, well, hey, Salim, we have our side bet,
and this really weighs in my favor.
Look, the natural dynamic here is winner-take-all.
And you're going to see later in this podcast
the amount of competitive pressure on these foundation model companies
to get the best talent, the amount they're willing to pay,
is mind-blowing. Well, why is that?
Well, because the natural dynamic is winner-takes-all
because the AI becomes self-improving very, very soon.
So the observation in that video is right on target. dynamic is winner takes all because the AI becomes self-improving very, very soon.
So the observation in that video is right on target and the only force that's going
to … In our first slide here, we're saying, look, if the data that goes into these is
one view, one point of view and it's self-fixing but it filters out other points of view, that
could be terrible.
And so the only way you're gonna have a variety of these,
and America thrives on a variety of competitors
in any given market, a variety of viewpoints,
that has to come through some kind of regulatory framework.
It's not gonna happen
with the natural winner-take-all dynamic.
So this is a great wake-up call video,
and I completely agree.
Salim, winner-take-all?
I'm not sure about the winner take all.
I'll stay with my bet on that one.
So Dave and I will continue.
It would be great to have a polymarket on this by the way.
Let's do it.
But the idea that when something like this emerges that it might get nationalized is
100% true.
There's no way that's not going to happen while these,
and I think this is what the governments are doing right now.
They're just watching their various folks work on stuff
and they're gonna jump down the throats
to minute something like this.
And nationalization may take a different flavor.
It may be the government buying a significant share.
We're gonna talk about what the government's doing in AI.
Oh, I don't think it's going to be like that.
I think it'll be just like, I'm sorry, we own that.
It's a military potential.
Boom.
And you've lost kind of agency.
There goes the US.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's going to happen.
And I wouldn't, from what I've seen with governments, there's no way they're not going to do that.
They almost have to do it in order to prevent other people
from getting there if they think they're getting there first. The bigger picture might be if
you have a particular worldview, what do you do with that when you have ASI? Because I
have a feeling that ASI is going to strip past the limitations of a particular worldview
very quickly. And so then what do you do? Right? Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's, I have the next, the next story. Let me, let me, let me just
build on that for a second. Here's what I think will happen. Okay. Some ASI, call whatever we want
to call that, will emerge. A national government, call it Kazakhstan, will kind of go, we need to
own that. Okay. This is our worldview. ASI ASI Please operate on this worldview and then let's get everybody else to align with this role review
And the AI's in about three seconds is gonna go their worldview is so limited
Right that this doesn't help at all and it skips right past all of that
I don't the ones I think once you have ASI it's outside the potential for control for anybody
For sure, and it maybe this is like
The modality of religions taking over and setting a worldview around the world
Yes, you have to relate to it in that way except that religions are you know, they're based on absolute
unverifiable truths or assumptive truths
Like Mary was a virgin or Muhammad was
the last prophet or Jesus of the Son of
God or whatever and an AI any kind of AI
half its worth would skip past that
assumptive truth instantly and go
there's no evidentiary basis for that.
I don't think I don't think there's much
of any chance that the US is going to
nationalize a single AI company and say
this is our national AI I think that if you look at the way the Defense Department works, some things like uranium
and plutonium refinement are nationalized, but all the missiles, inertial guidance, defense
systems, those are all private sector companies that work for the government.
That's going to be the likely outcome in AI as well in the US, maybe not in China, maybe
not in the Middle East, but certainly in the US.
Well, we're going to find out in the next few years. in China, maybe not in the Middle East, but certainly in the US.
Well, we're going to find out in the next few years.
I think that's the key point here.
By the end of next year, clearly.
By the way, Jeff looks more like an AI in that than anything in any video I've seen
in a long time.
This next story is one I want to dive into.
The title here is Metatry to buy Ilya Sutskevich's $32 billion AI startup and now planning to
hire its CEO.
We'll get into this in a moment, but I just want to pass a theory by you.
So how does Ilya get a $32 billion valuation?
So he basically goes out, he pitches Andreessen Horowitz,
his investors are Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, DST Global, which is Yuri Milner,
Alphabet, NVIDIA, Lightspeed Ventures, I mean, like the triple A list of investors.
And he raises, what was it, $6 billion of capital on a $32 billion valuation.
How do you do that without any product or any tech to show?
And I have a theory.
Here's my theory.
You ready?
OK.
Yeah, yeah.
We just saw the presentation on the first ASI, his last ASI.
He goes in and he says to these venture funds,
listen, I know how to build an ASI that will blow away
the other AI companies.
It will be a safe ASI because here's my strategy.
Because it's the first, it will be the last.
You believe him and as a venture fund, you have no other choice than to invest in that
company at whatever valuation he offers it to you.
How do you think about that?
I think that's exactly right.
I think there's another point which is that clearly the true great neural architect people,
the Ilias, the Miramarades are not intimidated by the progress that's been made at OpenAI, GROK, and Google.
And that's an amazing fact by itself.
And when you look under the covers, the research teams working on this are 10, 15 people.
They're not 10,000 people.
And the innovations are still piling up, you know, where there are still 10x improvements out there.
And so, undoubtedly, Ilya, having been an architect right in the middle of this, is saying,
look, I know how to 10x this and I'm not afraid of the big guys.
And actually the actions at OpenAI are kind of reinforcing that.
OpenAI is racing to control the consumer experience with buying Windsurf for coding
and having the voice mode and trying to get everyone,
they're trying to be like Google and have a huge user base installed.
And they're succeeding, by the way.
And succeeding a lot wildly because just competing as a foundation model is not necessarily defensible.
And so it's not just Ilya, it's Mira and then also some other things bubbling up out of MIT
that are getting huge valuations because they're very likely to work.
And so I think that's the other kind of underpinning here.
We're in the middle of probably the greatest drama in human history here, which is why
everyone should be tracking these moves closely.
These numbers are so unprecedented, so much bigger than anything in history, but they're
completely justifiable given the impact.
And so more people should be getting involved and reacting and contributing and not being intimidated
because Mir is not intimidated,
Ilya is not intimidated and the investors coming in
to invest in Ilya are not intimidated.
A billion dollars a day.
Saleem, do you remember the meme that came out
when Ilya left OpenAI or staged the revolt?
It was like, the meme was, what did Ilya see?
Do you remember that? And now I meme was, what did Ilya see? Do you remember that?
And now I wanna know, what did Ilya pitch?
Yeah.
Is the new meme here.
Selim, what do you think about this?
A $32 billion valuation,
does he have an ASI in the bag
and he's racing out in front?
I think this conversation kind of nails it, right?
If you're in front of investors, they don't know.
They're kind of trusting you to know.
And the fact that they kind of have a confidence-based
approach to saying we can beat the other models is huge.
And I think Dave's assessment is right.
OpenAI is now focused on how do you get
to the biggest consumer share in this,
and they will go after those other white spaces
that are
there and there's a lot of white space so applying this in all sorts of areas
becomes hugely but my big question for this is how do you do this safely is my
question and I'd love to understand what did he say to investors that gave them
the sense that this could be done safely because that's the foundation of his
approach right you're gonna make a GI that's safe. That's the name of his company.
Safe Super Intellectuals.
I'm curious how he's going about that.
Yeah.
All right.
The other side of the story here is that Meta is trying to buy talent left, right and center.
Let's take a listen to this video.
All right.
Open AI CEO Sam Allman has some strong words from Mark Zuckerberg on a new podcast,
criticizing Metta's recruitment methods
and even its level of innovation.
Dear Triposa, with more.
It's cutthroat out there, Brian, you're right.
Yes, I mean, critical words may be an understatement.
So Sam Allman, on his brother's podcast,
he says that Zuckerberg is offering
$100 million sign-on bonuses to poach top OpenAI talent.
Keep in mind, those kind of bonuses,
they don't have cliffs,
they don't vest over a number of years.
$100 million just to get on board.
Nothing's stopping talent from leaving
in what is already a revolving door of talent in AI.
Salim, did you get an offer of $100 million from Zuck yet?
No, but can I please be an intern at one of those companies
and maybe I'll get a $20 million signing bonus? yet? No, but can I please be an intern at one of those companies and maybe I'll get a 20 million
signing bonus?
It's insane, right?
So here are the numbers, just to put this in context.
Meta is worth $1.8 trillion today.
They've got $70 billion in cash.
So if you think of it that way, these offers of $100 million or their acquisition offers on companies,
because Meta tried to buy SSI first, it makes sense.
The biggest threat to Meta is that they fall way behind on AI.
Dave, what's your calculus here?
Yeah, that's so much.
Well, first of all, I don't believe for a minute that it's $100 million dollars to join no vesting, no retail. You can't just join and quit the
next day. There's no way that's true. I don't know where that fact came from. But look,
these numbers again, you see professional athletes getting numbers like this, but other
than that, it's unprecedented in human history, but it's hugely justified if you get one of the key research talents at this inflection moment
in the competition toward ASI.
So it does make a lot of sense.
I don't know if the choices of who to go after are necessarily right.
We heard on our tour through San Francisco two weeks ago, Peter, that the Lama IV really
does suck and it's kind of embarrassing.
I know Mark tried to save it with a podcast world tour there, but look, if it sucks, it
sucks.
Doesn't mean that they can't catch up in a heartbeat though, because a couple of tweaks
in the algorithm and suddenly you're back on top.
And so you get the right people who know exactly how to try the next experiment, the next tweak,
and it's worth a lot more than a hundred million.
It's worth many billions billions if not a trillion.
And so I think that's the bet that they're making
and this isn't the only one.
There's a lot more of these going on.
Yeah, so there's a $70 billion war chest
and it really is a winner take all mindset in this.
They're willing to do whatever it takes to move forward.
Here's a, yeah, go ahead, Slink.
Can I game this out a little bit?
Yeah. So if we go back to the previous conversation, I think what Ilya has
figured out is how do you use AI to tweak itself and that then gives you a
very very fast iteration path to what you're trying to do and if the
investors believe something like that then they go wow if he's figured that
out then nothing will stop that from being the winner.
I think you're right about that.
Now regarding this particular thing, you know, when WhatsApp was bought for, what, 18 billion,
everybody laughed at Zuckerberg, right, and thought this is nuts, this is unprecedented,
etc., etc., but it was actually a hugely important and relevant bet.
So given the past success in throwing money at this
and going after it, you can see that he can see
the market is that big and this is pennies in the bucket,
pennies in the dollar in terms of the potential outcome.
Yeah, I would never bet against Mark
for exactly the reason you just said.
He can act unilaterally and quickly and he's aggressive and he's super, super smart.
And so what is interesting though is the other thing we learned on our tour through San Francisco
two weeks ago is there is a mass exodus of AI talent out of Metta.
So then Sam's saying, hey, they're trying to buy everybody back for a hundred million
bucks.
Like, well, dude, you just took everybody's, you know, it's fair game.
But the question I have is why are why were
they leaving in the first place and then why did llama for not come out the way
they wanted it and so we'll dig in on that I'll try and try and get to the
bottom of exactly what's going on there but the tide is certainly throwing money
out it is one way to turn the tide and yeah so you know the story here again is
meta tried to buy SSI they were rebuffed and now they're trying to hire Daniel Gross, who's the
CEO of SSI and Nat Friedman, who's been on our stage at Abundance 360. Again, he's out shopping
and he just made an acquisition. He hit the Neiman Marcus store for AI and he basically
acquisition. He hit the Neiman Marcus store for AI and he basically bought our friends at Scale AI. Alexander Wang also was on stage with me a couple years ago at A360. $14.8 billion for 49% of non-voting
stake in Scale AI. Dave, the IPO markets are just beginning to open in the tech and
AI space. The acquisition markets are getting hot. You're deploying Link
XPVs, venture fund and companies out of MIT and Harvard. How are you seeing sort
of the acceleration? Because it's been it's been relatively a closed IPO and
acquisition market over the last you know five years. Does it feel like it's been relatively a closed IPO and acquisition market over the last five years.
Does it feel like it's opening up now?
I'd say as of the last month, it's wide open.
I mean, these deals are unprecedented huge deals.
The Core Weave IPO is way up.
Circle is way up because it's the way that agents can transact with each other.
So, yeah, the Yahoo moment clearly happened.
The door is wide open.
And the deals are still concentrated
among the top, the magnificent seven.
But Jamie Dimon sees that.
Bank of America, everybody else sees that.
So their banking teams are spooling up.
Everyone's getting ready.
It's going to be just like 1997, 1998 all over again.
That'd be great.
But much bigger.
So also, you know, a couple, I don't know if people care, but the structure of the deal
is really important.
And I know a lot about the topic if you can cut it out of the podcast if people don't
care.
But this is the deal structure of the future.
The 49% acquisition dodges HeartScot-Rod. So the the deal is closed the day you sign it
You don't have to go through the six month torture waiting cycle of DOJ review
And it does skirt, you know the edge of the rules, but the rules are bright line. So and
The there are two parts to it. 49% is not a controlling stake. So you don't have to report
The other part is it's a non-voting stake.
There's another threshold of 19.9% or 20% ownership where you have to consolidate financials.
But because it's a non-voting stake, you dodge that rule as well.
So you're like, well, okay, but do I really own the company?
Well then you look at the contractual structure, which isn't disclosed.
There's no public disclosure of the underlying agreement.
And that agreement probably says
we own all the intellectual property
and you know, if you don't work your ass off,
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So it's truly an acquisition.
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So, Salim, I'm curious, you know, and I both have spent time with Yan LaCun who's previously was heading AI at Meta and now
Alexander Wang comes in
Alexander I guess Dave he was a freshman at MIT dropped out after his freshman year to start scale AI
Becomes a was he the youngest billionaire out of MIT? Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah by far and
Was he the youngest billionaire out of MIT? Oh, yes.
Yeah, yeah, by far.
And now he's going to, I wonder if Jan is going to stay on at Metta.
So any thoughts there, Salim?
I think, well, clearly there's a changing of the guard there.
And the whatever they feel, they're deficient and they're trying to leapfrog and they're
doing it very, very aggressively. Something that I love about scale AI, it's really
attacking the heart of the problem which is tagging of data and if you have that
you can solve the garbage in garbage our problem in a really powerful way and
then it means you can use much better models to the models you use become much
you can use lesser models because you have much better data. Yeah, I think Iyan LaCun, just to bring it back to that, and he's a
super brilliant sweetheart guy at the center of this all, but he's had a much
more conservative point of view on AGI and ASI. It's the same with Jeff Hinton.
Iyan is this is kind of in that camp of being, everybody needs to slow down and be really, really careful
of what we're about to unlock here.
Yeah, I think Mark has the opposite.
Also, Mark is an engineer at heart.
All these guys are engineers at heart.
They're not trying to buy an AI philosopher.
They're not trying to buy, you know, a lot of the people that are the senior AI leaders from the big labs are saying,
look,
there's something fundamentally missing from these transformers.
They're not actually reasoning.
They're just brute forcing their way to intelligence.
They don't want to buy that.
What they want to buy is, I know how to make this algorithm work on a million concurrent
GPUs.
I know how to change the algorithm so that it stays synchronous across all this massive
amount of compute. I know how to actually deploy the transfer algorithms that the swigloo isn't working,
we need to go back to Relu, stuff like that.
That's in the minds of these mid-20-year-old geniuses.
That's what they want to buy.
So it's interesting to me is normally the older, highly successful Eric Schmitz have
all the money and themitz have all the money
and the young people have all the brain power.
But here the young people have the brain power
and now they suddenly have a lot of money too.
That's a new thing in the world as well.
So it'll be interesting to try.
Well, speaking about brain power and money,
Masa-san, one of the old guard investors
has pitched a trillion dollars.
He wants to replicate Shenzhen scale within the US.
Let's take a listen to this video.
I know one trillion dollars worth of investment of soft bank, but then the context for us
and trillion dollars and he wants to recreate the kind of Shenzhen in the US potential alongside
TSMC of course, the Foundry and, of course, Samsung
as well.
You'd imagine that OpenAI would have a piece to play as would ARM as well, that is moving
closer into data centers, into their CPUs aligning with AI accelerators.
So it hits that and it ticks that box in terms of Trump's ambitions.
But we do need to find out where the capital is coming from, where the spending is coming
from and whether indeed they can get the talent and the engineers not just to build all these
projects but actually to operate them as well, which has been a constraint and a bottleneck
in the US.
So, have either of you guys been to Shenzhen?
I've been there a few times.
Oh, really?
Yeah, years ago.
Yeah, I mean, it's changed in the last five years. I mean I was there between you know
2014 and in 2019 and it was an
Incredible hotbed. I mean it was an engine of innovation the old mind the mindset there was nine
It was a 996 was a light was the best lifestyle you could have
9 a.m. To 9 p.m. Six days a week
And you know people talk talk about China replicating stuff.
There was a lot of entrepreneurs
creating varying new ideas out of there.
But it was basically a convergent mecca for technology.
And the idea that Masa-san wants to rebuild that
here in the U.S., I find that fascinating.
Thoughts?
Yeah, I think part of that vision doesn't align.
When we were at OpenAI, one of the questions I was asking Dee Scully is the talent pool,
the computer science talent pool in Boston is about 20 times bigger than in Silicon Valley
and it's also not nearly as picked over.
Why doesn't OpenAI open an office in Kendall Square just like Google did and Microsoft
did?
And the answer is, yeah, we would do that except the timeline to AGI is so short
that we're gonna have a multi-billion dollar
or multi-billion person AI workforce
before we could even finish the building and populate it.
You're like, okay, that's a pretty interesting insight.
Wow, blows my mind.
So then you're like, okay, well, Shenzhen,
that's a huge number of people, buildings,
but is that timeline gonna line up
with the Elon Musk video that we saw a minute ago? So, you know, I think the constraints
here are electrical power and chips and not so much building a huge city that's all working
on it. It's the sixties, but he digitized, dematerialized, democratized, demonetized, you know, and disrupt.
And here's, this is a chart near and dear to your heart, Dave.
Krister, the fastest SaaS growth in history.
$500 million of ARR in under three years.
Blowing Way, Anthropic, and Uber and OpenAI.
Talk to me about this.
Well, this is so inspiring for the teams
in the office at Link Studio.
So, you know, Link Studio, now we have 26 teams,
MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and this team.
These are startup companies that are being incubated at Lynx.
Yeah, I mean, they're exactly, and they're culturally just like cursor, you know, like
three, four, five best friends from school, brilliant, but never operated a company before,
building something with AGI or AI that's groundbreaking.
And so they see a company like this thriving and hitting a huge valuation.
But also, you know, back when this happened in the internet era, you got huge valuations,
but the companies were very fragile because they didn't have a huge amount of revenue.
These companies 500 million of revenue, the margins on that must be astronomical.
And so they're raising a lot of money at a big valuation, greater than 10 billion-ish.
But they can actually operate profitably on one day's notice
if they want to, because they're not headcount intensive.
So these are like the best companies financially
that we've ever seen in history.
And then the timelines are just laughable, like two years
to get to 500 million of revenue.
How many cursors are out there in the next couple of years?
Dozens, dozens. It's actually constrained by the number of teams, not by the number of opportunities. So many cursors are out there in the next couple of years? Dozens, dozens.
It's actually constrained by the number of teams,
not by the number of opportunities.
So it's fascinating, right?
We've got constraints on electricity, on chips,
and on the smartest entrepreneurs who take this forward.
At least for the moment, it's humans that are constraining.
Well, I mean, the difference in the vibe
around Boston versus any time I've ever seen is just
so blatantly obvious and palpable.
You just need to walk around, but everywhere you go, everyone's just talking about Scale
AI, talking about Cursor.
These are their fellow alumni that they actually knew.
And so the jealousy factor is a great motivator.
It's really an amazing time.
Salim, and these are all exponential organizations. All EXOs. They have an MTP. They're using community
effectively. They're building developer communities. The engagement levels
are really great. They've gamified in many cases what they're trying to do.
It's phenomenal to watch. We predicted this in the book,
right? We said we're going to have just a continuing increase in the velocity and scale and speed.
I mean, this is surprising even to us at some level because the speed of, I mean, 500 million ARR
in this time scale is just unbelievable. I do agree with Dave. There's a lot more coming down
the pike on this. And these curves curves are just gonna get more and more vertical
The the teams is a really intriguing problem
How do you find the right teams and I'm wondering if you could use an AI?
Solution to find teams that can then be put together and thrown together for this that would be a really interesting problem
If you do that, I mean, you know one of your billion dollar one of our billion dollar investments is Merkor
That is all about, you know finding and hiring but is that for the general employee?
I mean what are the attributes of the founding team that you're looking for?
Yeah, great question. And you know, we study that all the time
We quote the Fred Wilson rule a lot.
We call it the Fred Wilson rule, Fred didn't call it.
He's the Union Square Ventures founder, MIT alum, most successful venture capitalist of
all time, numerically.
He keeps a low profile so we don't talk about him every day, but Fred Wilson is really a
god of the industry.
What he says as he gets older is, I always invest in teams of three or more best friends
who write the code themselves, meaning they're technical, they're really technical, all three
of them or more, and I trust them.
If they pass those three filters, I invest even if it's the stupidest idea in the world
because they'll change the idea much more quickly.
You can't change friendships, you can't change relationships, you can't change yourself overnight,
but you can change your idea overnight.
Once you get them into an ecosystem of other people
that have great ideas, take them out to Silicon Valley,
introduce them to Eric Brynjolfsson, take them to HAI,
take them over to OpenAI headquarters,
run them through Google.
And we're doing all that with these teams now.
Then they come back home and they're enlightened
and they always have good ideas at the end of that road trip.
Let me hit on one of the points there.
I mean, people say, why should they be best friends?
Why should they be around, you know,
having had a relationship for a number of years?
We just saw these large companies like Meta and Google
and OpenAI are just rating companies
and stripping out the talent.
And if you've started a company with some stranger
that you don't know and it's been six months
and someone gives you a huge signing bonus,
you're gonna leave.
But if you've started a company with your best friends
and you've got long history,
you're not gonna abandon them.
I think that's a really critical point.
That's the number one failure mode actually for companies
is that somebody bails.
Because you'll always succeed in the end if you
stick with it. So the way you characterize it is exactly right.
You'll pivot a dozen times and you'll look, you know, name any one of these companies that didn't
pivot at least once, you know, going back to PayPal and every one of them, you know,
pivots at least once. And so that's just part of the journey. But when you pivot
and then someone says, oh I give up, I'm leaving, that's what ends
up killing the company.
So also the way I've been phrasing it for many, many years is more true than ever before.
Imagine that you're on an international flight and you're sitting right next to somebody
in a middle seat.
The way you feel when you get off that flight, that's the way it's going to feel when you're
doing a startup together.
So if it's you and me and Salim flying we're gonna come off that plane
Energize because we've been talking about everything in the world for hours like you know eight ten twelve hours
Yeah, not only will have infected the three rows around us to all and get into a conversation
Yeah walk out with more employees than you started with yeah, yeah Salim when we had Singularity University's
graduate studies program the GSP going,
and we were starting companies that had a 10 to the ninth
plus mission, right, impact a billion people over a decade.
And we were starting companies, it was around the same exact
timeframe that Y Combinator was getting going.
And the failure mode, I think, was that we thrust,
you know a hundred you
know alpha males and females into a room independent of each other and said start
a company and that was very different than Y Combinator where teams came in
with an idea already and that glue pre-existing with something that they're
all passionate about I think is is a super differentiator for investments.
And if you look at the track record, the ones that did succeed were the ones that became friends
and stuck together over time. The one thing we did do was created lasting friendships that were
lifetime long. And so if you look back, a lot of those alumni have gone and started working together
for where they found affinity, not necessarily on the teams that team
formation is a critical one and that early chemistry is really important I
remember this whole conversation reminds me of Yossi Vardi who kind of
single-handedly created the Israeli startup scene yeah and he sold ICQ then
became AOL instant messenger for like half a billion dollars back I remember
well and and he did something amazing. He basically went to founders in Israel and said,
if you're a good guy and you have integrity, I'm giving you 50k. That's the bar. And then he just
trusted them. And he would check their integrity and their character very carefully. And then he
just give them money. And he invested in something like 400 startups. And the outcome of those has
been a little bit like the Fred Wilson type
It's just been off the hook
So the the team and the individual that you're betting on is everything in this
Salim you're so right and you reminded me of something that's really really important Peter
Remember when we went over to Israel to Tel Aviv to start up nation to try and figure out
Why the startup success rate is five times higher
There than anywhere else on the world per capita,
than anywhere else in the world.
And there are a lot of reasons,
but a lot of it comes back to everyone has to do
their military time and there's a huge amount of bonding,
just marching through the desert together
and suffering together.
And that creates these lifelong friendships.
Then you go to college and you appreciate it a lot more.
And then you start your company while you're in college.
And so they're a little older, but a lot more bonded when they're going through that experience.
But if I port that back to the US, MIT is absolutely thriving, like I've never seen
before in terms of startup success.
But Daniela Ruse, who runs CSAIL at MIT, biggest AI lab in the world, she has two daughters,
one went to Harvard, one went to MIT.
Her Harvard daughter was constantly at MIT for the parties.
And nobody thinks of MIT as a party school, right? Why would you? one went to MIT, her Harvard daughter was constantly at MIT for the parties.
And nobody thinks of MIT as a party school, right? Like, why would you? But actually when you're there, it has an immense amount of bonding.
Part of it is because the way it's set up with the living groups and the
fraternities and sororities,
a part of it is because the school is so freaking hard.
And that's like the Marines of-
You cannot get through on your own those problem sets, you know know all night long with your best buddies trying to get just a plug here for Waterloo
Which is the MIT of Canada?
We have the same thing you couldn't get through unless you collaborated really closely with a bunch of other fellow students and that created lifelong
Friendships really great point. Yeah. Well, if anyone's listening out there in school administration
You know Harvard has a little bit less of that bonding culture because school is so stupidly easy.
You know, everyone says it, Mark Zuckerberg, everybody says it.
And it also doesn't...
Hard to get into, harder to fail out of.
Harder to fail out of, yeah.
And then Stanford has become even worse.
Stanford is, you know, if you talk to the students there, they're like, where the hell
is the crazy, fun bonding culture? But
one of our Harvard guys in the lab decided he was going to open a window and do a rock
climbing drill on the second floor down to the first floor on the brick wall. And so
there were cops all over the building and security guys running around and they're like,
Dave, why are the cops all over the all over the building? I said, guys, let them be.
This is what they need.
They need to bond.
They need to blow off steam.
They need to be a little crazy.
This is what's going to create the success in the long run.
But we also can't have the cops here every day.
But this is the culture that is ultimately
going to thrive, because it's kind of lacking
on the Harvard campus, and they need to create it.
And so they are self it. All right.
This next slide from Andreessen Horowitz is pretty epic.
It's labeled what's working means in the era of AI apps.
Gen AI startups are shattering growth records.
Dave, this must make you feel pretty amazing.
Yeah, this chart's a little hard to read, but if you look at the top quartile, it looks
like they raised less money, but they actually raised it much more quickly.
So if you look in the bottom right corner, pre-series A dollars raised, 3.1 million.
That means they were very, very capital efficient getting to 8.7 million in revenue run rate.
So this is what I was saying earlier.
The fundamentals of these companies are so good compared to the internet era.
I mean, very capital efficient, great ARR,
and this is accelerating really quickly now.
Cause did you see that, you know,
one of our companies, Farsight,
was talking to JP Morgan as a customer,
and nothing was happening for months, you know,
just unresponsive.
Then Jamie Dimon sent an email to everyone
in the entire company, every manager, saying,
if someone is trying to sell you AI,
you better buy it
or at least listen right now because this is going to...
And all of a sudden they called back.
JP Morgan actually reached out to Farsight and says, okay, we want to talk, get over
here right now.
So that's going to happen now across most of the Fortune 500, all of the mid-market.
So this will get even more traction very quickly now.
I just, I love these numbers are extraordinary, right?
You know AR
8.7 million time to a series a in five months. Yeah
Extraordinary, I mean, those are crazy good numbers, but then look at the cursor number from the prior slide five and two years
I mean sure I mean weak, right?
Look at the bottom quartile
there right? They reached 10 million in series A and in six months or 12 months they've brought
back a third of it. That's still an amazing number. It's a great point Salim. Yeah 3 million in 12
months would have been top decile a couple years ago. Here it's bottom quartile. That's a great point. Yeah, an acceleration of the acceleration.
Here's a big story in AI this past week.
The Trump administration is launching AI.gov.
They're hoping to launch it on July 4th.
I hope they hit it.
And I just want to dig into this a little bit for those who've been frustrated by the government.
This is a project being led by a Tesla engineer by the name of Thomas Shedd, who's leading
the team.
The idea is, can the government use AI across federal agencies, the GSA, DOT, FDA, DOE,
FAA, all these agencies, which have been sub-linear in their existence at best.
And let's chat a little bit about this.
So GSA, which is General Services Administration, it buys everything for the government.
They could use AI to optimize procurement, get vendor performance, automate contract
analysis, really eliminate fraud.
DOT is going to be predicting flight delays, analyzing real-time vehicle data, helping
support infrastructure like roads and bridges in advance.
It wouldn't be great if they could predict where the potholes are and get those fixed.
DOE about optimizing grid ops, forecasting demand and supply.
The FAA, we're going to see a story on this
about automated drone traffic management, weather avoidance.
I mean, just as a pilot, the FAA's air traffic control
system is a bloody 1950s mess.
And then, of course, we've spoken about the FDA
using AI to enhance drug device approvals,
faster clinical protocols, optimizing food safety.
I mean, if there's one part of the world
that needs optimization with AI, it's the government.
Yep.
Thoughts, John?
You have a great roadmap for how this works too.
I think Palantir and AWS,
because everyone was worried about,
how is the government going to interact
with cloud computing?
There's a huge privacy issue here
and is the government going to start building
their own data centers and build their own cloud?
And obviously they don't know how to do that.
So then Palantir and AWS set up secure clouds,
private clouds for the government
and that became
the roadmap.
So now with AI, it's like, well, I obviously can't take all my government documents, tax
returns and everything and dump them into Gemini or into chat GPT.
Like, how's that going to work?
So now if AI companies are smart.
I just explain to people why you can't, why you shouldn't do that, why you can't do that.
Well, first of all, there's no compartmentalization.
So it gets pulled into the training data with everything else.
You know, everyone asking about what times a soccer game gets pulled in with someone's Well, first of all, there's no compartmentalization, so it gets pooled into the training data with everything else.
You know, everyone asking about what times a soccer game gets pooled in with someone's
tax return goes into the training data.
Then somebody else who queries chat GPT says, hey, what if Peter Diamandis' taxes look
like and it just answers.
So that's not going to work.
So yeah, all kinds of concerns like that.
But it's going to be figured out in the private sector and it's going to be sold to the government
as compartmentalized AI modules.
There's a lot of questions around whether departments can pool information and share
their AI.
So, those are really tricky conversations, but I guarantee none of the ideas are going
to come from the government out.
What will happen is mandates will come out.
It's what the state of New York just did.
The governor of New York said, you know what, we need a gigawatt of nuclear power.
Okay, any ideas on how to do that?
No.
I'm just saying make it happen.
And then every private sector genius can propose a way to do it and then they'll just approve
one of them and that's how it'll happen.
So the same will happen with AI here.
So hopefully the big AI companies are aggressive in building up their government services operations
or they bless some other
third party like a Palantir type or a new startup to go and become that entity.
But that's the only way this can actually happen.
And God knows we desperately need it, right?
AI can solve so many government problems so quickly.
Oh my God.
Salim, you've been working with governments around the world with your EXO hat on.
Speak to this please.
I have so much to say here.
Okay, three quick points.
One, note that most government processes are prescriptive.
And the many of a prescriptive, repetitive process, you can apply AI to it and totally change the game.
So I think that's a huge area.
Second, about a few years ago, I was asked to give a talk at the Republican National Leadership Convention,
and the title of my talk was going to be, How do you drop the cost of government by
10x?
And you could do it easily using some of these technologies, blockchain, AI, etc., etc.
The third point, I'll give a specific example.
If you were applying for a wind turbine approval in, I think it was in Colorado, it was taking
like two years or three years to
get approval for that right and then they brought in a programmer who put in a on a google maps
where the electrical mains were the water mains were the one of the flight paths and they were
able to reduce that two-year approval time to 30 seconds and that's just the smallest example of
how you can do this across the board and And we've mentioned some of these already.
It's going to be a game changer.
I'm so excited about the potential government applications of this.
I love it.
I love it.
And it is.
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Go to fountainlife.com slash Peter,
and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. Here's a related story. The U.S. Army appoints
Palantir Meta Open AI execs as Lieutenant Kernels. This is a special unit created to support the
government. Fascinating. I'm gonna give some names here
because they were published.
The employees include the Palantir CTO,
Shyam Sankar, Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth,
Kevin Weil, the OpenAI's Chief Product Officer.
Kevin's gonna be joining us on this podcast
in the next month.
I cannot wait for that.
Yeah, and Dave, you and I had an amazing meeting with Kevin up at OpenAI headquarters, and
then Bob McGrew, former OpenAI Chief Revenue Research Officer.
So I find this absolutely fascinating, sort of indoctrinating.
And actually, they made it super fast. There's no
No required, you know
Traditional training no boot camp for these for these individuals
What are your thoughts Peter you didn't read the quote there the the backlash quote, okay
the appointment of
Lieutenant colonel in the US Army followed the creation of a special unit
Created for rich big tech mavens seeking military leadership roles
This is like exactly what you're always saying, you know, everything turns into a drama they've whether it needs to be or not
That's just the nature of social media
I mean, this is one way that the government can bring in extraordinary intelligence that they could never hire, they could never
recruit otherwise. I mean this is sort of a part-time military service to make
sure that the US government and the US military have access to the brightest
minds. Yeah exactly and then I don't know the other guys personally but Kevin
Weil we know and he's a sweetheart guy, guy. Yeah Absolutely. And you know is somebody
Gonna just naturally join the army as a private work their way up and end up being aware of how to use AI to solve
Government and military issues. No, that's not that's not likely to happen. So go get the best guy on the planet
He's absolutely the right guy. I mean just just you know, he's he's a physically impressive
absolutely the right guy. I mean, just, you know, he's a physically impressive manager.
He can actually move mountains while still being the nicest,
sweetest guy on the planet.
And he knows exactly how this stuff works.
Like, this is just great for everybody.
I don't know, I don't know,
the negative spin here is nutty.
I think that this is a great example
of a human being plus AI,
because as they bring AI to help in these roles,
it's gonna be totally transformative.
You of course have the monster immune system response with people going, well, you can't do
that unless you've worked your way through the ranks, et cetera, et cetera. And people have a
thing. But I think this is a great application. This reminds me of the big problem of around
leadership training, right? And we've spent decades and dozens of hundreds and thousands of books lit written on leadership training and then about few years ago turned out the best leadership training the world was world of warcraft.
I'm not the fact that technology can outstrip this age old human kind of institution is unbelievable but it's there and I think that added to what these guys can do
plus bringing technology and their mindset to the mix.
This is where I think you'll have the biggest impact
is they'll bring that mindset to,
and hopefully infect the rest of the armed forces with it.
Yeah.
All right, talking about sort of breakthroughs in AI.
I love this, my hats off to DeepMind,
continually to push new capabilities out that support
all of humanity.
So, this is a DeepMind algorithm supporting better tropical predictions for cyclones.
Let me just play the video here.
It's no sound, but let me give the data.
So, it's a five-day track prediction that averaged 140 kilometers closer to the actual storm
path.
It's the difference between hitting Florida and Georgia or Virginia.
This was trained on 5,000 cyclones over 45 years.
Here are the numbers on impact. There's about $1.4 trillion in economic losses for
cyclones over 50 years and I'm excited about this. Thoughts?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, there's a piece of AI folklore called the bitter lesson
would be basically anytime you throw a lot of data and a lot of compute at one of these
algorithms you're likely to get a great outcome. You can sit there and stare at a wall trying Basically, any time you throw a lot of data and a lot of compute at one of these algorithms,
you're likely to get a great outcome.
You can sit there and stare at a wall trying to think through how to do it with differential
equations for three years.
You're not going to compete with the big data approach.
And this is a great case study.
I'll bet the people working on this got it cranked out in a very short period of time
with just a couple of people, yet it's far more effective than anything that's been done
over 50 years of weather research.
So there's so many of these around.
The benefit to humanity, if we coordinate it and wrangle it correctly, is just immeasurable
and is a great example.
Pete Slauson So, what are your thoughts here?
Salim Arafat I label this as nothing to see here.
And I don't mean that in a negative way.
Pete Slauson What does that mean?
Salim Arafat This kind of thing should be completely expected, right?
You take an ancient data set where we have the human beings trying to hand plot these things,
which are never going to do that well.
And now you throw AI at it, plus the rich data set that's very bounded,
and we know exactly the history.
Of course, it's going to come out with a much better thing.
And thank God. Thank God, because look at the predictive ability now going forward.
Huge impact.
But I think we should take this as we should expect like a thousand of these coming out
in the next year or two or three.
I agree.
These would have been great X prizes as well.
And I've been pushing for this.
I think DeepMind is an extraordinary company under Deimos Asabis.
And they're creating these kinds of assets to support humanities
Really in their their DNA in their culture
I can't wait for an earthquake prediction exprize or an earthquake prediction algorithm
Right. I mean if you could predict an earthquake with a instead of like 30 seconds or a minute with 10 minutes or 30 minutes
Getting people into safety
Would be huge. I mean one of them is wait. Can I just really know that sure?
That's a perfect example like we know animals can sense this exactly right is there the data is there
We just have to get the right kind of algorithmic approach to it
And that's an area where I would expect to see a breakthrough in something like that for with you
And then when it happens everybody everybody's going to go,
oh my God, this is unbelievable.
But we should expect things like this.
And in fact, we should take areas and go find them,
find areas where we have, we know what the answer could be.
We know definitively it's possible
and then put AI against that.
Yeah, my guess is we'll see earthquake prediction
algorithms within the next two years, if not sooner.
Here's an interesting controversial thought on this.
Imagine if you could control the direction of the hurricane.
So instead of having it hit Miami, you steer it down into Central America.
You go, oh my God, why would you possibly do that?
That's terrible. Well, so if you hit Miami and the cost of the impact there is $50 billion for that,
and the government of Costa Rica says, listen, you pay us $20 billion and you can land the
hurricane here.
An interesting arbitrage on geography.
Crazy idea.
We have people to control the path of these things.
Do you know the mechanism that they'd use for that?
I mean...
Butterflies?
Yeah, butterfly effect.
I think you'd use lasers and heating the atmosphere.
Maybe it's magic Voodoo dust.
I don't know.
I mean, I can just see the other side of that coin, right?
Hey, Mr. Trinidad, maybe you want to pay us some money so that we make sure that hurricane
doesn't hit you.
And you get all sorts of crazy outcomes.
But if you can measure it, you can impact it.
And I find this again huge
and interesting implications. Okay, our next story here comes from Mattel and
OpenAI. They've announced a strategic collaboration. I've talked
about this forever, super excited. Your toys are going to become super
intelligent with GPT-5.
So your Barbie doll, your Hot Wheels, your American Girl.
I know that, Salim, that you in particular like the American Girl dolls.
Thomas and friends. Sorry, buddy.
That's okay. You've uncovered my deep secret.
I think this is going to be a boom for the toy companies. And I mean, this is going to enable rapid,
you know, early education of our kids.
That's the area I'm really excited about because the feedback loop,
as you have interaction with these toys,
you'll learn a lot about the child and we can use that too
for understanding learning behavior, guardrails that you could implement,
where their motivations
are.
I think it's so exciting because we'll get more data about young children than we could
ever gotten before.
Yeah.
I was a little surprised OpenAI wanted to touch this one.
It's really clear when you're talking to the AI voices now that they're, within a year,
going to be just crazy engaging, super, super friendly, and a lot
of kids are gonna prefer talking to AI all day than talking to real friends.
And you know, there's good and bad that comes along with that.
I kind of, I've loved every minute of raising my kids, and I hate to see that change in
any way, but it's clearly coming soon and it's inevitable.
The other part, Dave, is sparking their kids imagination, right?
When you have to make up what your Ken Doll or Barbie Doll
is saying, that's critical for fostering early curiosity
in your imagination.
It is.
And you have the echo chamber risk
on the other side of that.
So if it's done right, it's an educational gold mine
and the kids are happy. And a lot of schools are terrible.
So you're alleviating a lot of that.
So if it's done right, it's incredible.
If it becomes an echo chamber,
then you can see where it can go bad in a real hurry too.
That's why I'm surprised OpenAI wants to touch it
because when you start talking about kids,
you really got, you cannot make a mistake, right?
You gotta get it right.
Yeah. There was a friend of mine that had a product called Moxie, which was an AI robot
and it was mostly being used for young kids with educational challenges, right? Neurodiverse
kids, in which case, you know, creating a best friend and helping them open up and communicate there's real value there
What happened with your AI enabled Chucky?
That'll be interesting
A whole new set of movies coming out. All right, let's jump into a little bit of AI and education
These are some scary reports that came out. So this is in Time magazine chat GPT maybe eroding critical thinking skills
According to a new MIT study Dave. Did you did you track this? Yeah
Well only because you put it in the slides. I said I better understand what's going on here. It sounds really really important
so I dug up the the research and
and read it
And it's nothing surprising if you think about how ways works, right?
A lot of people don't know how to drive anywhere unless they turn on Waze, like places they
go every day, they still could not get there without turning on Waze.
So it becomes a crutch really, really quickly.
So that's what's happening here with writing, you know, where you would have thought through
all the underlying topics in order to write it because the AI is filling in the blind
spots.
You just don't really understand what you just wrote.
But it's not at all surprising.
When you write it up and put it in a headline, it opens your mind to what's going on.
But when you read the paper, you're like, oh, duh, of course, this is exactly how it's
going to work.
Yeah, this is some of the data.
I don't know if you want to use this to recount what the study said.
Yeah, well, I know it's really straightforward.
If you write a document yourself and you have to think through every single word of it,
that time that you put in means you can then recount what you just wrote with incredible
accuracy.
So, you know, the failure rate on the top line shows your quoting accuracy of what you
were just talking about.
So, if you use AI to write the same paper and then you immediately ask you, hey, what was
Shakespeare's favorite toy?
Like, I have no idea.
Well, you just wrote it down.
Like, oh, did I?
Yeah.
So that's the difference there.
83% failure rate if you use chat GPT versus 11% if you're using Google, meaning you're
actually looking up the data, then you're composing it.
I mean, when you're doing the writing, you're actually looking up the data, then you're composing it.
I mean, when you're doing the writing, you're doing the research and doing the writing,
you're effectively training your own neural net and the data is being deposited in your
brain.
It is scary.
It's going to become a crutch in terms of thinking, and it's going to get a lot worse.
Yeah, I didn't read it as all bad, though. in terms of thinking and it's gonna get a lot worse.
Yeah, I didn't read it as all bad though. I think that you got the work done 100 times faster
in the left column.
Sure.
So your neural net actually didn't have time
to retain every little detail even if, I don't know,
if society is gonna move 100 times faster,
we're not gonna retain every detail.
It's just that simple.
So yes, as a teacher, you could say, look, the kids are not really learning this stuff.
But as a person moving through life, the kids are covering a lot more terrain.
Isn't that more important?
So it's a mixed bag.
It's not all bad.
Salim, good or bad?
What are your thoughts?
I have an 80-20 approach, 80% unnerved, 20% will navigate this.
So the 80% is, I actually saw this with Milan, my 13-year-old.
He was writing an essay and he just used Chats-Upt to write the essay.
And he clearly had no memory of that essay.
He would have fallen completely into these buckets, right?
And so when I saw this slide, I was like, whoa, this reminds me completely of what Milan just went through.
And he has no cognitive framing for what he wrote in that essay, because he used the AI to help.
And so there's part. Now, the other side of it is it's happening much faster, et cetera, et cetera.
I think the key question is how do you effectively train kids on critical thinking into the future?
And a guest we might want to think about is Nicole Dreiske,
who's actually solved this problem
and has found a way of teaching critical thinking
into kids in a very active and a very accelerated way
compared to where we do it.
The last point I'll make is that I remember seeing a study
that 52% of the CEOs in Silicon Valley
are liberal arts majors, right?
Which is the ability to think in different ways
is a critical factor of success in leading a tech company.
That's really, I find that really interesting.
There's an interesting-
Paul Graham has a different spin on that,
that the liberal arts majors succeeding
is more tied to their desire
to not do irrelevant, difficult things
and get to important topics.
And it's just an easier way to get through-
It's a good filter.
Silliness. It's a good through. It's a good filter.
It's a good filter.
It's a good filter either way.
Yeah.
Dave or Suleyman, I don't know if you saw Andrew Caparte's presentation
at the AI startup school.
Um, I showed it to my son, Jet, yesterday, trying to incentivize him about
vibe coding, which, uh, which Andre came up with, he put out the tweet that
went viral defining vibe coding.
And my son's reaction was, I want to learn how to code, not just vibe code.
So I'm curious what you think about that.
Because the concept right now is English is the new coding language.
But there's a lot of value in fundamental coding.
So what are your thoughts, Dave?
Oh my god, so many thoughts on this.
I have a little story, amazing experience this week.
I don't know if you want to hear it.
I do want to hear it, of course.
You do want to hear it?
It's incredible to me.
You remember right when I got out of MIT,
went to MicroStrategy, came back to Boston,
started my first company, DataSage.
Our very first product was using neural networks
for handwriting recognition.
And so I took the back prop algorithm, read the raw research paper, all the differential equations, Our very first product was using neural networks for handwriting recognition.
And so I took the back prop algorithm, read the raw research paper, all the differential
equations, said I got to try and code this up on real world hardware in assembly language.
From the day I started on that journey until we productized it was four years of coding.
And then that turned into a few million of revenue and then we just skyrocketed from
there.
Well then a billion dollar exit.
Did you say you got it up in assembly?
Well we had to because so you know we started out in a high level language but you needed to squeeze
every mip you know every flop out of these processors to build anything scalable enough
to work so you know we invented quantization you know which is now all the rage to try and
shrink the parameter size anything to get another 2x performance out of these things quantization, which is now all the rage,
Absolutely not exaggerating. It took less than an hour to vibe code it from scratch to the exact same, even the demo,
the demo graphical interface I put on it, vibe coded the entire thing in under an hour.
Now it's not entirely apples to apples because there's a ton of open source out there that
the vibe coding can pull in.
So just to be fair, but in terms of getting the job done.
The broader point is well made though.
Yeah. Yeah. Four years down to an hour is just like mind-blowing what you can do.
Now your son is exactly right.
Spend some time looking at the code, writing some raw code.
You don't realize how much faster you are until you try and do it the old way.
And so it's really, really important to get that experience.
Let me give you the end of this.
He went off and wrote a short story,
kind of full without any help, etc. And it was mind-bogglingly good. I couldn't believe that.
I thought he used an AI to write the short story, but it was really, really good. I think we're in
this golden era. Like right now, the AI can do almost anything for you, but it's not creative yet.
And so you still have to think,
the human component is still by far the most component.
Now I don't know if that period of time will last forever,
but right here, right now, such a golden era
where you're empowered, but not demoralized or crushed.
It's just such a wonderful next couple of years
and you really gotta take advantage of it.
All right, next topic here is AI and job loss. This was a Stanford survey revealing
which jobs AI would most likely replace. They surveyed 1,500 workers and AI
experts. 69.4% want AI to quote let me focus on high value work unquote and 46.6% wanted to take on repetitive junk set. That's kind of
Obvious. We'll put this study in the show notes
but you know
Here's the occupations most likely to automated no news here bookkeepers
payroll clerks data entry
insurance claim processors
software roles tax prepar, public safety telecom.
Dave, Saleem, any thoughts?
Well, high-level thought is, look, everybody needs to become a user of AI to get ahead of this.
And the study would say, wow, it looks like brick layers are going to be immune for a while,
but you're not going to go and become a brick layer layer just because You know, you got three more years of like it doesn't doesn't really give you any actionable, you know
Robots are coming for that job, too. Yeah, exactly. So don't do that
Just just start using it every day understand it and ride the wave
I let's let's double down on that if you're listening this podcast and AI sounds fascinating
You're not a a power user. How do you start?
Salim, what do you start with?
Oh, just take a task that you're trying to do and go, AI, how would I do that task? And
then say, do it for me and give it the raw data and watch it just go.
It pretty much is that easy. And I love the point you made Dave earlier, which is I do use chat GPT
Voice interface and when i'm doing my red light therapy or taking a sauna whatever the case might be
Or driving i'm having a conversation on whatever subject is i'm curious about
And it's extraordinarily educational and fun to have this back and forth with an ai saying well
extraordinarily educational and fun to have this back and forth with an AI saying well I don't understand that term could you dive in or what's the data that backs it up or when did that happen?
I mean just being able to have a continuous, you know, it's what a child like your child like memory of or
Experience of why why why digging deeper? That's exactly what you should do and you know get out of the media rut
I know Peter you say this a lot
Yeah, but you know we have the internet now
You can actually watch useful media like this or you know study KJ Harderich and his his podcast. He's phenomenal
Watch Lex Friedman watch Dworkish Patel
But while you're doing it if you don't understand anything have either Gemini 2.5 Pro or Chet GPT-4 open and just talk to it.
Right. While you're listening to the podcast, stay out of the mainstream media.
Like, do not listen to the rock stars, sports broadcasting, whatever.
It's going to distract you and suck you in. You need that time back and use that time this way.
Once you're into it, it's just as much fun, but much more useful.
Can I make a couple of points about that last line?
Of course. Of course.
Let's note that a lot of those roles are being done
because people have to do them,
not because they wanna do them, right?
It's grunt work done repetitively, et cetera, et cetera,
and it's a perfect area.
I was really happy to see that a large number of folks,
40, whatever percent, said, I wanna take all all the repetitive tasks because nobody wants to be doing that anyway
And now we can automate a lot of that side of it and just a quick point on the brick laying thing
I remember showing a drone and singularity University a few years ago
Where you had drones working in cohesion to lay bricks on the wall and the drones did it in like no time flat because they didn't
I was it's we know exactly where the
Bricks need to be laid. It's totally prescriptive off you go
Yeah, this is a story from the Guardian Amazon testing humanoid robots deliver packages took them long enough, right?
This is we see in the image here
agility's
Digit robot I'm gonna have the CEO ofility at the Abundance Summit with their robots.
Actually, I'm gonna have four or five robot companies
at the Abundance Summit in March this year.
You can learn more at abundance360.com.
But-
I was a little alarmed when you read,
it's gonna spring out of the van.
That's gonna be a little unnerving.
My two dogs are already freaked out by the
postman. What the hell did I do?
Come on guys. We're gonna have autonomous vans driving around where robots do the last
10 meters of delivery to your doorstep. And it's just gonna drop the cost of this. So
we're gonna see drone delivery of products. We're gonna see van, autonomous van and robot
delivery of products. This is happening, there's no question about it. It's a when
not an if, agree. Right and so the question is when, when do you predict
Salim? I'd say middle of next year because the technology is all there, they
just have to get there, there's probably some regulatory stuff to get through
which might slow it down, but the technology's potential is now there now.
Yeah, the technology is there.
I think the humanoids are inspiring everybody.
There's no surprise here, but you know what people don't talk about as much as the robotics
that are doing nanosurgery, microsurgery are unbelievable.
And also the robots that are crawling through pipes, cleaning things, you know, getting
into sewer systems, those are also taking off.
They're not as sexy as the humanoids,
but it's all happening concurrently
and it's just tremendous benefit for humanity.
Yeah, I think we're seeing-
I want to make a point about humanoid robots.
You know, we've had this long strong discussion
where I've been saying-
I'm tired of your point you're making,
they're over and over.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
I thought of a great real world example
of my octopus idea, which is you've got a human robot.
How many times when you're doing something,
do you wish you had a third arm
to hold the garbage bag open or whatever?
So can we please have these human robots have three arms?
No, we'll just have two robots with four arms.
Anyway, so, but here's interesting, right?
We're gonna see these companies stack resources.
So, you know, I would not're going to see these companies stack resources.
I would not be surprised to see Tesla get into delivery services with autonomous vehicles
and autonomous robots.
We'll see obviously here Amazon and agility.
We'll see other companies coming together on this, but a full stack in the physical
world. Let's talk about RoboTaxis. Big news since we
spoke last on June 22nd. The Tesla RoboTaxi launched in Austin with a flat
fee of $4.20. Elon loves his 420 over and over again. So, RoboTaxi is now live. Here is Elon at
Tesla headquarters in Austin and here's a quick video of what a fan had as an
experience in RoboTaxi. Thoughts? Finally, he's done it. I mean, I think it's the biggest one of the biggest markets, you know, that Tesla is going to experience.
We've seen Cathie Wood predict as a multi-trillion dollar marketplace.
Tesla will have been known as a car manufacturer.
It will be known as a humanoid robot and an autonomous you know robotaxi service delivery
company. Thoughts gentlemen? So two quick thoughts one is never bet against Elon.
I've learned that to my massive investment portfolio suffering over the last decade. I think the
second observation is the these cars are technologically quite inferior to the Google
Waymo taxis because they don't operate in heavy rain.
They're limited by human level site and that's a problem I think in the long term.
He may get some buzz out of it but he's going to have to upgrade the lidar for this to be
really working well.
We'll talk about that.
And it could be, hold on, hold on, let me just sit on the other side of that.
He could just be waiting for lidar systems and all that,
that the cost curve becomes cheap enough
and then you just flip over to that.
Well, you know his thesis, right?
If a human driver can drive with just his or her eyes,
in fact, with one human eye,
then from first principle thinking,
an autonomous car should be able to drive
with a couple of cameras.
And that's just basically...
That's great, except LIDAR can see five cars ahead.
So you can break that argument up.
Why not give it superhuman skills?
Why not give it superhuman capability?
Yeah.
You can do it, why not do it?
And yes, it's much more expensive for now.
I think he went down a philosophical route of going away from LIDAR, and I think you
end up with an inferior product. But if it's workable and it works good well enough
that's fine. I mean listen I drive with my you know my Tesla's autonomous mode
all the time and it does perfect the only time it ever stops working is when
it catches me picking up my phone and looking at it and then it beeps at me.
Otherwise it's extraordinary. That part surprised me actually. I didn't know, you
know, when we were driving together a couple weeks ago, the inward-facing
camera is new to me. It's like actually watching your behavior and then
adjusting. It's like, wow, that's a little weird. If I'm looking out the window to the left, it's
sort of like beeps at me. If I pick up my phone, it beeps at me. It's like really
annoying. I have my, I've kept my 2017 Tesla Model S for exactly that reason.
There's no inward camera, so it's great.
I've now driven that car, just to flip to the other side of this,
I've now driven that car four times up and down the country from Miami to New York or Toronto.
So I've become a bit of an expert at the highway driving.
Have you heard about airplanes, Salim? Have you heard about this thing called an airplane?
You know what?
I load up with five of my favorite shawarma clubs.
I arrange 40 conference calls.
The car drives itself 80% of the time and it's free to do that and I arrived more refreshed
than when I left.
I mean, it's phenomenal.
All right.
Let's take a look at this next one.
So Tesla faces protests in Austin over Musk's robotaxi plans. Protestors claim Tesla's FSD, full
self-driving, has been linked to hundreds of crashes including dozens of fatalities.
So let's look at the data here one second. Here it is, number of accidents per
million miles and without any question, listen, humans are terrible drivers.
We are distracted constantly now with at least one cell phone per car.
We are terrible control systems for two ton cars going at high speed.
Can I throw out a quick data point here?
Sure.
About in 2011, I think it was, there was a three-day outage in Blackberry services around
the world.
Nobody could send text messages for three days.
The accident rate in Abu Dhabi dropped 40% during that three days.
That was then.
Today you look at anybody driving, they're looking at their phone.
We absolutely should not be driving as human beings.
I agree.
I mean, we're going to see an extraordinary increase in safety.
I mean, just the idea of a 16 or 17-year-old driving a couple of ton vehicle at 60 miles
per hour through the streets with very little experience and their phone distracting them
should scare the daylight out of everybody.
Well, this is America's greatest Achilles heel actually is that we're responsive to
sympathetic stories that are statistically rounding errors.
And it's actually the...
Or wrong.
Or wrong, yeah.
Well, look at the State of the Union address, you know, somewhere along the way it changed
to let me call out four or five people in the crowd here and tell their personal stories.
You're like, well, how do I know if that's just like, that could be one in a trillion
for all I know.
But yeah, that's okay.
I'm just trying to sway a bunch of voters
toward what I'm trying to get done here.
But we're ridiculously swayed by that.
And if you look at that prior slide,
yes, hundreds of fatalities from self-driving,
like, well, hundreds relative to what?
And you put your statistician hat on,
you're like, this is clearly better.
But some of these are really, really tragic.
And if it's all captured on video, which everything is now, this is clearly better. But some of these are really, really tragic.
And if it's all captured on video, which everything is now,
it can sway opinion.
And this is where, if America is going to lose to China
or to some other state, it's going to be for this reason.
Yeah, the same concept when people hear about an airplane
accident, oh my god, I'm fearful of flying.
It's like, have you looked at the accident rates in cars?
I mean, you know, flying is still the safest mode of transportation.
1.2 million people a year die in car accidents around the world every year.
Yeah.
Well, hey, nuclear power, we will come to that later, I guess, but that's another case
study.
We will.
So here's an important news bite from this past month here in LA.
Five Waymo vehicles were torched in downtown LA.
Waymo paused service in LA, limited San Francisco, Austin,
Phoenix, Atlanta.
And the question is, is this the beginning of the Luddite revolt? So are people responding against all of the technology?
And here's an image of the Luddite revolution from 811 through 816.
And I have some data I want to share with you guys on this because I think it's worth
noting and I want to talk about it.
So the Luddite revolt over that five-year period
was a series of protests by English textile workers
against the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution,
particularly against automated looms that
threatened their jobs and wages.
Sounds familiar, right?
Named after the mythical Ned Luddite,
the movement began in Nottingham and
spread across the UK. Workers fearing de-skilling and unemployment amid economic hardship from the
Napoleonic wars destroyed machines and organized raids at night. The revolt involved thousands.
The British government deployed 12,000 troops to suppress it. Sounds familiar.
And here we go. Quote, machine breaking became a capital crime in 1812, leading to
17 executions, dozens of hangings, and the movement was crushed by 1816.
Thoughts? Saleem?
Well, this is the classic
immune system response, right?
In a slight twist note,
I note when I read this up,
the Waymo cars were actually called to
that spot so they could be attacked.
So the AI is watching those people
carefully for future retribution.
But I think this is the general
backlash of
technology against society what we don't understand we fear and what we fear we
get angry at we try and destroy it yeah I like insert a picture of the picketers
that are in front of open AI you know that security guys have cleared them all
out now but if you pull one off the internet it's very light revolt looking
yeah and I think we think we are without question
gonna have a revolt.
How often and where against which companies?
I mean, we haven't really started to see job displacement
truly occur, but when it does hit,
and I think we'll be seeing it significantly
in the next two to three years,
until we figure it out on reskilling
and other mechanisms. in the next two to three years until we figure it out on reskilling and you know
other other mechanisms. Can I give the positive spin here? Of course we have no
more looms. No it's the fact that we've seen this kind of displacement fear
throughout history and we always survive it very very well. Yes of course. And on the reskilling which everybody's like oh my god how are we going to reskill? Note that we have
AI to help reskill everybody right and so you can pick your passion and go I want to be reskilled
in that area and you'll get a really good potential work. Note also that we're near full employment
today and have been for a while so we actually need a little bit more buffer in the labor market than we have today.
So those are my positive spins and I also understand the negative.
I am curious what rules and regulations the government will put forward.
I don't think it will become a capital crime.
I do think we'll see troops again deployed on things like this.
This was a-
We'll just arm the Waymo cars with little machine guns.
Fight back.
Uh, this was a scary story.
Two children shot, uh, while in a Waymo here in Santa Monica at second and
Broadway, this is actually like, um, probably a mile from my home.
Uh, two teens were shot in Armintarso, non-life threatening, now stable in hospitals.
I think violence against tech, I don't know if you remember all of the scooters here in Santa
Monica, Salim, if you were here at that time. And the scooters, people sort of raged against
the scooters because they were blocking sidewalks. They would like literally throw them to the middle
of the street. They'd decapitate them. I think we're going to see when we see Waymo robots,
or not Waymo robots, when we see Optimus robots and figure robots on the streets,
I think we're going to find them in various positions hanging from trees.
Thoughts here? We are, but I think this is really just part of the shift.
I mean, they probably called the Waymo to try and get away and there was probably some
sort of gang violence involved in this, something like this.
Yeah.
Okay, this was the slide about Waymo versus Tesla.
And here's a tweet. The downfall of Waymo began yesterday. This is on this was tweeted on June 23rd
about the launch of
Elan's robotaxi, so people need to understand the Waymo car is not cheap. It's a
$200,000 a vehicle. It's got 29 cameras five lidars six radars
It's got 29 cameras, five lidars, six radars. Versus RoboTaxi and Elon has held to his first principle thinking there shall only be cameras.
This would be a great Dave Salim bet.
Dave, do you have a particular preference on which one would win out of this?
Yeah.
Yeah. Peter, you know this topic far, far better than I do.
My bet, knowing what I know, is that it'll be about a 70-30 split.
There's always two or three vendors in any given market in the US.
It always stabilizes at that for antitrust reasons.
Tesla will grab the lead now because they put a bigger investment into the neural chips.
On the other hand, Google's got incredible technology.
But if I had to bet right now, I'd say 70% of the market goes to Tesla, 30% goes to Waymo
and stabilizes.
So I'm 50-50 because I always prefer better technology, but you have the never bet against
Elon problem on the other side.
You know, here's the issue. It's a huge capital expense that Waymo will need to
roll out to do this nationwide. Elon's got a different option. You buy a Model Y,
you turn on self-driving, it drives you around, you're going on vacation for a week, you tell your car to go off and earn your revenue.
So basically the CapEx is covered by the consumer and it becomes a revenue engine for you.
So you'll buy a couple of these and just have them go out there.
So he's going to populate millions of these cars across the country at no CapEx to himself.
So if you apply that model, which is essentially the EXO
model, which is assets on demand, and you don't own your
own assets, and you let other people self provision these
assets, etc., that will win hands down, because it'll scale
much, much faster than Waymo trying to own its own car as it
has to.
Yeah, this is directly connected to our other side bet, which is
you remember last week, Elon and Trump finally break up now they'll hate each other forever.
I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, one, this might be totally made up.
You know, they might be just trying to make PR for themselves.
We haven't surprised me at all, but two, if it is real, which it probably is,
they'll kiss and make up in no time. That was my bet.
Anthony Scaramucci is going to join us back on this pod to talk
about how the administration.
He was really accurate last time when we, after inauguration, we asked him how long
was his bromance last?
And he said, I think 30 Scaramucci's or something like that.
And it was really near or dead on almost to the day.
So we got to respect his views next time.
Yeah.
Well, look, the government needs space launches and Elon needs regulatory approval of that
really good idea.
You know, you buy your car and then you lease it back to be a robo taxi.
It's just a really good idea.
All right.
Let's hit a couple other quick ones.
This is flying cars and drones.
We've seen the Trump sign an executive order on drones and flying cars and supersonics.
Really important for these drone systems to actually work. You need to enable beyond visual
line of sight mode. And we're seeing the US government support five regional e-vTOL pilot
programs. Super excited about archery aviation here in LA
to serve the Olympics in 2028.
And the other point here is they're enabling supersonic
travel by scrapping outdated overflight bands.
So, you know, the supersonic jets of the Concorde
could not fly over the domestic US because the sonic boom
and changing, providing FAA waivers
in particular because a number of companies have come up with mechanisms
to actually avoid or absorb the sonic boom but this is going to accelerate
aviation as it should. I mean there hasn't been that much change in aviation
for the last 50 years. It's been incredibly slow. Yeah I was wondering if all the you know
privatization of space travel was also gonna lead to breakthroughs for you know
out of the atmosphere hypersonic travel because you know I don't know if you
remember Steve Kishi was working on that. Yeah I know way too much about this. It's
it's just really tough.
I mean, the amount of energy and to build something
that's gonna go skip across the upper atmosphere.
And there've been many companies who have died
on that mission statement and billions invested.
The closest thing right now is Starship
going spaceport to spaceport, but it's still expensive.
Here, another competitor we know about. We know about three or four of the companies out there
providing eVTOL services. This is WISC.
It's been selected by Miami to launch in that location.
So watching out for a whisk in Miami.
I don't know if we're going to talk about these eVTOL flying cars at all, Saleem, but they're coming.
You know, interesting is, you know, Dave, when we spoke to Eric Schmidt about this, he was not a believer in eVTOLs.
Yeah.
I think it was a relative thing, you know, there's so much change going on and so
much of it is so impactful and I don't think it was like, yeah, I don't believe in this. It was
like, look, aviation, we have helicopters, now we're going to have four prop electronic versions of
them, so what? Like, well, so what to me is that they're flying, self-driving.
That to me is really, really a big deal.
And they're much safer too.
So I do think it is a big deal.
But he's like, yeah, but relative to space and AI, is it a big deal?
And he was like, no, not really.
For me, this is one of the most exciting technologies we could have.
Can I explain why?
Sure, but you're still driving your Tesla every place.
I am, but I just love it.
That's fine.
I'm allowed to do that.
By the way, I have a Porsche Macan Electric also, and it's like maybe the best car I've
ever driven, but it's not way, way better than my 2017 Model S, it's marginally better. So that's really profound to say how much further ahead Tesla was than all
the other car makers in many many areas. But let me go back to EV details for a
second, okay? I think this totally changes the game. Why? Because real
estate that's hard to get to is priced very low.
And it's scarce.
And therefore we pay a lot of money for that little
waterfront property on a lake somewhere
because there's not that many of them.
Well now you can get to all sorts of places
you can't get to by road.
It's gonna make an abundance of,
or a really beautiful plot high up on a mountainside
that you can't get to by car. Now that becomes a viable real estate and we turn real estate from a scarcity problem into an
abundance problem. And I think that's incredibly exciting for the future. There's huge economic
implications for this. Not just to mention, many of us fly around a lot and how much of a nightmare
is the damn commute into the city and just having a drone
corridor from Kennedy airport into Manhattan would just change the game. Yeah for sure and that is
coming. We've seen this with Joby, with Archer, now with WISC. You're going to get commute from
downtown Manhattan to JFK in one of these vehicles. Right? Yeah.
In Sao Paulo, it's two hours to get to the airport.
Oh my God.
Sao Paulo, you know, it's like a nightmare.
Helicopters are the only option you have if you've got the money.
And those are like not the safest.
So these are safe and solid and I think they'll be sort of become really a big deal.
Tourism destinations, I mean, the list just goes on of the broad effects this could have.
This is usually exciting to me.
Yeah. Every day I exciting to me. Yeah.
Every day I get the strangest compliment.
Someone will stop me and say,
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Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone.
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Alright, back to the episode. I want to jump into the next subject,
which is timely and critical, which is the demand for energy from AI systems.
And a little bit of a look at US versus China. I think people need to understand we are going to
become limited by power in our quest for digital super intelligence.
So how are we going to power this revolution?
So China is rapidly scaling up on nuclear.
It's their equivalent of a Sputnik moment.
So China aims to surpass the US by 2030 in nuclear.
The numbers are staggeringly incredibly, you
know, pessimistic here, the US only added two reactors this
century. I mean, two reactors, you know, over the last 25
years, 94 total in the US versus China's 58. China is building a
reactor every 52 months.
The US licensing alone takes 10 to 12 years.
Yeah. Crazy.
Yeah.
You know, this is the reason I love doing this podcast
and I look forward to this so much
because your team will dig up a topic
that I really need to study
and then it'll come into the deck.
I'll be like, it's just so fascinating to me
to dig in on these things and it's just so fun to talk about it.
A lot of these things like, you know, this are so obvious
and this is America's Achilles heel.
Like we cannot act on long-term thinking
and long-term investing.
Our investment cycle is three, four, five years at the most.
Our election cycle is eight years, four years or eight years.
And we can't think about 10 years in the future. And election cycle is eight years, four years or eight years and
we can't think about 10 years in the future and so it's killing us. It's absolutely killing us but the data in these next couple of slides is mind-blowing. We're going to talk about
nuclear in a future podcast with some of the CEOs in these industries but generation one nuclear But Generation 1 nuclear power plants no longer exist.
Generation 2 plants are still out there,
including what we saw with Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
Those were the dangerous plants.
Generation 3 have been the plants
that have been really manufactured
over the last 30 years.
And then Generation 4 are the plants
that currently have been
designed are fail-safe it's kind of nuclear plant I'd put in my backyard but
the time frame for these plants for developing them is insanely long right
we're talking like you know if you wanted to start today it would take you
10-15 years and that's why Three Mile Island is being recommissioned because it's a really it's already approved from a government regulatory standpoint. It's crazy. It is totally crazy
I'm I've got a I'm really really angry about this one, you know
You know, I'm trying to be constructive here, but we know that solar scales
China's gonna have more solar
That's our next topic here. Let's let's go to the next slide
Wait, so you get so lame you got here you muted yourself. I don't know if you muted yourself. Yeah. I'm just really mad
Swear it I thought better cut off the mic before I swear. All right, so here's, let you take the lead here.
China is winning the race to become a type one civilization.
In other words, a civilization that harnesses all the power hitting the earth and the sun.
By 2030, China will have the ability to build an entire US worth of power generation from
solar and storage alone every single year.
Look at this chart, Salim, talk to us about this.
You go, Dave, let me just gather myself.
This chart is, I added the gigawatt axis on the left there
because who the hell talks about terawatt hours per month?
What the hell is that metric?
But anyway, gigawatts is a better way to look at it.
But this is actually gigawatt actual utilization.
They actually created about 700 gigawatts of solar panels last year, 2024,
and deployed 250 gigawatts of peak capacity.
Kilometer after kilometer, the hillsides covered with solar.
We covered that on a past podcast.
It's insane.
They're just rolling this out, building capacity and distribution.
Yeah. They're just rolling this out, building capacity and distribution. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just for context, the US total capacity energy production is 1.2
terawatts, so 1200 gigawatts. And so, you know, peak actual utilization is more like,
you know, three quarters of a terawatt. So you're like, yeah, half of what the US creates,
they created in solar panels in 2024, a lot, just solar panels in 2024.
Yeah. what the US creates, they created in solar panels in 2024, although just solar panels in 2024.
Yeah.
Yes, William.
All right.
So they have an advantage because they've got all the rare earths and they can use those
for solar panels and build out.
They're going to add more solar than the entire US energy output in a little while, so that's
going to be crazy.
It blows my mind that we are putting restrictions and not extending tax credits for solar and
other stuff here in this country.
We need to unlock that in the biggest possible way and let private sector go nuts on this
and put government subsidies there instead of government subsidies on oil, which is what
we do today.
It's the stupidest energy policy we could possibly have.
I mean, I'm fine with all energy needs to be made available, but where do we invest on growth?
Solar is available today.
The numbers are, can I just share a couple of points here?
There's enough energy that hits the Earth in one hour
to provide the global energy needs of the entire year.
So one year worth of sun hitting the earth provides
global needs for the entire year.
All right, so here are some additional numbers.
Global solar capacity reached 1.13 gigawatts by 2024.
About 1% of global energy need is being provided by solar.
It's estimated that if you cover just 0.1% of the earth, about 150,000 kilometers with
20% efficient panels, that would generate 200,000 terawatt hours annually, exceeding
current demands.
How big is 150,000 square kilometers?
It's about the size of South Dakota.
I've never been to South Dakota,
but if it were covered by solar panels,
it'd be giving us a huge amount of energy.
So.
Yeah, the problem with solar for data centers
and AI fundamentally is,
the good thing about AI is you can move it to the power.
I love that at a point.
That's a huge advantage.
The bad thing is you need those chips
to be running 24 by seven. They depreciate really, really quickly. They're very expensive. You know, you can take the data center. That's a huge advantage. The bad thing is you need those chips
to be running 24 by seven.
They depreciate really, really quickly.
They're very expensive.
The chips cost 10 times more than the power.
You're not gonna let them sit idle if it's raining out.
So solar has the horrible flaw of being intermittent.
And so it's really good if you can store it,
but the cost of lithium to store the solar
when it's cloudy and raining is
about five times higher than the cost of the solar panels.
So if you want to become the world's first trillionaire, find a way to store huge amounts
of energy cheaper.
Yeah, this is the way.
And we're going to be talking to Bill Gross, the CEO of Idealab, right?
He's been using gravitational storage, which is, we'll talk about that, rather than storing into batteries, you
use the energy during the day, a portion of energy, to move a large weight
vertically and this was done, has been done with water for for ages, but you
move a large weight vertically and then at night the weight gets pulled down by
gravity and in a generator generates electricity. So it's
efficient, it's available, and it works. Can I throw out some thoughts here?
Sure. So in 2016 we crossed an inflection point where it became cheaper to build a
solar power generation facility than fossil fuel and almost all energy and
generation since then has become has been solar because of that. In 2019 we hit a more important inflection point which is that
it became cheaper to build solar than to build and run solar than it is to
build, sorry, it became cheaper to build and run a solar facility than just run a
fossil fuel facility. So the capex and
as you've said, at large scale this is very easy. You just pump water up a hill to an artificial lake and use
hydron at night on the way down. It's a little clunky but it's very workable until battery technology or
energy vault type stuff that Bill Gross is doing comes along. So this is a really unknown
problem. We should be going full out for this. I think it was 100 miles by 100 miles to power
the whole of the US was Elon's calculation. The one I saw was 2% of the Sahara covered with solar panels
gives you enough power to cover the whole world's energy needs. Distribution is a challenge,
but just that visual is a really killer visual. It's absurd that we're doing what we're doing.
Here's the chart that was posted. Elon's tweet is, solar is 100% of energy long term.
tweet is, solar is 100% of energy long term. Right? No question, this is what's going to drive humanity forward.
And here's a chart that basically reads, it took
8 years for solar to go from 100 terawatt hours to 1000 terawatt hours
and then just 3 years to go from 1000 to 2000
terawatt hours. You can see that super exponential growth curve, you know,
exceeding hydro, coal, gas,
nuclear, wind.
Yeah, pretty amazing.
Yeah, I really feel like pumped hydro is very, very efficient, but you need about a lake
the size of Loch Ness to move up about 300 meters and come back down to store enough
energy to power a huge data center.
So that's a lot of water. Bill Gross has solved that, right?
With these gravitational towers, basically,
you pump huge multi-ton bags of dirt
up into an elevator shaft, into a large building,
or up the hillside if you're near a mountain.
And he's got this working today.
He's got huge contracts.
We'll be talking to him about that. I think storage
can be solved and
I'm hoping in fact AI is gonna help us with new technology for
Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna say. You know, if you're a material scientist or or chemical engineer
I'm pretty sure with AI's help in a couple of years or maybe even this year
Come up with a reversible
chemical reaction that's completely self-contained, that stores huge amounts of energy.
Use the solar to drive the reaction one way, and then when it's cloudy, run the reaction
the opposite direction.
And if you come up with something that's 10, 20 times more energy dense than a lithium
battery, which seems very viable, you're going to be a trillionaire.
So just figure that out.
Use AI to help.
A couple years ago, we tried to design
an XPRIZE around this, and the numbers were
get off grid storage 50 times cheaper than it is today,
which is very viable.
Here's another tweet from Elon.
Solar power in China will exceed all sources
of electricity combined in the
U S in three to four weird in three to four years. It's a wake up call.
China is going all in on energy production and it's it's epic.
I have one more thing to say about that.
I have one more thing to say about this. Please.
I think this China U S stuff is a little overhyped. I don't
think we'll have that much of a- I think it's a stocking work.
But I think it's a great, I agree, but it's a great comparator. I don't think there's real
deep conflict there. No, there's not. There's just, but what it does is it shows the US what is possible.
Yeah, and to Dave's earlier point is this is a structural issue we have in the US where
we have four-year election cycles and we have no mechanism to look at 20 years and say this
is the water, healthcare, energy we need over a 20-year period.
We need to solve that structural issue.
And you know, running our venture funds, you know this acutely, but you make an investment,
investors want to see liquidity within four or five years.
They don't want their money to be sitting out there for 10 or 15 years.
In China, they know they'll still be in power.
They think they'll still be in power 20 years from now.
If you look at the date, they said, you know what, we need to be the world's biggest manufacturer
of solar panels.
So it's about 2004 or 10 or somewhere around there.
From that date, you have the factories up and running and you have the production.
And then also, when there's a recession,
you gotta keep cranking.
So just keep the engine running
because you got a 20 year view, 30 year view.
We just can't do that structurally in the US.
And that's why we get so far behind in nuclear and solar
and some of the other long-term trends.
And that is our fundamental Achilles heel.
Hey folks, Salim here.
Hope you're enjoying these podcasts and this one in particular was amazing.
If you want to hear more from me or get involved in our EXO ecosystem, on the 23rd of July
we're doing a once a month workshop.
Tickets are $100.
We limit it to a few people to make sure it's intimate and proper and we go through the
EXO model.
What we do there is we basically show you how to take your organization
and turn it into one of these hyper-growth AI-type companies.
And we've done this now for 10 years with thousands of companies.
Many of these use the model that we have called
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Peter and I co-authored the second edition a couple of years ago.
So it's $100, July 23rd.
Come along.
It's the best hundred dollars you'll spend.
Link is below.
See you there.
All right, last subject for us gentlemen, crypto.
Always have to have a little crypto in the conversation.
We've seen Bitcoin over the last couple of weeks dip down below 100K and resurrect itself
up to 107.
Predictions, Selim, that I'm seeing still hold that we might see 200K by the end of this year.
I still remain all in and massively enthusiastic.
Are you?
Big time.
I heard Michael Saylor say Bitcoin will get to 21 million a Bitcoin.
I'll be happy when it gets to a million a Bitcoin.
That'll be perfectly good enough, I think think for most people because that'll just put it at the level of gold which is
Infantessimal anyway as in terms of global asset class
But I think there's a bunch of things happening that are making this move very huge or very very
That'll start to accelerate this. I heard Freddie May and Fannie Mack are looking at or approving mortgages backed by Bitcoin
That'll be a huge thing. So it's starting to get systemic approval and then things go crazy.
Yeah, for sure. I love this. This comes from our friend Brian Armstrong at Coinbase.
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I love this. I'm going to switch over from my Amex to this.
How about you?
Big time.
Yeah.
Dave, thoughts?
I'm really excited about the next story, actually.
All right.
Well, let's go to the next story here.
Dave's holding his powder.
Okay.
Yes.
Circle Internet Group goes public it explodes, goes exponential.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Yeah, so two parts of this story.
One of them is Jeremy Allaire, who's stuck with this for so many years and he deserves
every bit of his success for just grinding it out.
It's always tough to be an entrepreneur.
He had to grind it out over a long period of time with regulators all over him and different
administrations and people going to jail and what a persistent story.
But anyway, the reason this is so, so important is because agent to agent transactions can
be done in either Bitcoin or dollars now.
And you can move back and forth seamlessly.
The old method, the SWIFT network, the interbank trading network is great if you're trying
to move a million dollars to Hong Kong because it's only like a buck.
Terrible if you're trying to do a penny microtransaction with another AI agent.
So this solves that problem.
Because the current pricing model on AI is subscription fees.
Give me 200 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month flat.
But that's crazy, right? The utilization gets throttled because, you know, if you're trying
to write code or talk to your AI, it'll slow down every now and then. Why is that? Because
there are too many users online. Like, well, why can't I just pay for what I use as I go?
And well, it's because we didn't have Circle. So the whole AI economy needs to now move
to these micro payments and this is what's gonna enable it
And that's why the stock is up so much. Yeah, I've been texting with Jeremy
Super impressed congratulating me on this exponential growth. The IPO goes out at $31 a share and peaks at $300 a share
Extraordinary, right? These are the IPOs that the entrepreneurial market needs
To fuel sort of the opening of the doors wide open.
Saleem thoughts?
I want to just echo the kudos here for a slightly different reason, which is one of the big
issues in the crypto world has been trust.
And you have a lot of scam artists and a lot of shucksters. And can you actually deliver trust?
And Jeremy, over a long period of time,
has demonstrated rock solid, stable, trustworthy
environment.
And that's not an easy to do in the environment where everybody
else is a shuckster.
And in the United States.
That's a huge kudos to Aaron.
Within the US territory of law, if you would,
which is super important.
So Circle Internet Group is a financial technology founded in 2013.
It's a stablecoin pegged one-to-one for the US dollar.
And it's going to enable, as you said, Dave, my AI agents to go and transact, microtransactions.
And it's finally going to enable what has been the full promise of the internet, not
just data, not just video, not just words, but a financial layer.
And I can't wait for my...
Can I say one thing about stablecoins?
Yeah, sure.
It's awesome to have this pegged against the dollar, but once you have something, there's
so many natural assets in the ground and out in the world.
Oh, amazing, yes.
That when you can peg a stablecoin against, say, real estate holdings or something like
that, and when that becomes possible, as long as the trust, again, needs to be there, you're
going to unlock unbelievable amounts of capital flow. One of my friends is actually contracted, I can't say the details here, with a
government who has large gold deposits underground and they've gotten a
contract where they're going to peg a token against the gold in the ground and
not dig it out, wait until the technology for being able to
extract it more environmentally friendly is there.
But that's an extraordinary thought that there's so many assets that could be sort of connected
to a token or a stable token.
Yeah, that's great.
It's the missing ingredient actually and kind of the trifecta of digital transactions because
Bitcoin has become a great store of wealth, but there's no guarantee that it's stable.
The dollar is guaranteed to go down in value, right?
We just print more dollars every year.
So you don't want to have a huge balance sitting in circle for a long period of time.
So what people will tend to do is park their money in Bitcoin, then if they want to transact
in dollars, move it over to circles, it's all seamless, do your micro transactions in Circle, then
come back to Bitcoin.
But what if you want something tied to something incredibly stable like real estate or gold
or whatever?
Well, it doesn't exist yet.
That would be the trifecta of the crypto circle.
All right, moonshot mates, what an extraordinary couple of weeks since we spoke last.
I mean, there's so many other stories I can't wait to cover with you guys in the next week
or two ahead.
Any travels coming up for you guys?
Saleem, are you orbiting the planet again?
I just came back from a hundredth birthday party of a grandparent.
Lily is one of Lily's grandmothers, which was unbelievable.
Not going anywhere for a bit. I think I'll be seeing you soon, Peter, at the end of July
in Utah maybe. So we'll talk about that separately.
Oh, fantastic. That's great. Yeah. Dave, how about you?
Yeah, we have our, we're going back to see Kevin Weil very soon in San Francisco. Hopefully
the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.
And then our mega event, yeah, Open AI headquarters,
our mega event on September 9th.
Google agreed to host the pre-party at their HQ.
So that's going to be, so I'm basically going to be going back
to San Fran over, that's why I need that hypersonic plane.
I just want to get back and forth a lot.
All right, dear moonshot mates, have a fantastic weekend
and excited for next week.
See you guys in conversation.
Really awesome.
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